Middle Level Texts

A guest post by James Moore, the instructional coach at Hunt Middle School. 

Discussing War and Conflict

Consider this resource from Learning for Justice on discussing war and conflict in the classroom.  There are several links which may help as you plan lessons around current events or as you facilitate conversations that come up in the classroom naturally.  There are several resources, including a pocket guide to speaking up again bias and harm.

Using IXL for Diagnosing Learning & Targeted Practice

It’s progress monitoring season. The state requires it: three times a year, we have to collect data on how our students are doing in math and literacy. But progress monitoring also makes sense. The fall progress monitoring data is our starting place; it's a snapshot of how all our students in each grade are doing. And while this data - whether it’s a Lexile score or a “pinpoint” number that IXL generates - is neither perfect nor showing us the whole story, it does provide a gateway to asking more questions about what is working and not working for our students. 

This year, we’re using IXL for progress monitoring in math. Last spring and summer, a group of teachers, instructional coaches, tech interventionists, and district leaders met with people from IXL to develop a plan for how to most effectively use IXL for progress monitoring as well as recommendations for its use as part of teaching and intervention. The group decided to use a function called "Snapshot" as our progress monitoring tool. As its name implies, Snapshot gives us information on a student's overall math level at one moment in time. This is a broad strokes assessment, and therefore, helpful for progress monitoring.

IXL also provides tools that can be helpful to teachers in identifying specific areas that students need more support and targeted practice.  The Real Time Diagnostic (RTD) is a second IXL assessment tool, which we'll explore a bit more here.

The RTD as a Diagnostic Tool

Earlier this week, I talked with Jim Monahan of Edmunds Middle about his experience using IXL. He had his students spend up to 45 minutes initially answering questions in the RTD, so that IXL can get a clear picture of what their strengths and math gaps are. Thereafter, he has students students spend 10 minutes a week answering questions in the RTD, and 10-15 minutes working on one of the areas of targeted practice that IXL provides based on the student’s demonstrated gaps. Note that the program recommends a goal of 15 questions per week; our recommendation is based on time not number of questions. The time students spend in the RTD keeps the program's profile of the student current; having students return to the “diagnostic arena" weekly ensures that the practice sessions better reflect current student skill. Providing specific time for the student to practice one skill area helps keep the intervention practice manageable for students.  Jim also found that the Snapshot (our progress monitoring tool) took very little time for students who had consistently been “entering the diagnostic arena” - the IXL term for using the RTD -- once a week. 

Here it's important to underscore that no computer program is a substitute for high-quality, culturally responsive grade-level instruction that is differentiated with multiple access points for learners who are known well by their teacher. And we don't want students to continue to practice math that they don't understand, no matter how "targeted" that practice is. The data that IXL provides must be monitored and analyzed by the student's teacher. Which students could benefit from a 1:1 or small group re-teaching? Which students continue to practice the same skill without seeing any improvement? That's a flag for a teacher intervention.

All this is to say that IXL can be a useful supplement to daily instruction, practice and feedback in the classroom. In a future post, I’ll highlight some of the ways that IXL can be used as formative assessment in order to tailor classroom-based interventions for grade-level math.

Do's and Don'ts of using Newsela to Accelerate Literacy Skills

I had a serious oh nooooo moment last week at a training. I've been doing it all wrong. Consistently, intentionally, and over more than a decade: wrong. We have all been there - the moment when you realize that the thing you have been doing for students is not actually best practice. So, as teachers and lifelong learners, what do we do? We take a moment to throw our hands in the air and scream "Why didn't I know?", we take a deep breath, and then we figure out how to make it better for the students in front of us right now.

It was a two-day conference on adolescent literacy intervention. I was there with Brent Truchon and James Moore, the middle school instructional coaches, and Cera Putney-Crane, the literacy interventionist at HMS. This was my second time attending a conference led by Dr. Sarah Lupo, who specializes in adolescent literacy. James, Brent, Cera and I had many takeaways from this experience, including some specific things that we can stop doing and start doing instead.

Just before attending the conference, many middle school teachers celebrated at the news that we have secured the funding to renew our Newsela subscription. Teachers, myself included, love Newsela for the easy, searchable access to articles about diverse current, scientific and historical topics. The online program allows us to change the Lexile level of the text with the click of a button to meet different readers where they are. So when Dr. Lupo started talking about Newsela, our ears perked up. She had some very specific recommendations for how to use Newsela effectively as a differentiation tool for readers at diverse levels, as well as some specific ways that are not effective.

First, a couple of the highlights of what I learned from Dr. Lupo about research on adolescent literacy intervention: 

• Supports, differentiation, reading strategies and reading instruction all need to be in service of meaning-making.  

• Adolescent readers of all skills levels need access to and experiences with complex, grade-level texts. 

• Teaching vocabulary is essential, and also needs to be in service of meaning. Focus on building the vocabulary that students need to understand rich texts you have chosen, and provide regular
  opportunities for students to say, use, and write the words. 

As a middle and high school teacher, my routines for using Newsela went something like this: choose a topic or a concept that I want students to read and learn about, find 3-4 related articles, and choose different Lexile scores for each one. Group 1 gets an article with Lexile of 700, Group 2 reads an article at 1100, and Group 3’s article is at 850. My goal was for students to learn about the content with reading that was “just right” for them. 

Sound familiar?

It turns out this approach does not help students learn to read and it does not even help them learn the content better. According to Dr. Lupo, in Tier 1 secondary instruction,  we need to chuck the idea of “just right reading”. Students need access to and practice reading grade level text as often as possible in Science, Social Studies, Health, and Language Arts classes.  And they need supports for that: vocabulary supports, meaning-making supports, reading guides that help them activate prior knowledge and make connections, partner reading and turn-and-talk with good prompts. 

Ohhhhhh. My approach with Newsela was meeting students where they are, but it wasn’t doing anything to move them forward. 

So here are some do’s and don’t of using Newsela to accelerate the reading of our students who most need it. 

Do 

• Use Newsela to find and select readings on high-interest topics that relate to the content you’re teaching. 
• Keep the Lexile level at grade level or higher whenever possible. 
• Look carefully at the rich, complex text you have chosen and identify what will be challenging for readers. Then plan for how you will actively support students for those challenges. 
• Give everyone access to the same text.
• Choose 1-2 short, supplemental readings  with a lower Lexile (easier reading level) in order to build background knowledge or understanding in service of being able to access the complex, grade-level or higher text. You might also choose a short video or two for this purpose: to increase students capacity to access the hard text. 
• Provide lots of ‘touches’ with the text, with opportunities for students to interact, build meaning, learn, practice and use the complex vocabulary associated with the content.

Don’t 

• Don't each articles in isolation, unconnected to bigger, deeper learning that is part of an existing theme or unit of study. 
• Don’t choose a Lexile so low that the article no longer resembles “real” text. For example, if you choose the lowest possible Lexile that the program provides, you’ll notice that the text is so stripped down it barely resembles the original. 
• Don't give different students different texts, or texts with different Lexiles.

In the next few weeks, we'll share more of our learning from this conference, particularly about the implications for core instruction.