Hello readers! It's one of those lovely summer shower mornings. The birds are still chirping and some are even bathing in the puddles created. The steady drum of the rain is soothing and bringing respite from the humidity of the day past. It's a perfect moment to curl up with a good book and read, read, read. 

This instinct is one that many avid readers have, however it is not something that many of our students would necessarily chose. Summer rainy days often are met with the comment "I'm bored". Or more often now, kids choose to turn on their iPad, plug in their game console and "check out". What are some tips that we can use as teachers (and parents) to instill the innate reaction of "It's raining - perfect time to read a book". Here are a few of our suggestions below:

TIP 1: Model "rainy reading" yourself! At TLA, we are firm believers in the gradual release of responsibility. In terms of teaching, we constantly think "I do, we do, you do". We can't expect our students (or own children) to take on behaviors that we do not practice ourselves. So next time it's raining, do a think aloud for your students "Oh this is my favorite time to read and I have just the book I want to dive into!" Show your students what it looks like to be enthralled in a text. Like so many great things, this could be "caught" not just "taught". 

TIP 2: Have a stash of books ready! Keeping back a few beloved titles from your classroom library collection is something we recommend for many purposes. Because students curiosity is piqued by novelty, it's a great idea to keep back some books you know well for a great rainy day read-aloud. Make a big fuss about it too and you'll soon find kids "buzzing" about getting their hands on that book. 

TIP 3: Read more than just "books". Magazines, maps, and cookbooks are all great resources to have handy for students to read. Too often, students don't get a chance to do this kind of reading because they are working on specific reading strategies. However, these types of texts lend themselves to different kinds of reading skills that are just as important for students (determining importance, synthesis, using text features). Who knows, maybe one of your readers will even find a great recipe to share with the class for the next day!? That's what we call a win-win!

TIP 4: Make it cozy! Pull out the pillows, turn down the lights in your classroom and let the students pick a different "just right spot" for reading. When you are reading at home in the rain, it's often curled up on a bed, couch or comfy chair. Encourage that same idea in the classroom. We worked with a teacher once, who kept spare sheets in her room and would allow the students to build forts and read underneath them with flashlights on "rainy reading days". 

TIP 5: Reflect on the experience! Finally, when the rain has stopped take a moment to talk with your students about "reading in the rain". What did they like? What could have made it better for them while reading? How could they establish this routine for themselves at home?  John Dewey said "We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience." Giving the students time to think and talk will ideally engrain this love of reading more deeply. Then, the next time the sky opens up, so will a new book for them! 

The days are longer. The waves are crashing. The sunscreen is being liberally applied. It's summer time again and one of the best times of years to be a teacher or a student. One of the things that summer affords educators (something that is often lacking in the school year) is time! Time to play, time to reflect and time to read! It's challenging to be a good teacher of reading if you aren't invested in your reading life as well. We understand that the school year puts up many barriers to the flourishing of a teachers reading life. That is why we love the summer time. At TLA, we are firm believers that reading loads and loads of high quality children's literature is a great investment of your time and energy in becoming a more effective and compassionate reading (and writing) teacher for your students. 

So our encouragement to you is this --- find a new-to-you title, or ten or twenty and read this summer! Since sticky notes could easily fly away at the beach, we recommend putting one large sticky note in the front jacket cover of the book. As you are reading, if something grabs your attention and you think "that would be awesome for a mini lesson on ________" jot it down in the front. However, if you become so engrossed in reading that you forget all about mini lessons, that's okay too! That experience of being lost in a book is something you will want to share with your students during those long winter days that are bound to come back. 

Now the question begging to be answered is: Where to find some great summer reading? We are so glad you asked. Here are a few of our recommendations: 

2. Check out summer yard sales! You'd be amazed at the books you can find when people are doing some deep cleaning of their garages and houses. This is a great way to find some new-to-you titles for your classroom library. Even if you aren't seeing current titles at a yard sale, if the books are in decent shape and seem appropriate, we'd recommend picking them up. You can display them uniquely in your classroom  and because our brains are hardwired for novelty, even "used yard sale" books can be a great new adventure for your students. ​

3. Subscribe to a podcast! We highly recommend "Book Club for Kids" by Kitty Fielding. This podcast includes real kids and their real thoughts about books. It's edited and fun for listening with your own kids. The Children's Book Podcast has interviews with authors, illustrators etc who talk about their books! The content is a bit longer listen but has some interesting twists and turns. "Read Aloud Revival" This podcast is intended for families and parents who are trying to instill a love of reading in their home. You should also know that much of the audience are homeschool families. However, we have found the book recommendations (you might just want to check out the show notes) to be especially helpful. ​

4. Check out this list of titles from your very own TLA consultants! A little while back we reviewed dozens and dozens of children's titles with a social justice lens and wrote out a little blurb about each. These little vignettes might help you find a book that could be added to one of your Units of Study for next year. 

5. Follow TLA on Facebook! We are constantly updating our facebook page to include resources, especially about recent professional and children's books. Follow us and find something you love. 

We hope these ideas help catalyze a great summer of reading for you. Let us know what titles you've got in your beach bag in the comments section below! 

As March nears its end, ask yourself, how far have your readers come? Are you still wondering how to satiate your advanced readers? Do you still have readers who are “faking” it? Are students cringing through informational text with milk of magnesia-like reticence? Do some of your students still demonstrate significant deficits in vocabulary or background knowledge? The answer may lie in a dormant curiosity factor. Good readers press on to quench their curiosity about how octopuses squeeze through tiny spaces or how the villain will undermine her own conspiracy. So how do we address reader dispiritedness in the March doldrums? Productive curiosity is a potential solution. Teachers can hoist productive curiosity, or curiosity that bridges all of the cognitive gates, with focused, relevant analysis, inference, and synthesis orbiting around fascinating text. But how?
 
Using Text Sets to Drive Productive Curiosity
 
What is a text set?
A text set is a collection of high-quality texts organized around a specific topic. Text sets that drive productive curiosity orbit around unfamiliar topics of high interest. Consider yourself as a reader. Are you more likely to dive into a bin of books about making toast or a collection of texts unveiling the nine types of bacteria currently living around your toaster? We are curious about the unknown. We are productive when our effort feels relevant. Our students approach text in the same ways.
 
How are text sets constructed?
Text sets are constructed around an “anchor,” or complex grade-level text serving as the centerpiece for the curious and relevant topic in the unit. The anchor can be a full-length novel, an article, a primary source, a poem, or any piece of meaty text that necessitates other texts around it to grow related student background knowledge. The other texts in the set acts as a “staircase” building the background knowledge and vocabulary for students to actively engage with the anchor. The staircase also ensures that students move up and down the set through various complexity levels and text types to deepen, reinforce, and connect ongoing learning. The texts in a set “talk to one another” in that each stair is equally relevant.
 
What’s in a text set?
Texts in a set can include print, visual, auditory, and statistical formats. Varied text formats demand that students activate a multitude of cognitive processes and engage a variety of tools to hold on to knowledge and vocabulary.  Notes, concept maps, rolling knowledge journals, vocabulary sorts, and text-dependent questions help students analyze text, capture critical ideas, and prepare to synthesize this new knowledge through meaningful tasks. Texts in a set might include a whole book (e.g., a novel, a picture book), excerpts from a lengthy text (e.g., a chapter, a section from a speech), short text (e.g., poems, articles, song lyrics, “juicy” sentences), photographs, videos, maps, charts, tables, graphs, primary sources, and/or models, among others.
 
What distinguishes strong and less effective text sets?
A text set is most effective if the topic is focused and specific (e.g., Life in the Pre-Civil Rights South) rather than broad and generic (e.g., Ancient Civilizations).  The most effective topics are those that are curious to students (rather than the teacher!). Consider those topics with an “ick” factor (e.g., tongue-eating lice) or those that are provocative and intriguing (e.g., literary monsters). Novel topics offer high levels of curiosity, along with some cognitive discomfort, as they demand knowledge building and decision-making grounded in text rather than privileging or relying on existing experience. Productive curiosity is maximized when the whole class embarks on an uncharted topical journey together because:

• No students will “already be the experts”
• Students will need each other to see evolving and opposing points of view
• Students will endure the productive struggle of integrating new information together
• Reliance on the texts in the set become crucial (as opposed to reliance on prior knowledge gathered through privilege or experience)

 
Strong sets are comprised of high-quality primary source texts (e.g., constitutional amendment, speech, photograph, data collected from an experiment, an interview transcript or audio recording) and secondary source texts (e.g., news article, book, timeline, map, essay, song). Effective text sets include a balance of informational and literary texts, ideally with a 50-50 ratio of nonfiction to fiction texts in elementary grades and 70-30 nonfiction to fiction at middle and high school grades. Strong text sets spotlight literary nonfiction with informational text structure, such as opinion essays, biographies, journal articles, documentaries, and speeches, while also including narrative nonfiction with story-like structure (e.g., memoirs, diaries).

How does a text set support the range of readers in a classroom?
Common core standards demand that all students engage in analysis, inference, and synthesis of grade-level complex text. As a result, effective sets support purposeful access to meaty text. Strategic design of the text set “staircase” can ensure scaffolding without denying all readers the productive curiosity, and productive struggle, associated with complex text. The following continuum helps to ensure an appropriate staircase:

Bridge Texts
Bridge texts are topical texts in the set that are highly connected to the anchor and topic but at lower complexity levels than demanded at that grade. Bridge texts do not replace other texts in the set but are available to all students to serve as a “bridge” toward the anchor. Bridge texts fill a void of topical knowledge and vocabulary at more highly accessible text levels.
 
Mentor Texts
Mentor texts are moderately complex grade-level texts in the set that are tightly connected to specific content in the anchor and topic, but at mid-range quantitative and qualitative levels for the grade. Mentor texts are often excerpts (paragraphs, stanzas, chapters, pages, etc.) from more lengthy, demanding texts, thereby keeping rigor ambitious yet achievable. All students have access to mentor texts in the set.
 
Anchor Text
The anchor text is a richly complex grade-level text, pushing the upper quantitative and qualitative bands for the grade, that serves as the centerpiece for reading and unearthing the topic in the text set. The anchor necessitates reading across the set to amass the background knowledge, perspective, and vocabulary necessary to independently think, talk, and write about its central ideas.
 
Stretch Texts
Stretch texts that are selections in the set falling two to three grade levels above the grade, allowing advanced readers to dive deeper into the topic and acquire even more sophisticated vocabulary. Stretch texts are available to all students but do not contain crucial content for accessing the topic or anchor. Therefore, some students may decide not to access stretch texts in a set.
 
The continuum of texts in a set, from bridge to stretch, ensure that all students can become productively curious about the topic and the anchor text, while maintaining grade level rigor. But what about our students that are reading well below grade level? First, consider these three questions:

• Might these students want to attend a college of their choice?
• Do these students have a right to attend college without spending years in remedial courses?
• Will these students be taking state-wide standardized tests?

 
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then these students need regular access to the texts they will encounter in these instances. States with common-core aligned accountability measures will demand students read grade-level complex text. Colleges will demand that students read richly complex topical texts. Our choices around text need to be purposeful in ensuring that students have a chance to grapple with complex text in the safety of our classrooms. We won’t be there to help them in their college dorm at midnight, or even on the state test during fourth period.
 
Second, consider these three questions:

• Are these students ELLs with significant language needs?
• Are these students with highly specialized cognitive, physical, or social/emotional needs?
• Are these students who are reading many levels below their grade?

 
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should include “supplemental” texts, along with the set, to support the unique needs of these students. Individual students may tap into these supplemental texts to overcome critical gaps in word-level and comprehension-level reading strategies and content knowledge. Supplemental texts may be bilingual resources, audiobooks, abridged versions, or “chunked” texts lifted from original sources, among others. While these supplemental texts may not be enough to leverage independent access to the text set for these students, they will increase opportunity for productive curiosity around the topic when texts in the set are read aloud by a teacher or peer and discussed. Shared reading of texts can take place in small groups with a teacher or with strategically partnered students who can demonstrate and support rich conversation and language models around the texts. Supplemental texts do not replace texts in a set, but make the topic far more accessible for students with specialized needs.
 
How can a text set be used before, during, and after instruction?
With so many texts in a set, gradual release and deliberate progression become essential. One approach to releasing students through a set involves the teacher using each text as a guidepost along the topical journey for students. Consider the following progression of gradual release through a complex text investigation:

Add as many mentors to the cycle as necessary. Insert bridge and stretch texts where appropriate and encourage students to self-select these texts based on their interest and need by asking questions like, “How can you find out more about that?” and “What unanswered questions do we have that might require additional texts to explore?”
 
Students can read bridge and stretch texts during independent reading, alongside of mentor texts, and for homework to debug or deepen topical knowledge. If you use and activator (or “do now”) to start your class, bridge texts and stretch texts can help students define key vocabulary using contextual clues or word-solving strategies. Additionally, bridge and stretch texts can be used during activators as “ten-minute fluency boosts” through which students can read the text chorally. Alternatively, support fluency by turning bridge texts into cloze reading passages. Eliminate every fifth word in a bridge text passage and have partners deliberate the missing words as they read aloud together. Strategically paired advanced readers could do this same cloze work with stretch texts.    
 
The goal of the set is to continually return to the anchor with a deepening knowledge of the topic and a growing, authentic purpose for synthesizing the central ideas of the anchor. The more students read across the text set, the more they should care about the implications of the big ideas on their world.
 
How does productive curiosity and text-setting fit into Workshop 2.0?
Workshop structure allows productive curiosity to effectively blossom for all students. Here are some suggestions for maximizing the independence and joy inherent in workshop when using text sets:

1. Explicitly model reading strategies in your mini lessons as you move students through the text set. Don’t forget, one purpose of a text set is to drive productive curiosity so that students:
   1. Develop stamina for reading
   2. Build intrinsic motivation to read increasingly complex text (because they NEED to know more about this juicy topic!)
   3. Read for an authentic purpose

 
None of this is possible without effective reading strategies. As you plan your mini lessons, ask yourself, “What strategy am I teaching my readers today that they haven’t already mastered?” and “How will today’s texts allow them to practice this strategy with increasing independence?”

1. Integrate teacher-created text sets with special topical collections you spotlight in your classroom library. Allow students to grow your teacher-created set by adding student-selected bridge, mentor, and stretch texts from your library (or the school library if you don’t have a classroom library).
2. Create DIY stations that allow students to construct their own text sets on the topic. Photocopy and/or gather all possible texts for a set but do not pre-construct the collections for students. Sort them into categories that help students recognize which are critical readings for the topic. Category labels might include “must-know” ideas, “great-to-know” ideas, and “nice-to-know” ideas. Have students conduct a “book pass” or “text pass” to skim and scan the selections and build their own group-selected set by choosing two texts from each category. Of course, students can always add additional pieces from your categories over the course of the unit if they need more support or enrichment. Group-created text sets cause interesting variations in the knowledge and point-of-view base across the class, driving productively curious conversation.
   
3. Use conferring opportunities to assess and intervene as students grapple with the various complexity levels in the set. Research one strength the reader demonstrates in the conference, along with one critical strategy you can model to help the reader improve comprehension. Provide a chance for the student to practice this strategy with fidelity before moving on to your next conference.
4. Add new texts that offer scaffolding, specific features, or incremental rigor for small groups in which you provide explicit instruction. These texts may be matched to the instructional reading level of students in the group, in the case of guided reading, or represent multiple reading levels, in the case of strategy groups.
5.  Ask students to continually add their own personally selected texts to the set. These texts can serve as stretch or bridge texts (independent or “just-right” texts at the students individual reading level) or mentor texts that become integral to the topical study. Help students make meaningful selections by modeling ways in which you find and integrate new texts into the set as a reader (e.g., finding an article on the dung beetle to deepen your text set on insect adaptations). Model for students how adding your own text greatly enhances your productive curiosity.

Whether you are acing common core shifts or cursing them, there are resolutions to be made by all of us as we head seven years deep into the post-common core era. Find a leverage point in the New Year and give yourself time to build toward success. Try these common core “shifter” resolutions on for size and transform learning ahead for your students.
 
Rookie Shifter Resolutions
 
Resolution #1: Even if you’re not implementing a “workshop” model or haven’t made any of the significant common core shifts yet, start small with interactive read aloud. To make this resolution a reality, first choose a text. Select an excerpt of the whole class novel or choose a picture book, poem, article, or primary source. Preview the reading or build background knowledge to help students access the topic or theme. As you read, model effective prosody, or the ways in which your rhythm and intonation support your comprehension. You’ll need to think aloud about this to help students track your prosody work. For example, after reading a piece of dialogue in a flat tone, stop to think aloud while announcing, “I’m going to give this a second read. Someone is speaking here and I notice a question mark. I know that tells me my voice should go up at the end of the sentence. Let me try.” If you come across a piece of dialogue with an exclamation point, think aloud by wondering, “How should this character sound in this line? An exclamation point could mean different emotions like shock, thrill, amazement, anticipation, urgency, or even danger. Let me think about the context here and try excitement on for size with this line.”
 
In addition to building topical knowledge related to the text and modeling prosody, use interactive read aloud to model ways in which you tackle tricky vocabulary. For example, think aloud about how you solve difficult words by isolating familiar ending or beginning sounds, finding word analogies, identifying recognizable root words, using context clues, and other strategies. For example, when bumping into the word “industrious,” you might think aloud the word part that reminds you of “industry.” Wonder aloud by saying, “I know industry sometimes means making things or manufacturing, so I think industrious means ‘someone who is busy producing.’” Don’t forget the importance of modeling how good readers sometimes let go of words that are not critical to comprehension. For instance, if you come to a proper noun or adjective in a clear series of synonyms, model for students how readers can ask themselves, “Do I need this tricky word to understand the sentence?” Economizing when appropriate can elevate stamina and fluency. 
 
Finally, use interactive read aloud to talk purposefully back to the text. Pose questions like, “Hmmm…I wonder why the author used this metaphor?” Affirm important discoveries like, “I was wrong! This character wasn’t completely evil. This is a surprise!” Untangle points of confusion such as, “Wow, I need to read this again. I feel lost in this paragraph. Let me try line by line.” Hold on to important information mined from the text by asserting, “This seems important. I need to capture this information on a sticky note that I can leave in the text. In this way, I’ll know to think about this carefully again later and I’ll remember exactly where it occurred in the text.” You can engage students in these conversations with the text during interactive read aloud. Invite them to challenge your thinking, point out supporting evidence, make an inference, or notice something important in the text.
 
As you do this work aloud, remind students that you want them to have these same conversations in their minds and in their texts when they read independently. Use interactive read aloud to show how good readers are metacognitive and alert for clues left by the author.
 
Resolution #2:  Do you spend the majority of time in whole class discussion of a text or review of math problems? Release the cognition to students in your whole class text or math problem set. Resist the urge to always be the tour guide for the chapter, word problem, or discussion of a primary source document. Spend no more than 5-10 minutes previewing the problem, reading the first paragraph, or modeling a strategy for tackling a tricky text. Then open the gate for students to shoulder the heavy lifting themselves. Opening the gate doesn’t mean a free for all. Line the path with a simple, meaningful task that helps students analyze, infer, or synthesize through reading, writing, talking, solving, drawing, or other output. Tasks might be as simple as finding three key pieces of evidence to support a particular claim or as complex as constructing a model to demonstrate mathematical thinking. Students can tackle tasks independently, in pairs, or in small groups. The key is to let the students do most of the work. Independence-killers include overly complex roles or directions for students to follow (e.g., literature circles that demand a note-taker, time-keeper, page-turner, etc. or graphic organizers that involve many elaborate kingdoms of bubbles and boxes unlikely to be transferred independently to other experiences). Provide students room to grapple productively within the task by letting them develop a theory, shape a model, rewrite an alternate ending, or imagine they were tweeting in response to an inaugural speech with only 140 characters to reign in all their thoughts.
 
Resolution #3:  Have you become the sentinel regulating what students read and how they demonstrate knowledge of the texts you selected? Resolve to provide student choice for building and demonstrating knowledge through text as often as possible. Offer a set of short texts to complement the theme or topic of your whole-class reads. These texts may be articles, poems, song lyrics, images, excerpts from chapters, tables, maps, or more, read during an independent reading time. Ask students to “collect” a set of three-five of these short texts to build their schema around ideas from the main whole-class text. For example, if you are reading To Kill a Mockingbird as a class, create “schema baskets” with teacher-selected short texts dedicated to racism, The Great Depression, growing up in the South before the civil rights movement, characters struggling with identity, and characters that are inanimate objects. Allow students to select from one or more schema baskets to create their custom text set. Pose questions that drive students into these manuscripts to analyze, infer, and build theories across multiple texts. Use a “find four” grid (simple four-quadrant chart) in which students find four other students with distinct texts. Each of the four student responses to a class question, based on their individual text collection, gets recorded in one of the quadrants. This allows the class to consider how knowledge from various texts shapes classmate thinking about a shared exploration. Alternatively, during a whole class discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird ask, “Can a house can be a character? Do texts have characters like this? What evidence can shape our thinking?” Host a Socratic dialogue in which students derive their answers to these questions using their unique text collections.
 
There will be great diversity in student response based on their text choices but richness, debate, and rigor will hum from these conversations. Make your work easier by mining schema-basket texts sets from open source “expert packs” at Achieve the Core. Warning: This may feel a lot like chaos at first! Don’t give up. Model your own thinking using multiple, diverse sets. Take comfort in the counsel of Lord Petyr Baelish, “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” (Game of Thrones, 2013, Episode 26)
 
Resolutions for the Shift Maven
 
Resolution #4: Are your students spending lots of time filling in the boxes of your graphic organizers, only to transpose the content of these boxes verbatim to construct their writing? Are your students falling down on standardized tests when your carefully fashioned graphic organizers are unavailable? Resolve to let go of graphic organizers as we know them. Trade your elaborate GOs for DIY versions that students can create (and recreate!) at will during authentic and on-demand tasks. These DIY versions can include simple T-charts, Venn diagrams, four-quadrant charts, if-then bubbles, and boxes and bullets, among many other easy-to-create tools for holding and manipulating information. This resolution sounds too simple to be impactful, but here’s why you should commit:

• Not all students need GOs. Even students that benefit from them once in a while do not need them all the time.
• Readers and writers in the “real world” do not typically carry around an arsenal of extravagant GOs in which they do their work. They learn organic strategies for organizing their thinking.
• Like any tool, students should learn to be in charge of selecting a GO to match their purpose. This is a critical element of metacognition (What do I need to do this work? How can a tool help me do this work more efficiently?)
• Most of the GOs we build dependency on in the classroom are not permitted in standardized test environments.
  

Resolution #5: Are some of your students struggling to the point of frustration with complex text? Are you trying to balance release of cognition with scaffolding and support, especially for ELLs and students with specialized learning needs? Resolve to support students with personalized learning through small-group instruction regularly. Here are a few ways to push further into small-group learning, or launch it if this format is new to you:

• Schedule a rotation of small groups across the week. Plan to meet with groups of students demonstrating multiple needs or struggling with grade-level work multiple times during the week. For example, if groups A and B include students with significant needs, meet with them on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week. Students finding success with grade level content can meet with you less frequently. No, you cannot meet with every group every day! Your sanity matters in 2017.
• Meet with each group for just 10-20 minutes at a time. This will prompt you to focus on a clear teaching point and still provide time for you to support each and every member of the small group. Most importantly, it conserves time to schedule one or more groups during the class time, ensuring you see approximately ten groups per week on average. If you have the luxury of a flexible schedule or a long block, of course you can schedule more. Caution: Do not overload yourself with too many groups! Small-group instruction is just as challenging as whole-class instruction.
• If you’re new to small-group instruction, start with just one group per day and ramp up slowly across the New Year. If you’re experienced, try adding one-three groups across the week at first. If you’re already a pro meeting with all students at some point in a rotation, try developing a personalized learning plan for each student. Spend time mapping long-term goals for students and, if age-appropriate, engage them in the decision-making. Tie these goals directly to the common core standards. For example, some of your advanced students may identify goals around RL.7 in which readers work across visual (e.g., illustrations) and print elements within a text to consider how each supports meaning for the other (elementary level), compare and contrast various versions of a text using film, audio, or other adaptations (middle level), or analyze representation of a key textual figure portrayed in various artistic mediums (high school). Students working toward proficiency may identify goals that gradually amplify the tasks they can engage in to support claims with evidence using grade-level text. The key is to differentiate the tasks, not the texts, to ensure common core aligned work in small group instruction during core classes. For some students, that may mean digesting only small bits of text at a time or focusing on explicit work within small chunks of text (e.g., looking at a syntax pattern) in pursuit of their long-term goals. Use intervention time to address critical needs that may require lower text levels (e.g., phonics instruction).
• Keep your small groups small! A maximum of three-six students allows you wide impact across a week but also ensures you are grouping like-needs together.  If your groups are too large, the range of needs will also be too expansive.
  

Resolution #6: Are your students struggling with stamina across complex or lengthy texts? Fluency is one critical piece of the puzzle impacting every reader’s comprehension in grade-level or stretch texts. Resolve to add a five to ten-minute fluency booster each day. Here are several easy ways to bring this resolution to life in your classroom:

Choral Reading: The teacher reads aloud at a moderate pace, and the students read-aloud, following along and matching pacing and phrasing as best they can. Younger students should follow along with a finger or other marker to track the print as they read. At the end of the passage or series of pages, converse about what was read to let students know comprehension is the goal of fluent reading.
 
Older students may balk at this protocol if they are unaccustomed to reading out loud together. Stick with it. Fluency is integral to advancing comprehension, especially for struggling readers. It’s okay to let your readers know they won’t always be able to keep up or match your expression. Let them know the act of pushing themselves and hearing others develop fluency is helping them all along the way.
 
Cloze Reading: Photocopy a passage from a text and white out every 5th word (approximately) in a section or on the whole page (depending on the amount of print). Draw a line in the whited-out spaces to indicate a missing word. For the very first time you use this protocol, model the way you predict the deleted words as you read fluently. Provide the doctored passage to pairs of students. Have the student pairs read the passage out loud together and predict deleted words as they read. If students disagree on the missing word, they can stop and discuss the strategy or kinds of information they used to make the prediction. If they agree, they should continue on without stopping. You can reveal the words you deleted at the close of the protocol by projecting a clean copy or reading the passage aloud if you choose. The goal of cloze reading is the cognitive strategy work rather than always having the correct answer.
 
Cloze Reading with Initial Sounds: This protocol is the same as the cloze reading routine described above except when you white out words in the passage, leave the initial letter in the word or a cluster of letters. In this way, students become more conscious of how they attend to visual clues in relation to meaning and structure. Model the way you predict the deleted words based on visual cues you can see.
 
Partner Reading: Pair students strategically by matching strong readers with evolving readers and provide a short piece of text or section of text that has already been read (either together as a class, in a group, or independently). Provide color-coded stickies or popsicle sticks to each partner so that you can instruct one color to read first (e.g., “If you have a pink sticky, kick off the reading in your pair.”). Ideally, the stronger reader reads first to model prosody effectively. Model or instruct how you want partners to navigate the text. For example, does the first partner read a sentence and then stop to allow the second partner to read the same sentence? Do they stop after the first paragraph? Page? Be clear about your expectations. Each partner reads the same short section, one after the other. Students can provide their partner with support if they stumble on words or have trouble with phrasing. Feel free to mix up pairs and swap the order of who reads first. It’s okay if the strong reader is second some of the time. Avoiding any stigmatization of reading ability will be important for reader confidence, especially at upper elementary, middle, and high school grades.
 
Readers’ Theater: Pair or group students and provide an unrehearsed text with plenty of dialogue. Each student in the pair or group takes on a role. The part of “narrator” can be a role for sections that are not dialogue. Students dramatize the reading to emphasize expression, tone, and pacing as they read. If the text is an excerpt from a long work, students focus on punctuation, context, and other clues to help them navigate the drama, as they may not be familiar with characters or plot. For short texts, they use the full range of comprehension strategies to get the drama just right. Any text with dialogue can be used as a Readers’ Theater “script.” Alternatively, there are many free Readers’ Theater scripts written expressly for this purpose and available online. Browse the K-12 collections of other Readers’ Theater enthusiasts for scripts:
 
http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm
 
http://www.thebestclass.org/rtscripts.html
 
https://www.readinga-z.com/fluency/readers-theater-scripts/#
 
http://www.aaronshep.com/rt/RTE.html
 
Remember, for each of the protocol, the goal is fluency and the timeframe is five-ten minutes each day. Don’t fall into the trap of turning Readers’ Theater into a two-week Shakespearean production involving costume-weaving and ten gallons of paint. Guard against choral reading that morphs into round-robin reading of your whole-class novel. Keep it short and simple and student fluency will improve dramatically over the course of the New Year.
 
Resolutions for School Leaders and Coaches
 
Should literacy leaders and principals have shift resolutions as well? Of course! The challenge of the leader in the era of common core shifts is that you are one and the standards are many. It would be impossible to think a leader could know all the standards and advise on all the pathways to lead teachers and students toward these standards. For leaders, resolve not to fix the alignment, but to ask the right questions so that you can prompt the subject-matter experts to light the way. Here are several questions you can resolve to ask regularly as you observe teaching and learning in your classrooms:
 
Resolution #7: Ask, “How does this task engage students in productive struggle?”
 
A complex text does not live out its full potential without a meaningful task. In fact, the task itself can increase the complexity of the text exponentially. For example, a task asking students to take on the role of a supporting character featured only briefly in a picture book image can amplify the complexity of a reading and writing experience. Students can rewrite the story from the supporting character’s perspective using textual tone, setting, plot, and character information as evidence to generate their stories. Alternatively, students can debate the possible versions orally in pairs or groups, using textual evidence from the original story to justify their theories.
 
To generate productive struggle, tasks should always be grounded in text. If teachers appear to struggle in answering this question, prompt them to think about revising tasks to emanate from one or more texts. Rather than tasks based solely on student opinion or experience (e.g., Based on our discussions, what do you think was the primary cause of the Civil War?), push teachers to think about reimagining these tasks fully grounded in text (e.g., Pick one of the authors we have read. Write a six word-summary capturing this author’s perspective on the primary cause of the Civil War.) You don’t need to identify the tasks for your teachers. You just need the words that convey, “Ground your tasks in the texts to enhance productive struggle.”
 
Resolution #8: Ask, “Who is doing most of the work?”
 
The most complex texts and tasks are not of great value if the teacher is doing most of the work. As you observe instruction, note who is doing most of the questioning? Is the teacher generating the questions? Is the teacher calling on the readers who will respond? Is the conversation path paved by what the teacher has decided is important in her lesson plan? Is every student engaged almost all of the time? Is each student doing heavy cognitive lifting of some sort?
 
Or are students compliantly following down a road behind an exhausted teacher with little sweat on their own brows?
 
Sometimes we can be lulled into a false sense of confidence by teachers who work so hard, passionately embrace their subject matter, and go to the ends of the earth to scaffold so students can “feel” successful. Unfortunately, it’s usually our accountability measures that shock us to the reality that our students are unaccustomed to doing this work independently with grade-level or stretch-level texts. Our most vulnerable students typically show the least growth, even though we’ve worked there the hardest. This question is critical: Who has been doing most of the work? Did the students facilitate the discussion using accountable talk measures modeled and released by teachers? Have students been talking to their texts using sticky notes or reading partners regularly or have they been relegated to whole class text discussions? Has student writing been formulated by a hamburger graphic or inspired by mentor authors? Who unpacked the complicated prompt with 17 directives and four unfamiliar vocabulary words?
 
Teachers will not follow their students to college. Bosses will not offer the weekly staff memo in seven differentiated Lexile levels. Modeling is critical, but only worthy if teachers can let students do the majority of the work.
 
This transition can sometimes feel subtle, especially for leaders observing content areas out of their comfort zones. Use these two tools to help you navigate the improvement effort:

• Help teacher teams revise their classroom schedules to reflect clear buckets of ownership. For example, teachers should own the smallest percentage of the period or day in what they should call the “I DO.” If the instructional block is 60 minutes, the I DO might represent no more than 15 minutes of a mini-lesson. The rest of the time should be spent releasing (WE DO) through guided practice (Let’s try this together for a few minutes!) and independent practice (YOU DO) either in small groups or as individuals. If you don’t ask to see these schedules sketched out visibly in a plan book and posted in the classroom agenda, it won’t happen.
• Use an observation tool to help teachers reflect on how time is spent in their classrooms. In the hectic lives of teachers, it is often impossible to track time ownership, reflect on who is lifting, and evaluate the quality of these ratios in the moment while managing a classroom full of students. As an observer, use the Classroom Time Analysis Tool, a web-based tool developed by the National Center on Time and Learning, to track and visually represent how time is used. The tool helps track general buckets of time use, including transitions, teacher-led time, student work time, and assessment time. Time allotments are represented with raw data (e.g., minutes) and graphically in a pie chart. The tool helps remove some of the nebulous assumptions about how we use time and focuses the conversation on how we can shift the ownership of learning to our students.

 
Whether you are new to the shifts or well-versed, there’s a resolution out there for you. While any of these might easily surpass the blood, sweat, and tears of a gym membership, any are sure to leave far-reaching benefits for your students. 

Autumn brings tidings of celebration, unless you’re a Red Sox or Trump fan. Classrooms are reveling in seasonal themes such as democracy, suffrage, harvest bounty, family, and giving to those in need. All the while, exhausted educators are searching Pinterest for candy corn martini recipes (yes, it is a thing) and strategies for ramping up complex text use during fall units. If you read last month’s blog, hopefully you are thinking about how to deliver your important fall themes through topic-based unit studies that build knowledge. In this month’s investigation, we’ll explore this critical common core shift of text complexity to significantly elevate your balanced literacy instruction.
 
Why is this Shift Important?
 
Common core standards assume educators are helping students construct knowledge and deepen cognition from text. The common core shift to complex text includes a number of game-changing paradigms:

1. Text is the great leveler. No student is privileged if required content knowledge is mined from novel classroom texts. 
2. Interactions with text must go way beyond our personal connections. Deep thinking through the three common core gates of cognition entail readers and writers first determining what the text says, not what they think it means, making strong inferences (schema + text evidence), not predictions or educated guesses, and synthesizing (growing a theory, rewriting the ending, retelling the story from a supporting character’s point of view, etc.), not summarizing. Most importantly, it’s not about our favorite parts or our connections to the text. It’s not about us. It’s about why the author wrote this for us and what message the writer wants us to translate for others.
3. All students will regularly access grade level complex texts, even if they are reading below grade level. While students will need text scaffolding to build prerequisite skills and strategies to proficiently access these texts, they still need frequent exposure to grade level text, as well as stretch texts (2-3 grade levels above).
4. Students will read multiple texts to build topic knowledge and deepen thinking. Reading one text at a time no longer replicates the cognitive demands facing 21st century learners. They will be simultaneously flooded with information and perspectives from a multitude of sources in their college and career experiences and need regular practice integrating and evaluating stimuli from many sources.
5. Text selection will be based on three criteria to ensure deep purpose and complexity. The three criteria include quantitative readability measures (e.g., Lexile level), qualitative evaluation (e.g., meaning, syntax, structure, schema demands), and task or reader conditions (e.g., specialized learning needs, questions posed, knowledge demands). 
6. Students must do the heavy lifting. You are already proficient and employed. While a 40-minute whole-class discussion of Hamlet or Charlotte’s Web may be interesting, if you are leading it, then you are doing all of the hard work. Your students should be exhausted from grappling with text independently, not you. Release the cognitive heavy lifting to students through text-dependent questions and high-leverage tasks to drive thinking, talking, and writing for individuals, pairs, and small groups. Use whole group structures for setting the stage or wrapping up after text explorations.

 
Tips for Shifters: Making the Move to Text Complexity in Balanced Literacy 2.0
 
Tip #1: Plan With a Ladder in Mind
 
Imagine the anchor standards are a ladder and the side rails are standards RL/RI 1 (thinking based on  textual evidence) and RL/RI 10 (increasing exposure to complex grade level text). These siderails should be integral in every lesson in order to ensure thinking is grounded in complex text each day. The rungs of the ladder become the remaining anchor standards supported by these essential textual siderails.
 
Tip #2: Build a Toolkit
 
While your candy corn martini may be an artisan creation, your lesson planning does not have to be. Use these online tools to support the planning process and mine for ready-made text meals on these open source sites:

• Use this smart lesson-builder to plan analysis lessons with complex texts and tasks
  
• Mine these vetted complex text sets and adapt their use within your units of study
  
• Investigate these units for complex task ideas and ways in which educators construct text-dependent questions (TDQs) to ground knowledge-building in text
  
• Explore this treasure trove of passages by topic and integrate complex grade level selections with meaningful tasks in your units/lessons
  
• Examine these high-interest informational texts organized by topic and instantly adapt quantitative measures of complexity (Lexile) or change the language for each to scaffold for specific readers

 
Tip #3: Use Independent Reading and Writing Time for Grappling with Text Sets
 
If you’re implementing a balanced literacy approach, you’re already building in time for independent reading, following your explicit mini lesson. Keep this structure in place! Instead of having students read one “just-right” text during independent reading, transition to use of complex text sets during this time. When you send students off to do their independent reading (or writing), ask them to apply their strategies across multiple texts in a set, including their just-right book. For example, if you’ve taught a lesson on finding the central idea of a passage, ask them to demonstrate this strategy using their choice of texts in the set. Alternatively, you might ask them to try this strategy along the staircase of complexity in their text set, starting with the most accessible and ending with the most complex.
 
Tip #4: Build a Staircase in their Book Bags or Bins
 
If your students have book bags or bins to house their just-right texts, convert these to house a text set that includes a staircase of increasing complexity. Students can have the following in their book bags:

• Anchor text (highly complex stretch text 2-3 levels above grade level)
  
• Mentor text(s) (moderately complex grade level texts)
  
• Independent text(s) (just-right – highly accessible)

 
The anchor text is selected by the teacher and could be a whole class text used primarily for interactive read aloud and mini lesson think alouds. Mentor texts are also chosen by the teacher and might be photocopied excerpts of texts or full-length texts. Independent texts are selected by the students. These independent texts can come from the classroom library, school library, digital resources, or from a small collection pre-vetted by the teacher. It may take several lessons to expand the text set but all of these texts should be readily available to students in the book bag as the unit climbs toward culmination.
 
As you teach skill and strategy mini lessons, invite students to apply these approaches across the text set in order to ensure maximum complexity. Use text-dependent questions to drive students deeper into specific texts. Design tasks that demand synthesis across multiple texts during independent reading (e.g., a Socratic Seminar, merging characters from two different stories in a sequel, persuading voters on a ballot question using argument and counterargument from multiple sources).
 
Tip #5: Use the Staircase Strategically
 
Start at the top of the staircase by introducing the anchor text first to set the stage, create purpose, offer intrigue, and establish a lofty goal for reading. Model your fluency, prosody, and self-correction with some of this text using interactive read aloud, but don't take all of the challenge from your students. Let them grapple with this difficult text before you reveal all of the meaning, nuance, and strategy needed.
 
Pause the investigation of the anchor text and build a staircase that leads students to success with this “top stair” after a journey through the set. Drop down to a low stair (independent or mentor text) and work back up the staircase to the anchor, methodically supporting in-context vocabulary work, background knowledge building, and fluency support with strategic text choices. Use text-dependent questions, frequent accountable talk, and writing to navigate these texts. Use your mini lessons to advance skills and strategies for success with these increasingly complex texts. Model and support use of a “rolling knowledge journal” that helps students hold onto knowledge revealed and questions raised across readings of multiple texts in the set.
 
Return to the anchor to apply new knowledge, demonstrate increased vocabulary and fluency, and incorporate all texts in the set into a synthesis.
 
Tip #6: Expand Your Set Beyond Traditional Print Texts
 
As you build or adapt your topic-based text sets, consider using diverse formats that include a mix of print, visual, audio including photographs, videos, charts, tables, maps, graphs, diagrams, graphic narrative, political cartoons, articles, poems, short stories, captions, social media posts, blogs, and more. Cross over literary and informational genres in your text set if possible. For example, integrate articles about shark sightings, a poem about deep sea predators, a video of shark conservation efforts, and a map of shark food sources, among others.
 
Differentiate by strategically scaffolding text sets to support individual learner needs. Rather than replace complex texts in the set with modified or more accessible versions, add them in addition to the regular set. Encourage work across the entire staircase, with emphasis on accessible texts to initiate meaning-making, word level strategies, and vocabulary building, while still ensuring opportunity to grapple with higher level texts. Keep in mind, these are the texts students will confront on standardized tests. Don’t let the testing environment be the place where they meet these texts for the first time independently.
 
Tip #7: Design a Task Worth Reading For
 
A text set with no purposeful synthesis is an exercise in frustration. Remember, complexity has three criteria: quantitative measures, qualitative aspects, and task variables. Texts become most meaningful when we think deeply about them and share our thinking with others through talking, writing, drawing, and creating. In the real world of readers, we don’t agonize over a challenging text just so that we can summarize it to a friend. We don’t write a five-paragraph essay about a book we cherish. Real readers use text to grow a theory, make an argument, design an innovation, bake a better pie, learn a skill, emulate a beloved author, laugh, find an inspirational quote, plan a trip, develop a metaphor for life, and so much more. Use task complexity and richness to teach your readers to do this joyous and relevant work with complex text sets just as they’ll need to in the real life of readers outside of school. Here are some tasks worth doing and reading for during independent reading or writing time:

• Reconstruct a full text from puzzle pieces (deconstructed words, sentences, or passages cut out of a full text on slips of paper that must be pieced back together to form what the reader believes to be the original text)
• Rewrite an alternate version (e.g., from the perspective of an article’s subject, from a supporting character’s viewpoint, a sequel, an alternate ending, a version for a different audience)
• Craft a movie trailer for a topic docu-drama using multiple sources
• Write a piece of microfiction summarizing the central ideas of a text set in 140 characters or less
• Sequence a series of visual images (e.g., photos) and craft a story to match
• As a group, write a six word summary of a textual analysis across a series of pieces
• Develop a visual essay combining characters from one story and a setting from another
• Craft an advertising campaign for a candidate describing his/her stance on a social justice topic using multiple sources of information and mentors for ad craft

 
Tip #8: Divide and Conquer with Baby Steps
 
This work isn’t easy. Don’t do it alone. Enlist colleagues to help you think through ways to build complex text sets. Divide text set construction roles among colleagues. For example, ask one colleague to gather informational texts on a topic while another gathers literary texts on the same topic. Ask colleagues to merge their existing text favorites on a topic with yours. Then make some careful choices together.
 
Start small. Begin by creating a text set with just three pieces. Choose just one unit this year to wrap within a juicy text set and leave the others as-is for this year. Borrow a text set you find online and adapt it to your unit this year. Next year, you can build your own. Use excerpts rather than whole texts. Choose a stanza here and a paragraph there to save you time and energy. You can reflect later and think about whether you want to expand some of these pieces in the set next time around.
 
Finally, remember, you can’t hurt the children by building them a text set. It’s okay if it’s rocky. It’s okay if the anchor text was too hard. It’s okay if you ran out of time for candy corn martini-hunting on Pinterest and you had to bring a six-pack and store-bought brownies to the staff Halloween party. Use the student outcomes as formative data to drive future planning. Adjust the set as you go, adding differentiated material, small-group support, and individual intervention. Common core shifts represent new learning for all of us, and that is something to celebrate.