Books are Weapons. Knowledge is Power @kylenebeers @bobprobst

Yesterday, at Bassick High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Ellen Rosoff led freshmen thinkers to view with a lens of empathy, sympathy and/or apathy as she continued her yearlong mission within an iPD model to offer students both counseling and emotional guidance as they work towards self-directed, focused, and intuitive processes. She achieved this through looking at several spoken word pieces including those of Alicia Keys, Taylor Mali, and Denise Frohman (whose poem, "Weapons", can be viewed above).  Ms. Rosoff asked students to think about the poet's perspective and whether or not they felt sympathy, empathy, or apathy towards the theme she was communicating.

A young student, Jasmine, raised her hand and said, "I get it. Books are a weapon. The poet's knowledge is her weapon."

Bingo. 

I had the fortune of seeing several classes of students come to the same conclusion, each noticing how few in the poet's address raised their hand, slightly, in an auditorium to say they had dreams, but how quickly they threw both hands high in the air (as if surrendering) when the question of prisons arose. For young people who walk through metal detectors on a daily basis to reach classrooms to learn, Frohman's poem brought forth tremendous empathy. In a mini-lesson, the kids realized they also felt sympathy for their place as students and, often as passive learners, they also responded to a need to push against apathy. They have reasons to care and schools, with teachers like Ellen Rosoff, are giving them tools in which they think, write, speak, and read in school.

Thinking about learning in creative ways

The same was true in another class hosted by Gear Up. There, 9th graders were challenged to build the tallest tower they could with the cardboard, paper, and tape that was available. The goal was to make a tower that stood on its own and didn't need to be taped to the floor. It was a task that required teamwork, ingenuity, perseverance, and creativity. As the students competed in groups, the instructors provided larger lessons to be learned: working together is best and individuals, at times, should think outside the box.

Later in the evening, I had the pleasure of listening to the wisdom of Bob Probst and Kylene Beers, literacy experts in the field, as they talked with pre-service teachers about reading informational texts, supporting reluctant and struggling readers, and flooding classrooms with opportunities for students to work on analytical skills. "A district that pushes a singular curriculum with reading materials that are irrelevant to young people," they both suggested, "is one that has to ask itself, 'is it working?'" Research suggests that a one-size-fits-all mandate for middle and high school educators fails to meet the multi-variant needs of heterogeneous, diverse classrooms.

Lynn Winslow's Developmental Reading Class

Now, I am asking (as Bob Probst helped me to realize) how do stellar educators share what they know about best practices with district leaders, members on the Board of Education, and with one another to counter the top-down management styles enforced on many urban schools during a time of economic struggle? I am hearing Lynn Winslow's remark made to her students after the SKYPE dialogue, that "Teachers have a tendency to circle around one another and shoot in." We need to, instead, celebrate our profession by sharing expertise with what works with others, especially those who have never taught in schools.

Probst worked with a metaphor of hunting and fishing when reading informational texts and insinuated that Beers isn't quite pleased with the analogy just yet. It made me think about a fishing net analogy Sari Biklen's qualitative methods encouraged while conducting research - the idea of casting a large net into the world and pulling in everything one can. Then, with the bounty, to begin to make sense of it all before making a sound judgment and providing assertions. Reading and writing can be a scavenger hunt of what he said, she said, they said, and now, I say. We read (view, listen, feel, smell, taste) so that we can form opinions and understand the world around us. It isn't a hunt...but it is definitely a collecting process.

With three spoken-word YouTube examples, several paper towers, and an evening of listening to the wisdom of Kylene Beers and Bob Probst, I feel rather positive about making the following assertion: Students are MUCH more like to acquire the skills promoted by the Common Core State Standards when they are engaged and invited into the literacy processes adults use to achieve. These, of course, arrive from classrooms that transcend textbooks and provide young people real-world reading, writing, and thinking activities.