Check It Out

I am in Denver, CO attending the PEBC’s conference (Public Education Business Consortium, been around for 25 years).  The conference provides people from all the parts of education to look closely at thinking strategies that promote comprehension and a deeper level of understanding. This work is based on the work of Ellin Keene (Mosaic of Thought, To Understand), Debbie Miller (Reading for Meaning), Stephanie Harvey ( Nonfiction Matters, Strategies that Work)  among others.

The conference has been a blend of participation, reading, writing, and observation.  A first task was to choose a thinking strategy to study:
schema
asking questions
determining importance
monitoring
inferring
synthesizing: “You know this info, so what?”
creating mental/sensory images

I selected “synthesizing” because I know it is something I do it but how to convey it to students?  How do you get them to synthesize?  Is synthesizing a strategy unto itself? In addition to working in a group of like people interested in this strategy, we read a variety of articles through the lens of our chosen strategy.  Challenging!  Need I say that our conversations around synthesizing have been rich?  The first day I found myself accidentally volunteering to to the think aloud our an Eudora “Welty text (with turned out a missing piece).  Talking out loud about my thinking about synthesizing the text was uncomfortable but I realized that I need to do this more in my classes.

We were also invited to choose a text to read from a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books.  Our task was to record our thinking process while reading the book.  I am reading Ultimate Excursionby Allan Gottleib which is a very dark story.  I used to record my thoughts while reading but have moved away from it.   The first night I kind of got mad that my reading had slowed down and I just wanted to finish the book (And I had to decide book down and sleep or stay up all night.  I slept).

We have visited a school for the past two mornings observing the workshop model in process. Our third grade class is in the midst of understanding the “test taking” genre which I found a valuable idea to bring back to school and to work with my third graders on.

I am still thinking about these kids building schema about the upcoming tests.  Their conversations centered around the thinking strategies vocabulary.  To watch the whole workshop process in this room was to watch a master painter.  How she talk the vocabulary as well, set them up to to do the task, pulled them in when some redirecting was needed was seamless.  My mind was racing with questions:

How can I implement this next week?
Where do I start?
What are the books we need in the professional library and can we have study groups?
How do you approach staff that may not be comfortable in making changes?
What would our school look like if we all began using the same thinking strategies vocabulary?
How does this all fit into the structure of teaching in the library?

I feel so fortunate that there are four others from my staff here.  Seven staff members attended last year so our capacity for this model is increasing.  Those traveling with me are as excited and chomping at the bit to talk about how to proceed.

Hmm, so have I just written a post which synthesizes my experience?  My brain is a bit muddled from all this thinking.

Happy reading.

MsMac