Secondary Application - The Joyful Reading Approach

Even though students may begin with strong early literacy skills - these skills do not automatically develop into complex skills that enable students to read proficiently specialized and sophisticated reading of literacy, science, history, and mathematics because students at the secondary level are still learning to read! Learn practical - fun, engaging, and joyful strategies and activities to incorporate at the secondary level! Check out more at www.ginapepin.com

 (perle et al 2005; shanahan 2008 p. 43).

Free PDF 10 Easy Ways to Use the Joyful Reading Approach at the Secondary Level: 
https://www.ginapepin.com/blank-3

Transcript

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Hello everyone, welcome to Let's Talk Teacher to Teacher Podcast. My name is Dr. Gita Peppen, and I am so happy to meet you. I'm a Midwestern mom of three and a super enthusiastic reading professor and a busy reading specialist at a wonderful elementary school. I was the 2018 19 Upper Michigan Teacher of the Year, and I really enjoy mentoring teachers of all ages. I have a great passion for early literacy and I'm co-author, along with the extremely talented children's author Eric Litwin, of The Power of Joyful Reading. Help your young readers soar to success. So each week I offer you practical make and takes, those easy tips along with real life shared stories so that you can easily create joyful shared reading experiences in your own classroom, daycare centers, and homes right away. I am here to help you make powerful changes. So let's do this together. This podcast focuses on the secondary application of the joyful reading approach. Eric and I have shared a lot of techniques and strategies throughout the past two years on how to do this in early elementary and early childcare settings. And I can't wait to share with you some of the secondary applications, easy ways that you can incorporate the joyful reading approach into secondary instruction and classrooms. So, first of all, let's talk a little bit about one thing that Shanahan and Peril share that strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into those complex skills that enable students to deal with all of those interdisciplinary, specialized, and sophisticated reading of literacy and science and history and even mathematics. We do know that even though they have that strong early reading foundation, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to be a very proficient reader from year to year. We know that students at the secondary level are always and they're still learning to read. If you are a reader, you're always learning new strategies and new techniques and all of those things that help you become a more proficient reader. I know that every year, as I continue to read more research and read all types of different meta-analysis of research, I continuously learn how to make those connections between practice and research. And the vocabulary and the depth of each of those things is often very complex. And again, students at the secondary level are still learning to read. So it's really important for us to build that capacity to read through different disciplinary lenses. One thing that we know for sure is that there's such an importance of developing very deep learning. So this can happen through immersion of reading and writing, thinking, and even social emotional practices. Deep learning really helps our students develop that mastery of core academic content. It includes critical thinking, problem solving, inquiry, collaboration, and of course, a lot of application and practice. Activities should also provide opportunities for students to find the meaning within that specific discipline and make connections across other disciplines and also be able to demonstrate their understanding of this through a variety of activities. One instructional approach, of course, that aligns best with this is the joyful reading approach. And this is where teaching practices involve integrating literacy skills into everything. So you have to kind of take a step back from presenting content so that students can kind of discover it on their own. So, as teachers, what we want to do is model the language of this discipline. Of course, by offering a lot of read-alouts and demonstrating these expectations in front of your students and learning the goals, and thoroughly explain why experts in the field use these words or these terms in certain ways. So, an example of this would include like an integrated vocabulary study rather than those isolated vocabulary studies. The joyful reading approach would include apprenticing disciplinary readers and learners. It would be increasing that overall volume of reading. Where students could read anything. You don't worry about lexile levels, but you would provide great depth of resources for different projects and assignments. There would be a huge variety of different types of text. Now, this does include the course textbook, of course, but then it's going to include a whole bunch of other things that you don't normally see accompanying a lesson or a particular assignment. Let the students be able to dive deeply into all types of different resources and let them choose what best fits the scenario. So let's dive a little bit deeper into how we can strategically weave in the joyful reading approach at the secondary level. We know that academic identities drive content area literacy and learning. We learned that from Moore and Cunningham. And so we strive to help our students love books, love reading, and really truly see themselves as readers. So this too applies to readers of any age. In order to do this, teachers need expertise in confidently adjusting classroom instruction to accommodate students' identities and to beautifully link instruction to what students bring to the classroom. Let me explain this a little bit further. This can be done through getting to know you cards. In elementary, we call these the all about me posters, the fun diagrams where you get to highlight your favorite food and different things like that. Well, at the secondary level, you can do things like getting to know you cards. They can be bingo cards. Students travel around the room and they find one of the squares on the bingo card would say something like someone that has equal number brothers and sisters. And then they get to check off that box and see who gets to fill up the card first. These could also include what we call principal conversations. They're kind of like prompts, conversation prompts. If you even look on teachers pay teachers or all kinds of other resources, you'll find things called like chit-chat cards. And what it does is it just it gives students a prompt for turn and talk or different types of conversation starters. Of course, interest inventories are always a fabulous way to do a quick survey of your students so that they can share their what they prefer, their preferences and their interests, and what truly motivates them as a student. And you could even spend some time carved out in your schedule where you do those student interviews and you ask them questions and then you really get to see their facial expressions and they get to talk with you one-on-one, even if it's just five to ten minutes a student. And of course, weaving those into your schedule is a powerful way to connect and build those relationships as well. I once worked with a middle school teacher and also a second grade teacher that did this, and they used communication notebooks. It was simply a notebook that each student in the classroom had, and they kept them in the bin in the back. And then the teacher and the student could actually share written notes or different narratives about just some different thoughts that they were having pertaining to the lessons or what they're learning. They shared ideas, they could also voice some concerns, or if they had any inquiry or particular interests. It just was a truly brilliant way to support students in their learning and growth throughout the school year. And it allowed for that time when the teacher would take the notebooks home and then be able to respond different times throughout the day or after hours. Joyful learning experiences should also focus really strategically on academic vocabulary development. Because we know that this is true word knowledge of content words. Students need this through guided practice and a lot of time to explore different word learning strategies. As we know the importance of academic vocabulary and student achievement, and in as well as in the earlier grades, we talk about building oral language and literacy development, academic vocabulary aids students in comprehending the text. Students should have just these routine opportunities to practice using academic vocabulary in a variety of discussions and of course in those writing activities. What we really want to build with our students at the secondary level is a confident level of word consciousness. But you may be thinking right now, like, how in the world can we weave intentional strategies into our classroom as part of a daily routine, especially those classrooms where there's only 55 or 50 minutes. When we look at most of our upper elementary and middle school or junior high school and high school classrooms, they're often designed with an hourly schedule in mind. So thinking along these lines, here are a few easy-to-use strategies that you can incorporate as part of your daily routine. So these strategies are a little bit discipline specific, but they do not have to be. So thinking about instructional objectives for science and even language arts, you can magically turn any routine, a concept, vocabulary, literature, and activity into a joyful reading experience. Let me give you an example. So you're gonna ask your students when you come to a particular passage that you're reading, or even a novel, and you would say, How would a scientist read this passage? So let's begin by revisiting what we already know about the literary tools scientists use to break down information, especially new information. And of course, we'd go through with our students how this really what this really looks like. Scientists will often assume an objective stance. They look for databased outcomes, they determine the validity of sources and they question and reason and come to conclusions. And of course, then they will often chart, illustrate, graph, data, and in order to formulate those conclusions. So now if we look at this passage or this novel that we're reading, and we approach it like a scientist, students can be encouraged to use their notebook or learning logs to actually jot down these notes or these questions, etc. So you can tie these different concepts in. So if they're reading an informational text or a novel and you can apply multidisciplinary approaches or cross-curricular approaches so that students are able to make those connections, it really truly is going to be a powerful and joyful way for them to experience the narrative or informational text or that they are learning. Let me share with you another example. This example would include thinking and learning like a mathematician. So, how would a mathematician read this passage? Or how would a mathematician approach this story problem? You then tell your students, like, let's begin by revisiting what we already know about the literary tools mathematicians use to break down new information. So remember, it's different than what a scientist may use. So, how would a mathematician approach this? They would ask questions as they read. They would make notes of misconceptions and conclusions, and they would read carefully and closely. They would read for accuracy and clear mathematical reasoning, and they would look for what's missing. And similar to the scientist example, you would prompt your students to the next task by saying, Okay, let's approach this passage like a mathematician, and you can use your notebook or learning logs to jot down your notes, questions, or etc. A couple of key points to remember when helping students at this level read complex text. It's so important to make it relevant, practical, and always most importantly, interactive. So supporting those students that are not quite yet independent readers is also super important. Help them to understand and help them to routinely seek to find out what adjustments they, as readers, what they need to do to make an in order to make meaningful connections to the given text. Provide mentoring that supports disciplinary literacy learning. And you can do this, of course, through like explicit modeling, purposeful instruction, and guided practice. Include activities that incrementally position students so that they can become independent learners through that scaffolding process. And some of these common strategies include think alouds. I love these. And we do these in elementary and you can do these in secondary, and you can make them as interesting as you want to make them. And of course, the more interesting you can make them, the more your students will become engaged and most likely mirror that same practice. In think alouds, oral language provides a window into the strategies that a reader can use to make sense of the text. So you literally are reading something and you're thinking out loud. You're showing your students like what your thought process is. And of course, you can over-exaggerate these and model these think alouds. You can even have some silly wonderings and inquiry, or and even your own personal connections, and you can share a story or an analogy so it would help your students connect to that as well. So teaching these reading strategies while you're reading these complex texts is part of the joyful reading approach. It's so important because it's never includes isolated theories or tasks. It does not include skill or drills. It's truly immersing them in the process of becoming and seeing themselves as a reader. You make engaging, disciplinary, relevant texts available and you give them time to read them. You give them time to explore them. One of my favorite things in Upper Elementary that we did was just we gave ourselves time for book exploration. And it was even called that. It gave us, I gave the students time to just explore different types of texts. They could look at everything from recipe books to Ripley's Believe It or Not books to historical books, old year books, recipe books, anything with text in it. So again, here at the secondary level, you could add primary and secondary documents, not just the ones that your course textbook provides. Actually print them off, find them, help them find them and identify them. And of course, alternate texts. If you know that the particular topic, you know, if you're teaching history to 1865 or after 1865, or you can provide alternate texts that present that same chapter. Allow students look at the readability of the course text and give them the same chapter from different publishers and let the students choose. And then of course give them time to practice those skills that they're learning and that they have learned through your modeling. So let's jump back and talk more about how to promote literacy in the classroom. It's really important to start by creating opportunities for reading and writing activities at any level that students can and that they want to participate in. And do this by promoting rich and really meaningful experiences with language. An example of this would include like a pre-reading approach where you kind of present the big picture first and then everybody gets opportunities to discuss the details. It would also include direct teaching sets of words, like wordplay activities. Um, that includes scavenger hunts and word hunts, even organizing words. This is a fun way to take secondary vocabulary and you actually have the students organize these words to help them better understand the word parts as well as the word meanings and some of the etymology and all of the objectives that you want for a secondary level. And then you can even let the students create their own categories and category names. Another way to approach a set of specific words would be to create different analogies. Of course, this is a great way that's going to aid in learning related concepts. You know, those concepts that are related amongst the given set of words. This also again promotes word consciousness. Talked about that a little bit earlier, and word consciousness is that absolute awareness and interest in words as part of our language. So of course when we're of course when we're interested in something, we want to learn more about it. What we are looking for is that true demonstration of awareness through student observation. We want our students to be able to note the word's presence and, of course, different settings, different fonts, styles, different formats, different texts. We also want them to be able to analyze those distinctive spellings and different meanings of the words. And this is our ultimate goal. Another powerful approach that you can take for this at the secondary level includes is to model word wonder. That's just kind of fun to say. Word wonder. So really model what it looks like. What does it look like? What does it sound like, and even what does it truly feel like to have a fascination of words and have that true appreciation for words, both of which help students to predict word relationships and apply word meanings. One of the most significant and supported by research approaches to promoting literacy in the classroom is that of the inclusion of student voice and student choice. We know today our classrooms, and again at any age level, are filled with diverse needs. And the overarching goal is to identify and, of course, meet all of the needs of all the learners in our classrooms. So depending on the ages and abilities of the students in your classroom, you can support student choice through academic offers. Things like integrating a layered curriculum. Joyful reading approach includes a lot of immersion of language and literacy goals, right? And it's all of those encompassing vocabulary. And you can allow choice and voice through layered curriculum. So a layered curriculum allows for students to actually choose between different learning pathways. These pathways are tiered in effort and expectation. So there are things like choice boards where students can create a matrix or the teacher creates a matrix of possible activities or processes or even products, which is often used for assessments. Things like tic-tac-toe. So choose three out of these nine on this tic-tac-toe board to demonstrate your understanding of or activities that you can practice and build concurrent processes on. I've also seen teachers utilize simple choose between these two options. So students choose between A or they choose between B. You can even promote student choice through and voice by allowing students to share with you what sequence they're going to read a list of short stories in. So you want students to read a particular sequence of three to four stories over the course of the week, and you allow the students to actually read those different texts in, read those short stories, and answer the questions in whatever sequence makes the most sense to them. Remembering you can also support your striving readers through routine choices of printed or prompted rereading strategies, or you can help them through little booklets with task cards or steps or even examples, and of course, allowing them access to audiobooks and students following along by matching that audio with physical print. These are just a few of the ways to promote literacy in joyful ways in your classroom. I want to talk to you about read alouds. More important now than ever for students of all age levels to be able to hear a text being read aloud. There's a scholastic study that came out several years ago about it was a family report about the importance of read alouds, and it gave a lot of beautiful statistics. And we know in both the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as in educational research that there's profound impact of read alouds and shared reading experiences. But we the scholastic report talked about how children are often not read to after a certain age limit. And believe it or not, it's like six to eight year olds because that's when the children become a little bit more proficient readers themselves, and so they want to actually read. But folks, I just want to tell you how important it is that as I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, secondary students are still learning to read, and they need to hear how experts in the field communicate. They need to hear what proficient reading really sounds like. They need to hear this like an average of five to eight times a day. Students need to be able to become familiar with content knowledge and they need to be able to hear that true cadence and prosody, which is natural to a proficient reader. So reading aloud from any source relevant to the discipline is so important at this level. Of course, this can include journals, novels, blogs, newspapers, really, really engaging your students in active listening and adding in your own thoughts as think alouds as you read aloud. Have students even jot down questions or comments on their learning logs or their notebooks as you read aloud. Project visuals if applicable, and if this makes sense to the way that you're teaching a particular lesson or topic at the time. It's one of those don't turn it in assignments that it's just something that's part of the daily routine and it's not something that you collect. And of course, model it as something that you, something you truly enjoy to do. So they're going to see it and feel it and know what a profession proficient reader sounds and looks like. I really encourage you also to include shared reading experiences in your classroom. So extend those literacy experiences through these through a variety of shared reading practices. And it's where you are reading collaborating with your students. The students can see the text, they follow along. You tie together with a lesson related to comprehension strategy or text feature, reading behaviors such as stamina, and even rereading. And plan to choose a text that's aligned with the strategy you're teaching, even such as like inferencing. You want to tell your students the purpose and model and restate these strategies throughout the entire hour. Make sure students know and are aware of what they're supposed to do with this new knowledge. Like, for example, this is where you would utilize those think alouds. Then they could practice this with a partner. You want to link between the teacher-directed read alouds and then the student-directed independent reading. And of course, that practical application is going to be key. There are so many wonderful ways you can have students interact with you through whiteboards. Um, you can use these to display, you can use larger print, they could have their own individual copies. There could be in Google Classroom or other types of learning management systems. You could post auditory read alouds where students could also click on after hours. And there's a lot of opportunities that technology has provided today for students to do extended learning and listening. Interactive writing would include like entrance and exit tickets, where students are students write a quick response either on a whiteboard or even on a small piece of paper as they enter or exit the classroom. And these questions or inquiry often can be high-order thinking, or they can just be a quick social emotional check-in with your students. A joyful interactive writing opportunity could include writing prompts where you check for understanding. There's a really fun activity called the crystal ball prediction. And so you you have the students imagine that they actually have a crystal ball in front of them, and they're making a prediction based on a particular a particular song or a piece of artwork. They're making a prediction based on where they are just viewing the a book cover or they read insert from a particular text, or they've listened to a particular song, or they've viewed a piece of artwork, and they make a prediction of what's going to happen or what the book is going to be about or the text is going to be about. There's another activity called Yesterday's News. This is a fun and interactive writing activity where students provide a summary of information of things that actually happen, or they actually provide a summary of a particular text or story. Students can also participate in what-if scenarios and information is changed and they predict different types of outcomes. They can also practice writing activities where they take a stand and they discuss, students discuss their opinions. Um, and they can also take on those authentic letter writing where students write letters to others, such as elected officials or famous people in which they want to make a change. One of my favorite writing activities are kind of a modified version of quick writes, and which are sometimes referred to as like power writing. It's a timed fluency activity. And in our intervention practices that we use Fontus and Panel, I love the little activity where there's just a blank canvas. It says, okay, folks, for the next two minutes, I'm gonna have you write down all the words you know. So it just gives students in this blank writing book with no lines, blank pages where they just write down as many words as they can. So I think this is a really fun way to introduce content-specific objectives and have students write about what words they know or what words first pop into their mind for about 30 seconds to a minute, or they can write about content-specific theories and concepts, and they write down everything they know about a particular topic for about 30 seconds to a minute. It's a great way for students to just get practice that thought process of making connections to what their prior knowledge, as well as being able to put it down on paper. Online discussion boards is another fun way to allow students to interact with one another. And of course, you could practice this through the school's learning management system. You could put prompts in there where students can respond, they can share resources, you could even form different book clubs as well as literature circles. Another really fun writing activity would include music response journals and art response journals. I have these on my website. You could visit them at www.ginapeppen.com. It actually is a journal, so students take a moment, students write in their journals while they're listening to a certain selection of music. And so you play a section of music for a little bit, and then students actually create a story or they create a response. You could also tie in art response journals, and this is where students are shown a piece of artwork or such as a painting or anything of the like, and then they respond to it in their journals. And what did it make them think of? What connections do they make to it? What do they remember? What experiences have they had? How did it make them feel? I'd like to share with you a couple more ideas that have been really successful in the secondary classroom that perhaps you can put to use in your classroom as well. One of these is where you actually take a passage, whether it's from a technical text or informational text, or it's it's a it's a poem or from a novel, and you read and re-rewrite it so that the punctuation is changed. So in other words, it can even include fragments and different types of sentence structure, but you're adding punctu punctuation in different places that it wouldn't normally be. But then the students would have to read it in that particular way. So you could insert an ex an explanation mark in a place where you wouldn't think that it would normally be. This would work on prosody and and voice expression, and and again, it would really students would begin to see how punctuation really can and does change the meaning. And so punctuation changes is a really fun activity to do with your students. You can also go on a punctuation walkabout where you find different types of punctuation within the context of your school building or the community. We know that research does not support claims that separate teaching of grammar and that will help them become more effective in using language as listeners and speakers and writers and even as readers. So by being able to find punctuation and grammar within different contexts of the school, students will begin to get a better understanding of our language. Another really fun activity to do is to pass out a story and read a story backwards. We we call this going on an error hunt. And so you read it word by word, you read it backwards. So it's not necessarily decoding backwards, you're truly going to just take it word by word. So if I take the sentence read a story backwards during an error hunt, it would say hunt, error, and during backwards story a read. So it would be really fun. And then you could work on prosody and you could also add in punctuation as well. It's a fun way to get students practicing on fluency as well as helping them identify some of those keywords in that informational text. Supporting our English learners at the secondary level is really important as well. Let me share with you a couple of things that others have shared with me that work awesomely in classrooms to support English learners. A symbol board. So symbol board is kind of like a word wall in the elementary level. We use word walls all the time. So a symbol board would be kind of a class created, it would be user-friendly definition of things. And it's where you would then add pictures and or even opposites as you as you feel would be fit to make sense. You could also include morpheme charts. So so, say for example, you're a math teacher and you want your students to learn a lot of these vocabulary words. My morpheme chart for math would include like B I, which is two. And then the words that would go with BI would be bisect, binomial, bimodal, and then you could do another one for milli. Millimeter, milligram, and milli means thousand. Science, your morpheme chart for science could include micro, which would be small. So you have microscope, microorganism, and then another example would be hydro, which is water, hydrogen, hydroelectric, and more. You could also do this for acronyms and abbreviations, where you could even have your students cut them out and print them or design them in image to symbolize each. I want to share with you a couple more things that you could do in the secondary classroom that would help engage your students even more. Let's create some joyful experiences. Sound stories. Sound stories are a story or a poem with repeated words. And so every time you hear a word, you would do an action. Let's say, for example, Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, which of course is an elementary picture book. But again, it doesn't matter what you're reading to your students in the sense of when you're trying to help them just learn different elements. You would do things like every time you said Alexander, everybody could jump up in the air or they clap or they do something, they do some sort of action. So they could define this as well, or you could make task cards and you could draw a particular word and then draw a task card. So using those action verb words, every time you hear that word, you would perform that particular action. Another one would be would be what's called pair sound effects. So partners would have like a partner A and a partner B, and then they'd have to coordinate their actions, whatever their partner's sound is. So if they're reading something or they're explaining something, one person would be reading and one person would be acting it out. Say it your way sentences is a fun way to get students engaged as well. So you say the same sentence over and over with emphasis on different words or phrases. So you just keep changing where you're putting that accent. This is a fun way for students to practice perhaps a definition or a particular phrase or a poem that you are working on as a class. And of course, building oral language in your classroom and perhaps even weaving in vocabulary concepts and terms would be where you create a story circle. So you begin with one student and they start the story with once upon a time, and then you pass some sort of rock or baton, and then everybody adds a few, a phrase or a few words to the story until you have a great big made-up glass story. To make it even more discipline-specific, you could do things like math commercials or science commercials or social studies commercials, and it's where students actually prepare ads to sell math concepts and skills to others, such as fractions and time and division or science and these commercials where they're actually trying to sell science concepts and skills. Another activity is connecting a song to a children's book. Studying literary elements of text, a wide variety of texts that also includes children's picture books is a really good way for your students to be able to make those connections between literary elements in complex texts and children's texts. And having students choose a picture book and then they work together to align with a particular song with the author's purpose is a beautiful way to connect all of these objectives together. When you're working with your students on read alouds, you could even add in some fun things such as the voice jar. I've talked about this before. So if you want to read a paragraph together as a class, you're working on partner reading or you're working on choral reading, you can draw a voice from the voice jar and you can read it in an underwater voice, you can read it in an opera voice, or you can add in some music components where let's say you want to read it in Allegro, which so then you're gonna set a digital metronome at 120 to 168 beats, or maybe you want to read it on Dante, which is 76 to 108 beats. So building on tempo and dynamics, you can turn your read alouds of your texts, whether they're informational or narrative, or poems, or even trade books and novels, to make them even more exciting and fun. So these are just a few of the many, many ways to incorporate joyful reading experiences into secondary learning environments. So look for more topics and easy make and takes and strategies and tips each week. Thanks again for joining me here today. I am here to help you make powerful changes. I look forward to working with you again next week.