Welcome back

As I sit here in our S.I.T. meeting contemplating, with my colleagues, the best way to incorporate better teacher communication through the use of technology, I thought it appropriate to revisit our lonely little NSLJ blogspot.  Hello all!

Frontloading

I found this piece to be a succinct reminder of a few simple steps that can be taken to better guide our instruction.

Frontloading Comprehension
by Dr. Bob Wortman, Educational Consultant

The brain is the organ that readers use to make sense of their world (not the eyes) - and that includes the world of print. What we do as readers BEFORE we read is often as important as what we do during and after reading.

Take the time to remind students to always read the title and look at the cover or illustration. It's an important step that struggling readers in particular don't know to take. Decide if the piece is fiction or nonfiction.

If the piece is fiction, it will be in narrative format (story form). As a reader you will be making predictions and asking questions about the three elements of story: character, plot, and setting. Doing this sets a purpose for your reading and will help you stay on track as a reader.

If the selection is nonfiction, it will be an information piece and you should quickly scan and check out any diagrams, photographs, or captions. Take note of any subheadings or bold-faced or italicized vocabulary. Then make predictions and ask questions to yourself about the main ideas. Keep in mind, there will always be important details you will want to keep track of as a reader.

As teachers, we want to notice and assess what students do as they approach a new piece of print and give them appropriate feedback. All readers need to have experience in the strategy - no matter their reading ability - for we have all encountered difficult and dense text that requires our full attention.

These strategies are very helpful when taking standardized tests. The same procedures are useful when encountering selections; there is usually a title and often one small picture that can give your brain a jump-start to the reading. The questions at the end of the selections will always tie to the elements of story (in fiction) and main idea and most important details (in nonfiction).

Think before you write

In anticipation of our next writing pieces -- especially I-Search.

Think Before You Write
Joanna Hawkins

After teaching 7th and 8th grade students the mechanics of researching and writing a well-crafted research paper and giving the class plenty of time execute their projects, teacher Joanna Hawkins and her colleague were surprised at the mediocre results. Even the best papers were not consistently thoughtful, precise, or well developed.

However, when students gave poster presentations tied to their research papers, which had addressed the struggle of African Americans to create a nation of equality after the Civil War, the two teachers were equally surprised about the content knowledge, enthusiasm, and thinking that students exhibited.

How could the students' clear demonstration of knowledge—as seen through the poster presentations—come through in their writing? To resolve the problem, the teachers developed a process, "Writing for Understanding," to structure the research paper unit.

Writing for Understanding
Besides focusing on a big idea and framing that idea within an essential question, then helping students to structure their papers and using the writing process (draft, conference, revision) to hone their thinking, "Writing for Understanding" hinges on two essential steps: building a working knowledge of the content and processing and capturing that knowledge.

A teacher can help students build their working knowledge of the content by helping them develop relevant vocabulary and giving them opportunities to comprehend related texts through appropriate reading level materials and discussion. Frequent discussion also offers students opportunities to refine their knowledge so they will know what they're talking about as they sit down to write their research paper.

To process and capture knowledge, Hawkins advises teachers to "be intentional" about having students take notes so they have opportunities to capture their understanding in their own words. For example, in a history unit on the Battle of Dunkirk, Hawkins' students reread related texts using the essential focusing question as their lens: "How do the forces of technology, geography, desire for power, economics, and values influence the little boats' rescue of British soldiers at Dunkirk?" Using a template to break down the questions into its parts, her students analyzed the event by taking notes on each factor.

Hawkins maintains that, by using the "Writing for Understanding" process, the strongest students frequently showed levels of insight that amazed the teachers, and struggling students produced writing that showed solid understanding.

The "Writing for Understanding" Process

1) Select an enduring understanding or big idea that students should demonstrate in their written product.

2) Develop a focusing question that will enable students to approach the big idea in a specific, manageable way.

3) Build working knowledge of the content.

4) Help students process the knowledge, capturing it in notes so that they can use it in their writing.

5) Help students structure their writing so that their thinking is clear.

6) Use the writing process (draft, confer, revise) to help students produce a written product that is focused, organized, and developed to show understanding of the big idea.

Educational Leadership
October 2006 | Volume 64 | Number 2
Reading, Writing, Thinking Pages 63-66

Nikki Gionvanni

I just received an email from Harper Collins and wanted to give a big ELA shout out regarding the following news:

Congratulations to Nikki Giovanni, who recently received an NAACP Image Award in the Poetry category.

For anybody who hasn't yet discovered the brilliance of her writing -- don't wait and reserve further inspection of Giovanni's poetry for next February's Black History Month. ReadWriteThink.org, among others, utilizes her works in our everyday practice. Peace.

Food for thought or Utopian folly?

NEW YORK REGION | March 7, 2008
At Charter School, Higher Teacher Pay
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
A New York City charter school is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential performance bonus.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world."
ZEKE M. VANDERHOEK, 31, who is starting a charter school that will pay teachers $125,000 a year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html?ex=1205557200&en=7ce008c928e7f083&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Seems we have the right idea

MAGAZINE | March 2, 2008
Teaching Boys and Girls Separately
By ELIZABETH WEIL
The idea is gaining traction in American public schools, in response to the different education crises girls and boys have been reported to experience.

An interesting PBS series opportunity

Hey everyone,

I thought this looked intersting (and time-comsuming) to read/watch and to spend a few days on...enjoy!!! Carr

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February 5, 2008

Famous Black Lives Through DNA's Prism

By FELICIA R. LEE

"African-American Lives 2," a four-part series on PBS that begins on Wednesday night, belies its sleepy name with the poetry of history, the magic of science and the allure of the family trees of Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Tom Joyner and Maya Angelou.

It is the latest incarnation of the highly rated, critically successful star genealogy program that its host, the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., presented in 2006. Then Oprah Winfrey, Chris Tucker, Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg were among Professor Gates's eight guests for "African-American Lives." That was followed in 2007 by "Oprah's Roots."

This time scientists use DNA samples, and scholars peruse slave ship records, wills and other documents to recreate the histories of 12 people, including Professor Gates and one Everywoman guest.

"I conceived of these series as roots in a test tube," Professor Gates says early in "Lives," which will be broadcast on most PBS stations in two hourlong episodes on Wednesday and two on Feb. 13. Through the prism of the individual stories of rapes of black women, the failed promise of Reconstruction, the great migration of black Southerners to the North, the struggle for education, land, and freedom, Professor Gates lays bare the basic contradiction of the American dream.

Mr. Rock can be seen wiping away a tear after learning that his great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, served in the South Carolina Legislature, and died owning dozens of acres of land. He never knew any of that history, Mr. Rock says in the program. He recounts growing up in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood and being bused to a white school where he was bullied.

"Until I lucked into a comedy club at, you know, age 20, just on a whim, I assumed I would pick up things for white people for the rest of my life," Mr. Rock says. "If I'd known this, it would have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing."

Along with the triumphs are the inevitable tragedies. Tom Joyner, the celebrity radio personality, is shaken to learn that in 1915 an all-white jury in South Carolina convicted his two great-uncles of killing a white man. They were prosperous landowners, but were sent to the electric chair, even though evidence uncovered by the "Lives" researchers suggests their innocence. Mr. Joyner and Professor Gates said they planned to petition the South Carolina government to exonerate them posthumously.

Mr. Joyner is seen in "Lives" gathered with his extended family, reading old newspaper articles and learning a story that had been lost.

"I have had mixed emotions — grief, anger, pride," Mr. Joyner said in an interview about the program's revelations, adding, "If you feel — and all of us have these feelings — that you can't go any further, think about the people in your past and what they survived."

In addition to the celebrities, the "Lives" interview subjects include Bliss Broyard, a writer whose father, Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book critic and editor, was black and passed for white; the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard theologian; Linda Johnson Rice, president and chief executive of the company that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines; Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic gold-medal athlete; and Kathleen Henderson, a University of Dayton administrator who competed with more than 2,000 entrants to be on the program.

Professor Gates, a co-founder of the genealogy Web site AfricanDNA.com and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, keeps things going at a rapid pace for his guests. He whips out photographs of former slave masters (who were sometimes relatives), pinpoints the African countries of ancestors and travels to Ireland himself to track down his Irish roots. In the last episode everyone learns his or her percentage of European, Native American and African blood.

"These stories are much more in-depth than those in 'African-American Lives,' " Mr. Gates said in a recent telephone interview. "Then, a lot of documents had not been digitized, and we've learned to interpret the DNA testing better, with more subtlety and sophistication."

In one of the stories Morgan Freeman puzzles over the nature of the relationship between his white great-great-grandfather and African-American great-great-grandmother, who had eight children together. His great-great grandfather's employer owned her.

"I don't know, really," Mr. Freeman replies when Professor Gates asks him how that information makes him feel.

But, in a twist, the "Lives" researchers discovered that Mr. Morgan's white great-great grandfather sold land to his biracial sons. And they found the great-great-grandparents' headstones on that land in Mississippi, side by side, bearing the same last name and surrounded by the graves of their children.

None of the guests are 100 percent anything. Maya Angelou shakes her head in sorrow as Mr. Gates tells her that her black great-grandmother, 17-year-old Mary Lee, was impregnated by her 50-year-old white former master (who forced her to name another man as the father) and ended up in the poor house along with her child. That child was Ms. Angelou's grandmother, Marguerite.

"That poor little black girl, physically and psychologically bruised," Ms. Angelou murmurs.

"You never know how you're going to come here," Ms. Angelou said in an interview about her participation in "Lives" and her ancestor Mary Lee. "People have great weddings, and they're lucky to have it last five years."

Ms. Angelou said she initially disliked the idea of using celebrities to reclaim history but realized that they would attract viewers to examine the complexity of this country's roots. "Nothing human can be alien to me," Ms. Angelou said. "If we could internalize just a portion of that, it could get us away from the blithering idiocy of racism."

And what is race? Professor Gates asks. Ms. Broyard, who grew up thinking she was white, says in "Lives" that she believes that her father, who died in 1990, "passed" to protect his children from racism. She does not feel she has the right to call herself "black" now because it designates not just physicality but lived experience, she tells Professor Gates.

"It's a complicated message to get across," Ms. Broyard said in an interview. "We can find the geographic origins of our ancestors, but it doesn't mean that race is a biological destiny."

Still, Professor Gates sees the evolving use of DNA and records searches as ways to revolutionize how science is taught in schools. PBS is using the Web site pbs.org/aalives2 and other resources to help educators and others interesting in pursuing the information in the series.

"Forget going into a classroom and saying, 'I am going to teach you about Watson and Crick and the double helix,' " Professor Gates said. "Imagine if I could say, 'With this cotton swab, we can tell you where your ancestors come from in Africa.' "