Online Social Studies Resources

In this Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy article, Joshua Kenna and Anthony Pellegrino (University of Tennessee/Knoxville) recommend two websites for social studies teachers:

• National Jukebox: http://www.loc.gov/jukebox This digital audio archive has more than 10,000 recordings of speeches and music from 1901 to 1925.

• Clio: https://www.theclio.com/web/ This is a free public history website and mobile app that serves as an active collaborative research, interpretation, and map-building project linking professional and local historians, museum professionals, scholars, and university students.

“Digital Resources for Social Studies” by Joshua Kenna and Anthony Pellegrino in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, May/June 2018 (Vol. 61, #6, p. 705-708); the authors can be reached at jkenna@utk.edu and apelleg2@utk.edu.

(Please Note: The item above was spotted in issue #736 of The Marshall Memo, and reprinted here with permission.  The Marshall Memo is a GREAT resource for educators.)

Reading Recovery’s Lessons for Regular Classrooms

            In this article in The Reading Teacher, Kayla Lewis (Missouri State University) says she was not thrilled when her district made her to go through Reading Recovery training as she transitioned to being a literacy coach. She had ten years of classroom experience, a master’s degree in reading, and had taught literacy at the university level. What could Reading Recovery add? Lewis was familiar with Marie Clay’s pioneering work in New Zealand, Reading Recovery’s track record with struggling readers, and its spreading implementation in the U.S. beginning in the 1980s. But the training just didn’t seem relevant to the work she was about to do coaching K-5 teachers.

“I am not ashamed to admit that I was wrong,” says Lewis. “Reading Recovery training and the teachings of Clay had a profound effect on my teaching and forever changed the way I view students who struggle.” Lewis believes that Reading Recovery, while it focuses on individual instruction for at-risk first graders, contains a number of instructional insights that can be helpful to all elementary teachers:

            • Observing well – “It is essential for us to put aside our own agendas and really notice what students are able to do,” says Lewis. One of the most helpful tools is video – teachers watching themselves after a lesson and thinking through all the teaching moves they made and their students’ responses.

            • Focusing on what students can do – “Struggling students would come to me needing assistance, and all I saw were the holes and the tangles,” says Lewis. She learned how to zero in on the competencies and knowledge students brought to the table – “roaming around in the known” is a Reading Recovery routine in early lessons. When students are overwhelmed by all the standards they have to master, frustrated, and feeling like failures, finding areas of competence is the key to building confidence and ultimately skillful reading and writing.

            • Working in the zone of proximal development – Vygotsky famously defined the optimal learning zone as what students can do with assistance – what they can almost do. It’s impractical for teachers to apply this principle to a whole class, says Lewis, but in small groups, teachers can use assessments and observation to tune in on each child’s Goldilocks level of difficulty and scaffold their progress with just the right amount of support, not wasting time on things they can already do and not frustrating them with tasks that are too difficult. Of course children’s zones move up as they become more proficient, prompting the teacher to make constant adjustments.

            • Knowing the difference between scaffolding and rescuing – During her Reading Recovery training, Lewis asked for her coach’s help with a particularly challenging student. The coach watched a lesson video and said, “You’re hovering.” A little defensive, Lewis said she was helping the student. “No,” said the coach. “You are making him dependent on you. Every time he struggles, you jump in and help him.” Again, Lewis pushed back, saying she was doing her job, teaching the student. The coach corrected her: what she was doing was rescuing the boy, teaching him to wait for her support every time he got stuck, instead of having him struggle a little and learn something new. Lewis says this was a pivotal moment in her development as a teacher. Going forward, she always kept Clay’s principle in mind: “The teacher never does anything for the child that he could do himself.” Lewis suggests three questions for classroom teachers: Do your prompts promote independence or dependence? Are you scaffolding or rescuing? and Who’s doing the work here?

            • Taking responsibility when a student isn’t progressing – “As a classroom teacher, I used to say, ‘All students can learn,’ but I am not sure that I truly believed it,” says Lewis. “I cannot tell you how many students I unnecessarily referred to our special education testing team. Most of the students I referred did not qualify. Why? Because they did not need special education; they needed me to do a better job of teaching them.” Most struggling readers have a difference, she says, not a disability. Another Clay mantra: “If the child is a struggling reader or writer, the conclusion must be that we have not yet discovered the way to help him learn.” Through observations and assessment, the teacher needs to figure out what’s going on, reflect on which teaching moves aren’t working, and make the appropriate adjustment.

            • Less teacher talk – “As a teacher, I talk a lot,” says Lewis. “We all talk a lot. It is part of our job.” But during Reading Recovery training, she realized that what she was saying was often getting in students’ way. “Once I realized the power of my words,” she says, “I did less talking and made the talking that I did do more precise. I learned to listen and observe, and in those quiet moments, I was able to see what my students could do without my support and constant interrupting. I will not say it was easy. I often had a hard time biting my tongue, but as I became quieter and more deliberate in what I chose to say, my students became more untangled.”

            • Seeing that no two readers are the same – Lewis has learned that one-size-fits-all book introductions and all-purpose lesson plans don’t connect with many students. She suggests that classroom teachers systematically cycle through their students observing two or three a day, taking running records, and learning the type of prompting and support each one needs. “Over time,” she says, “you will have gathered information on each student in your class, and another cycle of observation can begin. The time and effort will pay off when your students have one of those light-bulb moments that we teachers live for.”

            • The importance of teacher teamwork – After she completed Reading Recovery training, Lewis served as a literacy coach in her school, working closely with a colleague who taught Reading Recovery, building bridges among Reading Recovery, regular education, Title I, and special education teachers. This meant that students heard “the same language, the same prompting, and the same type of instruction in all places,” says Lewis. “Hearing one voice allowed many of our students to make more accelerated progress than any one of us could have achieved alone.”

            • Being a lifelong learner – “I have learned that there are so many people who know so much more about reading than I ever will,” concludes Lewis, “and in that, I have learned to listen.” She urges all teachers to take this stance. “Soak in the knowledge of those around you. Read often. Keep  up with the latest research. Reflect on your own teaching practices. Ensure that your knowledge never remains stagnant and that you continue to grow in your learning.”

“Lessons Learned: Applying Principles of Reading Recovery in the Classroom” by Kayla Lewis in The Reading Teacher, May/June 2018 (Vol. 71, #6, p. 727-734),

https://bit.ly/2I0LZNe; Lewis can be reached at kaylalewis@missouristate.edu.

Please Note: The summary above is reprinted here, with permission, from issue # 735 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Life Lessons

            In this article in Psychology Today, science writer Jena Pincott lists correctives for some common cognitive biases (inborn and acquired):

            • Understand that not everything that happens to you is about you. “At the very least, the egocentric bias causes us to misread others,” says Pincott. “It undermines empathy and tolerance. It also traps us in a bubble; we waste vast amounts of psychic energy recovering from insults that were never targeted at us in the first place. To live a life that is less reactive, more directed, it is necessary to put the ego in its place.”

            • Worry less about what others think of you. It turns out that people are much less aware of our competence, awkwardness, verbal flubs, facial expressions, even what we wear, than we imagine. “When we care less about our curated self-image, we open the door to interacting more genuinely,” says Pincott. “We can let down our guard. Others may respond in kind, focusing less on their own self-image and opening up.”

            • Realize that you don’t have to act the way you feel. Pincott advises “self-distancing” to keep disappointments and negative emotions from spilling into everyday interactions. This involves processing our feelings from an outsider’s point of view, addressing ourselves in the third person to normalize and make meaning of disturbing experiences. This makes it possible to preserve our dignity, privacy, and self-respect when we’re not at our best.

            • Reframe and manage disappointment and adversity. “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet. Social psychologists have confirmed Shakespeare’s wisdom, showing that although there are differences in people’s innate ability to handle stressful events, mental fortitude can be acquired. This means learning how not to jump to conclusions, overgeneralize, catastrophize, personalize, and engage in black-or-white thinking. “Resilient people do not define themselves by their adversity,” says Pincott. “They understand that bad times are temporary affairs.”

            • Solicit honest feedback. It’s possible to be internally self-aware (in touch with our own values and passions) and not externally self-aware (knowing how others see us). “External self-awareness allows us to be more in sync with others,” says Pincott. “It makes us more effective leaders because we have more empathy, which comes from understanding other people’s perspectives.” She advises identifying several “critical friends” and periodically asking them questions like, What am I doing that I should keep doing? What should I stop doing? What about me annoys you?

            • Stay true to your own values despite what others expect. There’s sometimes a tug-of-war between what we want and what others expect – parents, teachers, love partners. “People high in both internal and external self-awareness can navigate competing expectations,” says organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich. They value authenticity and integrity, knowing what they want to do and illuminating it with other perspectives.

            • Be open to revising your thinking. “The world doesn’t stand still,” says Pincott. “Situations change. Available information changes. However much we get emotionally attached to our own decisions, however much our opinions and perspectives may have once served us, there comes a point at which constancy can curdle into rigidity.” Studies show that we’re most open to change when we’re feeling good about ourselves, most resistant to change when we feel threatened and uncertain. Hanging out with a four-year-old is a good way to see what cognitive flexibility looks like.

            • Find ways to tackle tasks you want to avoid. Pincott suggests several approaches: write down how the drudgery will end with a success; gamify the activity, introducing an element of competition; use second-person self-talk (You can crush this, Ted!); bite off a small piece to get started (Just 20 minutes on this and I’ll do something else); and get into a routine (for example, rising at six to exercise).

            • Zone in on your purpose in a zoned-out world. “The two most important days in life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why,” said Mark Twain. But a sense of big-picture purpose depends on focus and self-regulation, and that’s undermined by the current obsession with checking social media every few minutes, driven by the fear of missing out on something. “You may want big ideas,” says author Larry Rosen, “but if your attention is jerked away constantly, they won’t come. There’s no time to process anything on a deeper level.” There isn’t even time for the overstimulated brain to daydream. Rosen strongly recommends 30-minute tech breaks. Turning away from the small screen, he says, can reorient us to the big picture.

            • Tolerate ambiguity. Uncertainty is a “sure-fire fuel of anxiety,” says Pincott, but it’s part of modern life, and dealing with it has many rewards. “We’re more able to shift gears, experiment, be more flexible, take in new information that we’d otherwise reject, and let a situation develop before pulling the proverbial trigger,” she says. “We’re better able to handle risk and to make decisions without deluding ourselves into thinking we know everything there is to know. In the end, we’re less anxious.” Studies have shown that one way to make yourself more flexible in uncertain situations is to read fiction. “When nothing is sure,” says novelist Margaret Drabble, “everything is possible.”

“Lessons You Won’t Learn in School” by Jena Pincott in Psychology Today, May/June 2018
Please Note: This summary is reprinted here with permission.  It appeared in issue #734 of The Marshall Memo a fabulous resource for educators.