Strategies for Argument Based Read Aloud from Mary Ehrenworth

Last week, I had the privilege of going to a full day workshop at TCRWP to hear Kylene Beers speak about close reading and rigor! Stay tuned to hear about that this week.  Prior to Kylene Beers speaking, Mary Ehrenworth shared strategies for argument based read alouds in the classroom.  In our district, we are currently in our Short Text/Literary Essay unit and our next unit is Nonfiction Research/Research Based Argument Essay so I was excited to hear what her focus was for her time with us.  

Below are some of my notes and take-aways about argument based read alouds in the classroom.   

Purpose of Argument Based Read Alouds: 

• Increase the intensity and engagement of partner talk 
• Increase skills of using text evidence
• Hone into skills for evidence based arguments 

During an argument based read aloud, you are reading aloud the text like you normally would without the students having the text in front of them and having the students stop and jot/turn and talk about the text.  However, in this type of read aloud, you have rounds of conversation that focus on a particular type of skill.  For example the focus for the rounds of conversation may focus on character attributes, theme, or author's craft.  Also, the partnership has decided who will be partner 1 and who will be partner 2 because each partner will have a specific focus during each round and will need to collect evidence to support their claim for their argument.  Prior to reading aloud, you will need to plan to figure out which parts of the text to stop at and what the focus will be for each partner.  You also will need to tell the students what their focus is so they can take notes on text evidence that supports their position.  When it is their turn to share their position with their partner, they will state their claim first and then their collected evidence along with their evaluation of the evidence.  For example, they should rank their evidence from most important to least important or vice versa, use quotes from the text instead of only plot, and use thinking stems to evaluate the evidence.  

Mary Ehrenworth had us try this out as partners as she read aloud Stray by Cynthia Rylant from Every Living Thing.  It was so powerful and beneficial to try this out as the students to see what their role is like in this type of read aloud and to get a clear visual of how this will look in our classroom with students.  She had us decide who was going to be partner A and partner B and told us that Partner A will work to prove that the main character is weak and partner B will try to prove she is strong.  As she read aloud the beginning of the story, we each took notes to support our position about the type of person the character is in the story.  She paused and gave us a minute to rehearse our claim and evidence in our minds before sharing with partner.  Then she had partner A share first and then had partner B share.  Mary said that instead of just allowing students time to rehearse their argument in their mind before the conversation, partner A can find a partner A to compare evidence and rehearse as well a partner B finding a partner B to do this work.   

We continued this work through a 2nd round that had a thematic focus. Partner A had to collect evidence for how the family struggles with communication and partner B focused on how poverty is an issue for the family.  We went through the same process of collecting evidence while she read aloud and then had our conversations with partner to support our claims.  The 3rd round focused on author's craft and partner A collected evidence to support how weather is used in important ways and partner B focused on how the author uses the dog as a symbol in the story.  

I am excited to try this out with my 5th graders this week and am already planning other stories to use besides Stray by Cynthia Rylant.  This is a strategy we can use in our classrooms with any type of fiction or nonfiction text as long as we plan where to stop and what the positions will be for each partner.  This is an engaging way to have students practice conversation skills, collect important and relevant text evidence, and strengthen their argument skills.  It also teaches students about perspective and how we can read the same text, but see characters, objects, themes, etc. in more than one way.  

If you try this out in your classroom or have already done this with your students, please share! :)

Trying Something New Each School Year

Each year, I change up my read alouds, lessons, charts, and always try something completely new depending on my students in my class.  I love when things organically evolve from the students and also when I get inspiration from students to take a risk and try something new with the class.
For example, last school year was the first time I...

• Did March Madness Book Edition with my class.  This idea was sparked by a few boys in my class who were eating lunch in my classroom while we were talking about March Madness in basketball.  I will continue to do March Madness Book Edition with my class this year because it was extremely popular with my students last year and was a great experience all around! 
• Had my students use Google Drive to set up digital portfolios.  Students used Google Drive for all drafting, publishing, group projects, book clubs, and more.  I will absolutely start this year off with having students use Google Drive and am excited to use it in new ways too.  
• Tweeted authors questions from students while conferring with them about their books.  Students loved when the authors tweeted back about their upcoming titles, covers of new books coming out, and answered questions. 
• Had an author surprise our class with a visit! One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt won our March Madness Book Edition and Book of the Year in our classroom book awards at the end of the school year.  Lynda Mullaly Hunt surprised us with a visit - click here to read all about it! It was a day that we will always remember and cherish! 
• Gave students the option of using a binder instead of only a folder to keep their drafts organized in writing workshop.  Most students loved using the binder instead of a folder and actually kept all short texts, drafts, and mentors inside and organized them by using tabs.  The feedback from students motivated me to have my new students this year come with a binder that will be labeled their literacy binder to keep their drafts, mentors, and short texts/articles.  Since writing and reading are often connected during units of study, this will help keep everything organized during the units.  
• Shared my Goodreads account with students during morning meetings.  Every so often I showed them the books I have read, want to read, and currently reading.  I also shared how Goodreads works and how I organize my books into categories and lists.  
• Inputted all of my books in classroom library into Classroom Booksource.  My students helped me input all the titles at the end of last year and I will use it for the first time this coming year.  This way, students can check out books and I can see which books are checked out, which titles I have, and also how many copies of the title I have.  Since I have approximately 2,000 books in our classroom library, this will definitely help keep track of all of the books! 
• Had students use Animoto to create videos during our nonfiction unit and social studies units.  Students loved exploring Animoto and using it to present their information to their classmates.  
• Created a Twitter wall for students during the last month of school.  Each students had a speech bubble and they "tweeted" about a question I posed on my speech bubble.  As students entered the classroom each morning, they read my question and updated their speech bubbles with their new tweet.  This is something I am thinking of maybe doing at the beginning of this year instead of waiting till the end of the year since it is a great way for students to get to know each other too. 

These are some highlights of things I tried for the first time last school year.  I'd love to hear what you have tried for the first time last year or what you are planning on trying for the first time this school year so please share! :)

Enjoy preparing for the new school year! 

Are There Lessons From a Controversial High School Tradition?

On Tuesdays, Ruth and Stacey host Slice of Life on their blog at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. Feel free to write, link, and/or comment!

Assassin has come to our house.

For those of you unfamiliar to the game, this is the high school tradition where they pair up, pay $20 to play, and are given teams to try to shoot with water guns before the teams who are after them can douse them first. The winners get the money which is a substantial sum--I believe that the purse is over $800 this year.

I would support banning this game for many reasons. Mostly, I worry about the safety of these teenagers because they will go to great lengths to get each other. While they are not allowed to chase anyone in a car, they are allowed to stalk, restrain, lure, and lie in order to move on in the tournament. I could continue to make my case against Assassin because of the distraction that it provides at the end of the marking period during a year when grades matter a lot. I could also bring up the fact that Obama was in Connecticut, fifteen minutes from my house, to talk about gun laws and my peace-loving daughter is making sure that her water gun is within reach whenever she goes out. I could also mention that our high school principal sent an email to parents reminding us to talk to our children about the rules and the common sense that must accompany playing in the game.

However, I will try to find the lessons that I can about teaching. You should see how motivated these teenagers are and the skill sets that they are using to strategize and try to win. I don't think that this is really about the money because the chance of winning is so small; the motivation comes from the competition. Listening to the conversations that all of her friends are having (and they are ALL talking about this) they are collaborating, communicating, and thinking creatively. Yes, I wish that their conversations had a different focus, but they are forming alliances with people they don't normally work with, trying to think of other perspectives, paying attention to details, and studying patterns. Hmmm. These skills sound familiar. And important.

I was talking to my husband about how schools could incorporate some of these Assassin strategies into learning. What if:

• A teacher gave a lesson about symbols in literature and said that the students' job was to find a certain number of symbols in books. Use each other, the library, the internet...whatever they need, but come back able to explain ten symbols in literature. Perhaps early finishers could get extra points.
• A teacher gave a lesson on a concept or strategy and then assigned a problem set. You can use any resources to figure it out and if you do it in a certain amount of time, then you get a certain grade. 
• Write an informational report that meets the Common Core State Standards on a given subject. The report can be on any subject and students are allowed to help each other, but every student must be able to explain the annotations that should accompany the report and clearly demonstrate the Standards.

I think that I could continue a list, and I could tailor it to specific grade levels. The TedTalk, Build a School in the Cloud by Sugata Mitra supports inquiry-based learning and the concept that if we give students complex problems and ways to figure them out, they will learn much more than we would have thought. I also think about Tony Wagner's claim in his book Creating Innovators that engagement and high learning rates happen when people have passion, purpose, and play. Assassin presents teenagers with a complex problem and passion, purpose and play. How can we transfer this high level of motivation and engagement into classrooms?

Ways to Support our Striving, Disengaged, and Reluctant Writers

My morning session, at the TCRWP Writing Institute last week, was with Chris Lehman - I have lots to share!  During the week, we discussed ways to support our striving (instead of struggling), disengaged, and reluctant writers, as well as how to support students with informational writing and note-taking.  In this post, I will focus on strategies for helping disengaged writers.  Stay tuned for a second post this week on strategies I learned to strengthen and energize our students' informational writing.

We have all heard, "I have nothing to write about," in our writing workshop or have seen students go to the bathroom, sharpen pencils, walk around, talk, and everything else they can to avoid writing.  Below are some strategies Chris Lehman shared in both his book, Reviving Disengaged Writers, and during his session at the TC Writing Institute.

Some strategies for helping students who have no topics are: 

• Make sure you model for everyone by aiming for a variety of tones in your demonstrations (funny, gross, emotional, and so on).  Think about what topics are "burning" inside of your students that they may love to write about.  
• Model writing about topics and situations that happened around the same age as your students so they can relate to your demonstration and use it as a mentor. Chris also suggested that you can write about "now" moments, but repackage them by replacing people in the moment so it is set at a younger age (change spouse to parent or sibling, change adult friend to childhood friend, and so on).  
• Have compliment conferences with striving writers to help increase confidence since they probably have a lot of experience feeling like writing is not for them.  Compliment conferences help make writing a more positive experience.  In a compliment conference, you only compliment and don't get to the teaching part of the conference.  For example, you may reread a line from the students' writing like you love it; compare their writing to an authors writing; treat it like a teaching point, but just tell them what they did and how they did it; act as though you are the reader by explaining what their writing made you feel as the reader and point to a specific part. 

Some strategies to use with students who act like they are "allergic" to the writing process: 

• Make goals measurable since striving writers often find it challenging to name and understand the qualities of writing.  For example, students can make a goal/plan at the end of the mini-lesson for how they will use the time during writing workshop.  It helps if the self-assignemnt has both numbers and words (how many ideas will you collect? How many entries will you write? How far down on the page will you write? and so on).  Then stop mid-way during writing workshop to have students reflect on their goals to see what they need to do in the last 15 minutes.  
• Make writing about experimentation by trying to see what works and revising.  Have small sheets of paper available so when students want to try out things in revision, they can take two sheets of paper to try two different dialogue strategies, or two different beginnings, and so on.  

Some strategies to use with students who are worried that it's not "right": 

• Model uncertainty in some of your mini-lesson demonstrations by showing how you work through hard parts in your own writing. 
• Have students re-teach conferences to classmates. To do this, have a writing conference with a student as you normally do, but tell the student that they are going to reteach the conference to a classmate at the end of the conference.  When the conference is over, call over a second student and watch the first student re-teach the conference.  This is a great way to examine your own teaching as well as see what students transfer and internalize from your teaching.  

During his session, we also talked about strategies to use with "chatty" students who seem to talk, talk, talk, instead of write during writing workshop.  I wrote about Chris Lehman's idea, to have a separate partner spot in the classroom that writers can use during writing workshop, in my post about his book, Reviving Disengaged Writers (click here to read more about the idea).  If you have not read Reviving Disengaged Writers yet, I highly recommend that you move it to the top of your TBR stack! :) 

Happy Writing! :)

Lessons for Teaching from Outdoor Education

Our school district offers fifth graders a outdoor education experience and we recently had the much anticipated three day and night excursion to Camp Jewell with the fifth graders. (Full disclaimer: I did not stay overnight so my experience was only partially complete.) This trip is a highlight of the educational experience for most of our students so as I spent time there and as have reflected about it, I have wondered about what we could do differently within our own classroom's walls that would tap into some of the skills and strengths that I emerged and developed in an outdoor setting.

I did have several conversations with students and thought about what we could duplicate within school. Here are some of the thoughts:

• "Writing was easier outside," one student said. As a writer, I agree with him that sometimes it is difficult to think of ideas sitting at a desk or table in a room full of people. For me, writing is a personal experience until I'm ready to share and the great outdoors certainly offers more space.
• Empathy is a skill that I have emphasized this year in my teaching and I think that this concept got through to kids more authentically at Camp Jewell. When we climbed the mountain, we talked about how different people would interpret the view. What if they were from Colorado and regularly climbed large mountains? What if they were from a city? What if they were from a desert?  How does background experience impact people's interpretations of events. The conversations at the top of Camp Jewell's relatively low peak were much richer and I would love to believe that those conversations could push their thinking in book clubs, read-alouds, and Social Studies--maybe throughout all areas of the curriculum.
• Throughout the activities, there were opportunities for collaboration and problem solving. Maybe because they were younger, or maybe because they didn't have the pressures of time and achievement, the counselors were better at letting students fail and figure out their own ways to solve problems. I know that I am guilty of helping students before they probably need help.
• The counselors who ran the program had creative ways to get children's attention whether they were in the dining hall, on a trail, in the middle of a field, or in an outdoor classroom. They used songs, chants, rhythms, and symbols and the children responded. Over the summer, I plan to create a personal repertoire of ways to get children's attentions beyond just a hand in the air.
• Ga-ga was the free-time activity of choice and if you've never played or seen it, here's a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO73MVAkhzw. I would love to get some ga-ga set-ups for the playground as this is a game that is physical, engaging, inclusive and relatively safe.

One child and I talked about what the focus of math would be if school existed within a Camp Jewell-like atmosphere. With minimal prompting from me, he listed several authentic project-based learning activities. I can't remember all of his ideas, but some were finding an estimated population of salamanders by how many existed in a small place and multiplying that number by the known similar habitats; calculating different rates of going up and down mountains; and creating graphs of the different speeds various objects and people would take to get down the long slide. Why can't we do more of these sorts of activities within our schools? We don't have salamanders but we have blades of grass and leaves on trees and ants on playgrounds.

Who knows what else we could find? What other opportunities exist for real-life applications of math and other subjects that might be so much more engaging for students? What other relevant life lessons can we keep bringing home from a few days in a camp setting with fifth graders? With summer coming, I am going to keep a notebook of learning opportunities that could align with our curriculum and the Common Core, but could also build the sense of purpose, relevance and engagement of this outdoor education experience.

Our Lasting Impressions

My seventh grade English teacher crawled across the desks when he read a passage from The Pearl to us. I still remember the passage and the power of the language that John Steinbeck used. My high school Latin teacher taught us that semper ubi sub ubi means always wear underwear. He taught us many more words and structures of Latin and we learned them because he was funny and passionate about his teaching. My third grade teacher kept our entire class after school when the minutes that she tallied on the board that we wasted on transitions added up to sixty. I can still recite the apology letter I had to write to my parents for inconveniencing them because I had to stay after school.

Teachers have power. When I first started teaching I had the quote by Haim Ginott hanging on my bulletin board and I came across this quote again.


"I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized."


I have hung it up again so that it reminds me of my daily power. We all make many decisions throughout the day--there’s some ridiculous number of how many decisions a teacher makes in a day that I’m sure I could google and quote, but really, we make much more than just decisions because we make moods and we make memories.

Mel wrote a post this week about mindsets and I hope that students remember that we challenged them to think about themselves as learners. We’ve read them great books and I hope that they remember that they loved books in our room. We’ve been writers together with them and we have allowed each other to critique our pieces, so I hope that they remember that great writing is never really a final draft. I hope that they remember that math has many real life applications and that they really have to know their multiplication facts. And I hope that they remember that they were valued, honored, and inspired as learners. Will they? Some might remember me as relentless or as a tough critic. I think I’d be okay with those memories as well. 

I’m having an especially reflective day today since I attended the funeral of a close friend and we are now driving over eight hours toward Hilton Head. One of the speakers at the service quoted the speech that Jimmy Valvano delivered at the ESPY awards in 2003. (This is really worth the eleven minutes!) The motto for the foundation that Jimmy announced that evening is “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” What an amazing motto to hear this week in conjunction with the conversations we have had and the post Mel wrote about Mindset!


Jimmy also charged the audience with three important things to do every day. Laugh, think and cry. I hope that my students remember laughter and thinking in the classrooms that I share. While I can’t say that I cry every day I do hope that they remember that there have been books and moments when their great work has moved me to tears.

What about you? What lasting impressions are you creating? What do you want to create?

Using Quick Assessments to Help Form Small Groups

Years ago, I met Jennifer Serravallo through the pages of her book, Conferring With Readers which gave me new insights into conferring.  It also helped me coach other teachers on their own conferring.  I’ve attended many of Jen’s workshop sessions at Teachers College over the years on conferring and small groups so I was thrilled when I heard she was writing a new book on Teaching Reading in Small Groups.  Of course I bought it as soon as it came out last year and tagged parts with multiple post-its and notes.  This year, our school is focusing on strengthening our small group instruction across grades and subjects and are reading Teaching Reading in Small Groups as a school book club.  So when I saw that Jen Serravallo was presenting a session at the TC Saturday Reunion titled:  Using Quick Assessments to be sure our small group work in reading has traction, I added it to my list of sessions! 

In addition to her two professional books, Jen Serravallo recently published  Independent Reading Assessment which is a new assessment resource through Scholastic. 

During this session, Jen talked about the many different forms of assessments that can be more powerful and informative than formative pencil and paper tests.

Some of the assessment examples she talked about are:

·        Reading logs

·        Engagement Inventory

·        Writing about reading (post-its and readers notebooks)

·        Conversations (partners, whole class, book clubs)

·        Comprehension continuums

Importance of Reading Logs:

Both teachers and students need to ask questions about the logs and notice patterns so they are purposeful, inform instruction, and are reflective tools.  Some possible questions and noticings are:

·    What is it about this series or author that you like so much?

·    Hmmm…I’m noticing that you are reading more when you are home than in school. Why do you think this is?

Engagement Inventory:

Jen developed this idea when she realized one day that her students were quiet during reading workshop, but doing everything they could to avoid reading.  She created an engagement inventory to document her observations of what kids were doing in 10 minute increments.  The engagement inventory is a class list document with 10 minute increments across the top and an abbreviation note-taking key on the bottom.  For example:

·   a check mark = engaged

·   W = looking out window

·   T = looking at teacher

·   NB = writing in notebook or on post-its

I began using this inventory in my classroom when I read about it in her book, Teaching Reading in Small Groups and it is very informative! Once you notice and make note of the avoidance behaviors, you can create and pull small groups to teach them strategies that can help strengthen their stamina and engagement as readers. 

Having Students Create Portfolio Pages of Post-its from Read Aloud:

One of Jen’s ideas is to have students create a portfolio page of post-its for each marking period to show their individual comprehension continuum and growth in specific comprehension skills.  Three times a year (beginning, middle, end of year), give students four specific prompts to jot down their thinking while you are reading aloud.  They jot down their thinking on individual post-its that you will collect at the end of the read aloud. 

Some comprehension skills that you can assess through the prompts are:

·    Visualization (Imagine what the character’s home is like and describe it OR Describe this scene using all of your senses)

·    Developing theories about characters (Describe what kind of person _____is OR What’s an idea you are having about _____)

·    Determining Themes/Lessons (Even though we aren’t at the end of the story, jot down what you are thinking so far about the theme/lesson/author’s message that you are learning)

·    Making Connections (What does this story remind you of?)

·    Questioning (What are you wondering right now?)

·    Predictions (Based on what you know about the character so far, what do you think s/he will do next or how will they react?)

·    Synthesis (Now that we finished the story, what are you left thinking about the characters? OR How has_____changed from the beginning to the end of this book? )

·    Empathy (Put yourself in the characters shoes and explain how s/he is feeling right now)

·    Interpretation (Why do you think the character acted or reacted in this way? What’s motivating or causing their behavior/actions? OR What is the story really about? )

After you collect all the students’ post-its, you can sort them into three piles for each skill based on their level (low, medium, high level of understanding of the skill).  So if you ask four prompts, you will have three piles of post-its for each of those prompts.  Once you have your sorted piles, you can begin to form small groups based on the similar needs you notice for each skill.  My next couple of posts will talk more about small groups and what to do next with these piles so stay tuned! J

When you are finished sorting and forming the small groups, you can give the post-its back to the students so they can tape the four post-its onto a sheet of paper with the title of the book, date, and each post-it labeled with the skill (i.e. prediction, question, theory, etc.).  These papers go into their reading portfolios and by the end of the year, you will have three examples to help see the students’ growth in comprehension skills. 

Happy Reading! :)