“For students to fully develop their intellectual capacities, close reading and rereading must be joined to writing.” P.61
As the elementary principal in a 4th and 5th grade building, I would create the following change based on this situation. I would restructure the organization of scheduling to join Reading and Language Arts classes into a unified literacy class taught by the same teacher. Separating the two classes—Reading being homogeneous and Language Arts being heterogeneous—does not enable the opportunity to take “pen in hand” as Schmoker described, to write about one’s thoughts about a specific text.
I will work with the teachers in learning communities so that these new unit plans can be created. The plans will be created so that there is must dialogue and writing about what is read in school. If we’re looking to “develop their intellectual capacities” for the future, then this is a solution. This will be a drastic change to the culture of our school. But, the teachers will most likely be excited by the idea since they often stress about not having enough “face time” with their Reading students whom they only see for 40 minutes a day. They also stress about the lack of time for assessing and giving feedback to these students.
We will have to research the successfulness of homogeneous vs. heterogeneous for this new scheduling plan. Either way, with a group of twenty-five students, the unit plans will still need to take modifications and extensions into account, and will also need to plan for discussions including the teacher rather than with small groups.
“Weeks of nonliterary activities would be built around the reading of a single short story or novel.” P. 79
As the elementary principal of the 4th and 5th grade building, I would again help the teachers to work together to create units built around novels that are NOT boring, do NOT suppress creativity, but DO emphasize reading, writing, and discussion. Projects would be designed to do at home where dialogue with the teacher does not happen anyway. In school, we would use multimedia that promotes literacy such as Smartboard, blogging, and podcasts, to make class time interactive, engaging, and full of the main elements of literacy. Blogging can be used to write journal entries from the characters’ perspectives. Podcasts can be used to talk about the changes seen in a character, or examples from the text that prove a character’s personality trait. The Smartboard can be used to highlight (literally) and focus on actual text for all students to see. These uses of media will be used in conjunction with face-to-face discussion about the actual story, and not on the elements of the story or parts of a sentence.
“You can walk into any school system large and small, and ask to see samples of work that’s proficient from 5 different 4th grade classrooms. You’ll get five radically different qualities of work.”
As an elementary principal, I will help the teachers to create a Rubric Bank where teachers can post assignment descriptions and their correlating rubrics. This can all be done prior to the implementation of learning communities. But once the learning communities are in place, the teachers will be able to use the bank to create unit and lesson plans with clearly planned assessments.
The learning communities will also be used to refine the rubrics so that they are useful and do what they’re meant to—provide a clear label for quality that helps the teachers and students. The rubrics will need to be descriptive, and will NOT need labels such as “fair,” “good,” “awesome.” What do those really mean anyway???
