Skip to Content

AUSSIE

Partners in Professional Development

Reading In Many Languages

Blog entry posted May 21st, 2010 by Chris Lowrey

The International Reading Association Convention 2010 started off true to its theme of ‘Reading In Many Languages’ through the first of an impressive array of guest Keynote Speakers - Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan. The mother of four, activist, UNICEF advocate for children, member of the World Economic Forum, author and a gorgeous 39 year old beauty started off proceedings after a...

The International Reading Association Convention 2010 started off true to its theme of ‘Reading In Many Languages’ through the first of an impressive array of guest Keynote Speakers - Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan. The mother of four, activist, UNICEF advocate for children, member of the World Economic Forum, author and a gorgeous 39 year old beauty started off proceedings after a long winded introduction from the IRA President Kathryn Au.

As I had been in Jordan just two weeks previously I was particularly interested in what the Queen had to say on Education. Especially from the very front row of an auditorium which holds an estimated 5-10,000 people. Her main aim is promoting dialogue and understanding between Arab and Muslim races and the Western World. Her book entitle ‘The Sandwich Swap’ exemplifies this with its running theme between two children who share peanut butter and jelly and hummus sandwiches as a bridge to understanding one another.

One of her most famous quotes reads: ‘Educating our children is not just about imposing a body of knowledge on them. Rather, it involves preparing children from the early years for the world in which they will come of age. It means instilling a love for lifelong learning, creativity, self-expression and an appreciation for diversity’… Hear Hear to that I say!

The first session I attended was conducted by the two authors Matthew McElligott (The Lion’s Share) and Kevin O’Malley (Once Upon A Cool Motorcycle Dude). Its focus was on designing a book to tell a story which will appeal to dads and boys. McElligott discussed the unigrid system for design and used his own books as well as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to show how illustrations and words can create a great dynamic. O’Malley was primarily concerned with books for dads, that is, books that dads would love to share with their children. He was a veritable comedian and very funny, emphasizing dads don’t want to read about princesses who live happily ever after but that like their sons want to read about poop and machismo subjects. He focuses on the ‘male voice’ in books and how there is a dearth of resources in this area. O’Malley also tipped librarians to ‘store the non-fiction books at the front of the library if they wanted to avoid having the troublesome boys all congregating around the back causing a disturbance!’

Next up Jeannine Perry from Longwood University VA conducted a session entitled ‘Reading like a Writer: Using Set Texts To Learn Writer’s Craft’. Perry provided a variety of text set examples and teaching techniques to help students read like writers and learn how to write effectively from the experts – published authors. She discussed using the Katie Wood Ray text ‘Wondrous Words’ to accentuate and plan these units. Learning to separate how a book is written from what it is about was also a key point in describing the craft of writing and examining how authors write. Perry discussed the concepts imitate vs. emulate and encoding vs. decoding and discussed the importance of having a collection of texts with connections in classrooms. Grammar, literacy technique, usage and mechanics were all best taught through books and she mentioned four key resources to cover a topic called ‘The Emotion of Motion’ – Little Green, John Henry, Brave Irene and Cloud Dance… apologies, I didn’t scribe the author’s names but I’m sure they can be googled.

Perry listed a variety of mentor texts under the headings:

  • Amazing adjectives
  • Vivid verbs and adverbs
  • Grabbers
  • Character
  • Painting a picture-vivid descriptions
  • Imagery through the five senses
  • Professional Resources


Hopefully she will have sent me the electronic copy of this by the time you are reading this and you can email me Here for a copy, mark in the subject area ‘Jeannine Perry’.

Following this I heard the highly energetic and entertaining Laura Robb, an educator from Powhatan Schools and Scholastic author from Boyce VA who has been teaching for 43 years and admirably still returns to schools in winter of each year to teach grades 5-8 language arts. Her session ‘Differentiate: A Whole Class Instructional Reading Workshop That Works’ centered around using very short anchor texts three times per week with a lot of explicit modeling to teach comprehension.

Robb’s working example with us was a pair/share brainstorm on values and beliefs, all which she charted and turned into open ended questions. The focus was on making inferences and drawing conclusions and was nothing really new but a timely reminder that the philosophies us Aussie consultants use is right on track!

Check her website www.lrobb.com for a variety of useful teaching references and hands on resources.

Another session was delivered by Dr.Katherine Perez from St.Mary’s College of California on ‘S.T.A.R.S.S. – Strategies For Teaching Active Reading To Struggling Students.’  Dr.K was a dry and uninspiring presenter and I drank plenty of water to stay awake, but she did present some useful strategies, some of which I was unfamiliar with. These included:
 

  • Whip Around – each student speaks quickly to an issue
  • Question and Quick Write - write a quick response in pairs.
  • Outcome Sentences – Using prompts with students such as ‘I Learned…’
  • Underexplain with Learning Partners – students help one another in pars understand a concept.
  • Voting – Asking questions to get students to take a non-verbal position.
  • Choral Work – Students re-read information in unison


There were many examples provided for each strategy and further information is available at kperez [at] stmarys-ca [dot] edu

The Keynote speaker on day three was former Vice President, activist, author and comedian (as it turned out) the honorable Al Gore.  He had me transfixed! A brilliant speaker, Gore spoke of the connection of reading and the Internet to world understanding of environmental issues. He gave us a brief history of the creation of books from the Guttenberg press of 500 years ago and told of how ‘enlightenment’ was once the province of the wealthy. Gore has an eternal feeling of hope that we can make the right decision about he kind of world we want to live in citing President Kennedy’s assertion in the early 50’s that man would work on the moon within 10 years being deriding and yet 8 years and two weeks later it was accomplished.

Gore spoke of his disgust of big business running all decision making in Federal government and that there are one billion transmitters of information on earth for every man woman and child. He told of 90,000 tonnes of rubbish entering the earths atmosphere each day and of the effect and flow on this was having and would continue to have on rising tides, the North Pole (70% the size it was 30 years ago) animals and people, most of whom around the world live on the coast.

Optimistically, he mentioned that there were now low barriers for individuals to join the network on conversation of the world and its environment and of course, plugged his book “Our Choice’ which discusses several workable outcomes .Big Al concluded by joking about the fact books would soon be available on the Ipad (he is on the board at Apple!) and that there were four key points in ensuring people could come up with a viable solution for the future:

  1. The education of girls
  2. The empowerment of women
  3. The availability of choices of fertility means
  4.  Higher child survival rates.


Hearing all of this (again) from the front row was something else and it had a profound, even emotional effect on the crowd who greeted his exit with a 5 minute standing ovation.

The next session was entitled ‘The Language of Revision: Helping Students Find Value in the Revision Process’ conducted by Pat Scully from the Writer’s Express, Cambridge in MA and yours truly! Well, not really, but I did comment a lot and Pat asked me to share several thoughts with the 500 strong crowd. The key thoughts from the session included ‘frequent targeted low stakes practice’ and ‘Growth is discreet in specifically identified writing skills’. She expounded the needs for constant explicit demonstration in order for students to become self regulatory and that this would take time. There is a paradigm shift that has been noticed in research circles where teachers are beginning to recognize this. One key point I learned was not to begin revision from the strongest point in the writing rather than the weakest. Food for thought! She talked of a simple three-part conference model:
 

  • Practice
  • Prompts
  • Leave


Much of the strategy focus was on writing two to three additional sentences to accentuate a strong point a task we were all require to do. From my point I commented on The Writer’s Notebook (surprise, surprise!), explicit teacher modeling and sharing our lives as writer's and the need to conference, nothing new and if this had been in my schools in NY and NJ the teachers would have been rolling their eyes saying ‘Yes, yes, we get it!” but in this forum everyone seemed to be nodding and scribbling notes.

I attended another session called ‘Students Show They Know: A Dozen Different Multimodal Comprehension Strategies’ by Christine Boardman Moen from District 21 and Rockford College, Dakota, Illinois. What an exhausting woman! Full of passion and enthusiasm I felt the need for a lay down as thought I’d run in the NYC marathon when she finished! That’s a compliment though and any teachers and students that work with this educator are fortunate!

She has three key principles:

  • Content – What is taught?
  • Process – How content is taught?
  • Product – How what is taught is assessed?


The twelve different comprehension models were:

  1. Fast fact card parties
  2. Story additions
  3. Prediction poses
  4. Creative catalogues
  5. Tangram tellings
  6. Culture kits
  7. No taking dialogue
  8. ABC books for authentic research
  9. Double duty dictionaries
  10. Plot puzzles
  11. Biography blogs
  12. Point of view press conference


Moen has an excellent resource published called ’Better Than Book Reports’ recently updated through Scholastic and available cheaply on Amazon. This covers some but not all of the strategies aforementioned.  She also recommended checking out Lori Anderson’s updated version of Blooms Taxonomy and suggested the following books for use within these models:
 

  • Moo Hoo?
  • Baseball in April
  • The Old Woman who Lived in the Vinegar Bottle
  • The Great Call of China
  • Shangi Goes to China
  • P is for Princess
  • Sassy (series)
  • The Twin princesses
  • The Statue of liberty
  • http://hk.mdg.net/chinadict/  (for translating English to Chinese)


A research poster symposium which was interesting was ‘Literacy Leadership and Coaching’ – Unfortunately I don’t have any notes to transcribe as this was 'a walk and talk' situation but I plan to access the electronic copies of these presentations via the IRA website in due course so if you are interested email me with the particular presentation in the subject heading.
 

  1. The Qualifications and Credentials of Literacy Coaches; Lessons from Reading First.
  2. Including Content Teachers in the Conversation about Literacy Instruction
  3. Mentoring Coaching Language in Clinical Settings Using Video Recorded Strategy Lessons and a Feedback Protocol
  4. Literacy Coaching and Student Reading and Writing Achievement in Grades K-8: Is There a Relationship?
  5. Leadership and Literacy Coaching: How Prepared are Coaches to Lead?
  6. The Identities we teach: A Qualitative Student Assessment of the Conceptual and Enacted Identities of Three Teachers.
  7. The Influences of Teacher Beliefs on their Participation in Coaching.
  8. Educating a Community of Reading Specialists in a Multilingual Environment.
  9. Developing Professional Learning Communities: One Urban Schools Journey.
  10. Coaching Conversations: The Nature of Talk between a Literacy Coach and three teachers
  11. A Literacy Coaches work; A case study of coaching implementation in one school
  12. The Role of the Literacy Professional within the Response to Intervention Model.


The final session I attended was presented by Stephanie Arriaza-Allen, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida entitled ‘ Effective English Reading Instruction for Young English Language Learners: How to support Spanish-Speaking students learning o read in English’. The young doctor was exceedingly hard to listen to and I actually skipped out just before the end because I had the point.

Essentially she talked about how to lift students to Reading Recovery level 20 from nothing over a period of a year through intensive 45-minute periods with groups of no more than six students. Although boring this was a most worthwhile presentation and I can see how, if conducted diligently, measured and assessed regularly that any teacher could bring these kids up to level 20, and I guess that’s saying something!

The steps were as follows:

UFLI Model:

  1. Step One; Gaining fluency and measuring progress
  2. Step 2: Word work with manipulative letters (all the same color)
  3. Step Three: Introducing and reading anew book
  4. Step Four: Reading for Writing.


In addition to the sessions I manage to network with a number of professionals from the USA and international schools. I purchased a ‘Thumb Ball’ which has 16 or so sides with a different aspects of comprehension for students to use when reading – essentially they roll or throw it one another and report of the aspect ‘under their thumb’ I have seen many such resources but in my mind this is the best – at 10 bucks it will be a useful and easy item to carry with me while consulting.

Check this and other interesting materials out at  www.literacyconsulting.com

Finally I met a favorite author of mine Bruce Lansky – He has written numerous nonsense poetry books for kids most famously the giggle poetry series. His books are a great way of getting kids tuned in and laughing before teaching any poetry lesson. I purchased two more: ‘Rolling In The Aisles – A Collection Of Laugh Out Loud Poems. And ‘Kids Pick The Funniest Poems – Poems That Make Kids Laugh Out Loud’, had them signed and then kept bumping into Bruce throughout the convention!

I highly recommend that any literacy consultant attend this valuable convention although if we all did at once there would be no one to consult in the schools!

If you go……
 

  • Become an IRA member, it saves you $100 off the fee (making it $280)
  • Book your hotel well in advance; I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express for just $59 per night, with flat screen TV, breakfast and free Internet!
  • Avoid the buses and shared mini vans – pay the $15 for a cab for easier access with the money you saved from the hotel room!
  • If it is held in Chicago go to Redheads piano bar!