A few posts ago, I wrote that teachers should begin assessing reading more directly, perhaps by looking at students’ annotations.

My assumption was that very few teachers are using annotations for formative assessment of reading.

I think I’m still mostly right, but I did find a rubric online from Achievement First, a network of charter schools founded in New Haven. Take a look.

My first impressions: It’s great that they’ve done this work, and it’s nice to know that I’m not the only crazy person out there who thinks that it’s possible to use annotations as a way to figure out how students are reading.

But I’m not sure how teachers use this rubric to assess annotations. It seems pretty general. I’d love to know more about what Achievement First is doing. I’ll contact them tomorrow and keep you updated.

Update: I received an excellent email this morning from Kurtis Indorf, Achievement First’s senior director of program strategy and design. Mr. Indorf emphasized that the general nature of the rubric was intentional. Rather than focusing on whether a student knows how to annotate, the rubric aims to assess how well the student interacts with and understands a text.

I agree with Mr. Indorf, and I appreciate that Achievement First is doing this work. We must unmask reading and make it more public. Teachers must be able to see their students’ reading as a product that they can assess. Only by making reading less hidden can we teach students how to read better. 

 A friend called me a few days ago for help on an upcoming interview. He’s applying to become a social studies teacher, and he wanted tips about how to answer the question, “How would you use technology in your classroom?”

I know the “right” answer, the one the interviewers want to hear. You’re supposed to link technology with large-scale, authentic projects. You’re supposed to talk about video and audio and new, obscure Web 2.0 tools. In this answer, the role of technology is to shock and awe.

That’s fine. I like snazzy tech tools, too. But that’s not the real right answer. Today I came across a tweet by Franki Sibberson, a literacy advocate and blogger at “A Year of Reading.” This is what she thinks about the role of technology:

Technology in the classroom must move away from projects at the end and become tools for deeper reading. @frankisibberson #allwrite12

In other words, rather than saving technology for flashy, end-of-unit projects, teachers should use technology day-in, day-out to advance the core components of learning, like reading.

I totally agree. In my class this year, my students and I used technology, and sure, we had fun projects, like “Tech Danger,” a music video exploring the role of technology in Frankenstein.

But the true power of technology in my classroom was less sexy. Here are three examples:

1. Google Docs. Many teachers see Google Docs as old-hat. Been there and done that. But Google Docs was crucial for my students’ writing. They drafted their essays, received feedback from me, a peer, and an online writing mentor, and reflected each week on their writing growth. Less time was wasted printing, waiting for feedback, and making improvements. Writing gets better with extensive practice, and Google Docs is the reason my students were able to complete 16 essays this year.

2. Mass texting. More and more teachers are using texting to communicate with their students and to build relationships. I used texting this year to extend the learning day. After all, five hours a week of class time is not enough to meet ambitious learning outcomes. Time after school and at home are imperative to accelerate learning. To encourage studying after hours, I used SmashText to send texts to all my students. Texting was a popular and effective intervention for my students, who appreciated the reminders and words of encouragement.

3. Class Blog. Teachers have had websites for years, usually to share information, but few have opened them up to their students as shared learning spaces. (My favorite is “Word Choices.”) Last year, I decided to let my students post to iseroma.com however and whenever they wanted, not just for assignments and projects. This decision built classroom community and gave students an authentic space for their work. It made my students’ work and thinking more real and more public.

I’m pretty happy with how technology in my classroom materialized this year. For technology to be useful, it must take hold; in other words, students must return to the same tools over and over again, rather than just one time.

Next year, I hope to expand my use of technology, this time to improve reading. I’m looking at using ipadio or Evernote to record think-alouds and text-based discussions. Capturing students’ annotations will also be important. If they’re on paper, I can just snap a picture. But I’m also thinking of using Google Docs or Diigo (my favorite, though clunky) or another annotation tool (they aren’t that good, actually) to promote a sense of shared reading and thinking.

Please let me know what you think. How do you use technology in the classroom? 

 The best assessments are ones that are authentic and directly tied to the skill being assessed.

For example, if you’re a pianist, the best assessment is a piano recital. If you’re a football player, the best assessment is a football game. And so on.

In schools, teachers often do a great job linking skills with assessments. Writing is a good example. We want students to improve as writers, so we have them write. To assess speaking, we assign speeches.

With reading, however, teachers don’t know what to do. We give pop quizzes, which often test recall. We assign reading questions, which involve writing (and guessing what we find important). Or we have students do Socratic seminars, which assess discussion skills. In short, teachers haven’t found a direct way to assess how students make meaning of what they read and what they understand from a text.

That’s why I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to assess reading. Doing so is not easy. After all, reading is private and usually done silently. Reading is thinking. And there’s a lot of fake reading, a lot of hiding. By the time they enter high school, many students (and some teachers) have a fixed mindset about reading. You either have it or you don’t.

Reading needs to get out there, to become public. Over the next few months, I hope to figure out ways to assess reading directly. I want to find ways that students can show me how they made meaning of a text and what they understood from it.

Here are my two initial ideas:

1. Teach students a consistent way to annotate texts and then assess their reading from their annotations. There would be two layers of annotations: process and meaning. In the process layer, students would demonstrate how they made sense of a text. In the meaning layer, they would show what they understood, the connections they made, the significance of the reading.

The good news is, My colleagues and I already have done some work on annotations. The next step is to streamline the system and come up with a consistent way to teach it (almost like the five-paragraph essay).

2. Teach students how to talk about texts and do recorded think-alouds. Instead of asking students to participate in a Socratic seminar, which comes later in the reading process, teachers could capture students’ initial thoughts, either while they read (process) or right afterward (meaning). It’s pretty easy now to record audio using a smartphone. Using ipadio or Evernote or another application, students could collect their thinking about their reading without having to stop to write down annotations. These short clips could offer teachers another way to assess how their students are reading.

* * *

I know, I’m early in my thinking about this. There’s much to do. But I think something is certain: We need to make reading more public, to unveil what’s happening with our students (or what’s not happening) when they read, and to assess reading more directly, instead of throwing upon additional layers of reading questions or pop quizzes or double-entry journals or other extraneous assessments that drive students away from the reading task.

Please tell me what you think. 

 Many teachers think that annotations offer an excellent way to peer into the minds of students as they read. I think so, too.

But right now, there’s a huge problem: Teachers don’t know what they’re looking for. There’s no agreement about how to assess annotations.

You don’t see this with writing. In a five-paragraph essay, all teachers are looking for five paragraphs. They’re also looking for a thesis, no matter if they call it a thesis, controlling purpose, overall claim, or main idea.

There’s just much more agreement with writing. It’s more public. We need to do the same thing with reading.

Many teachers like annotations, but few are ready to require students to annotate in a specific way. Annotating is considered “personal” to the reader; we shouldn’t tell students how to interact with the text.

I agree with this argument once students become advanced readers. In the same way that strong writers can break conventions once they learn the essay form, strong readers can annotate how they like once they demonstrate understanding of the basic requirements.

For most students, though, annotating is new and foreign, and there’s nothing wrong with teaching them one right way to do it. Several years ago, a few colleagues and I developed a system of annotating that we used in our ninth grade Humanities classes. This summer, I’m hoping to improve that system and to unveil it this August. I’ll keep you posted. 

 It’s typical for young people to love writing and hate reading. Writing is expression; writing is communication; writing is art. On the other hand, reading is boring; reading is private; reading is lonely.

This year, my students wrote 16 essays and read 12 books. They all said they became better writers. Only a few said the same thing about reading.

How is this possible?

It’s because writing is more public than reading. It’s more out there. You write something, and it’s on the computer screen or on a piece of paper. Even if you don’t want help on your writing, it’s in the world, all your thoughts and grammar mistakes right there, ready for a teacher or a peer or a writing mentor to critique, ready to talk about in a writing conference.

Because writing is more public, students feel they can improve their writing skills more quickly than their reading skills. Writing is a craft, while reading is just something you’ve done forever. It’s easier for students to have a growth mindset with writing than with reading.

That notion has to change. If we’re going to push our students to read challenging texts, we need to convince them that reading is a complex intellectual skill that involves much more than decoding and comprehension.

To do that, we need to make reading more public, more out there. We must challenge students to talk about their reading, both to us and to each other. We can’t be afraid to ask students to read aloud and process how they’re making meaning of a text. We have to build classrooms that celebrate reading “mistakes” as examples of growth.

Most of all, reading needs a product in schools that is equal to writing’s essay. Right now, there is no equivalent artifact. Sure, teachers have their reading questions and their Socratics and their book reports and other fancy projects. But very little exists that documents a student’s reading process and understanding of a text. Annotations come closest to achieving this purpose, but few teachers have taken them seriously (yet).

This summer, I plan on thinking about what can be done to make reading more like writing for my students. I want them to feel like they can track their growth as readers and to show evidence of their reading journey.

Please let me know if you have ideas.