In the spring of 2012, a group of English Language Arts educators from Franklin, Massachusetts launched a highly successful middle school reading program around THE HUNGER GAMES. In this five-part special series, the teachers who orchestrated the whole-school read will detail, step-by-step, this year’s initiative. Parts I and 2 focused on how the team made this year’s book selection, THE HOBBIT, and encouraged student participation. Part 3 looked at some unexpected pitfalls the group faced based on book selection. Now, in Part 4, Mary Cotillo, Erin O’Leary, and Kathleen McNeice talk about how they decided which readers were granted passage to see the film adaptation—and why some participants will not be going.

Bilbo Baggins was swept into a grand adventure without having to prove his burglary skills to the dwarves who employed his services. So, a savvy, finagling middle schooler may inquire, why do I have to prove anything to you? Why should a voluntary activity have a qualifying quiz?

For the straight-A, join-everything, honesty-is-a-virtue kids, you are right. They don’t need it. But let’s think about the hobbits. As much as we love books and reading and fully expect others to match our enthusiasm, we are also teachers of early adolescents. And realists. And we know that if kids catch wind of an opportunity to leave school to watch a movie, they’re going to be lining up. To maintain legitimacy it becomes necessary for students to demonstrate that they earned the reward. After all, this isn’t a school-wide film viewing initiative. It’s a school-wide literacy initiative.

And here’s another thing we learned this year. When choosing a book that leans a tad toward the more challenging end of the spectrum, having a qualifying quiz gives students an opportunity to feel pride and success. They get to feel good when they know the answers, bask in the congratulations of the teachers handing them their permission slip, and maybe even indulge in a heel click or two on their way back to class.

Call it reaping, call it riddling, call it whatever fits your book best—but make sure you do it. We were clear from the outset (okay, MOST of us were clear from the outset. See Part 3, Goblin Caves and Spider Webs) that this is a celebration of the book. And when you have book nerds running this thing, you’ll want to be sure that everyone is there because they, too, read and loved the book.

We brainstormed a list of seventy or so questions and vetted them in our classroom after school. If all four of us couldn’t agree on the answer, or recall it quickly enough, it was out. We also made sure the questions were from different parts of the book (I already admitted the book nerd thing). The more questions you can create, the better. Choose three questions per sheet, require the kids to answer 2 out of 3 correctly, and there you go.

When will you conduct your winnowing? Our prior experience was to go to the students in the classrooms. This proved difficult and time consuming. Students were missing—at band, activities, or getting extra help. This also took us away from the students that needed OUR help during this time.

So, this year, we made the better decision to have the students come to us. And what better time for a captive audience than during their lunch? It did require giving up our quiet lunch time to query these Tolkien enthusiasts; however, it was well worth the sacrifice when you see students ten deep in front of you waiting for their turn. We had to push students into the cafeteria to eat their lunch first so we could stagger the masses.

We had ten different versions of our quiz for the hobbits to choose from. A frequent question was “What if I don’t pass?” We encouraged everyone, not allowing any student to set themselves up for failure. We told them, “If you read the book, have confidence that you will be successful!”

We also knew that everyone wanted to be included.

With that in mind, the quizzes were answered at separate tables with no opportunity for sharing answers. There will always be the students that didn’t do the work but don’t want to miss out on the fun. We cheerfully asked everyone before they picked their quiz when they finished the book. The majority of the kids cannot help but be honest. If they said they weren’t done we didn’t let them take the quiz. This is ultimately better for the student since one question was about the end of the book. In order to pass the student would have to get the other two correct. We simply told these kids to finish the book and come back.

When they finished, the moment of truth was at hand. And believe me, these kids were nervous. Some prayed. Some closed their eyes while others bounced nervously from foot to foot. Honestly, they had worked hard and needed to feel that it was all worth it. You are that litmus test. If you are enthusiastic, chances are they will be too. To every student that passed came a heartfelt congratulations and the reward in the form of a movie poster (thank you, Warner Brothers!) and a permission slip to join us on the first part of our adventure, a private screening of the movie at the local theater. In addition, kids got high fives, atta boy/girl, woo hoos and pats on the back and everyone walked away feeling that they had won the race.

Not everyone will pass.

First, let me reassure you that we’re not out to trick anyone. The questions we chose are designed to assess comprehension, not inferencing skills or analytic ability. If a student happens to pull three questions and really and truly “blanks,” we’ll happily let them try again. Sometimes kids get anxious; in those cases, we verbally quiz them away from the crowds, usually posing such open-ended prompts as, “Tell me about the book.” But even after you account for legitimate lapses in memory, test anxiety, allergies, color blindness, and cholera, you are going to have a few cherubs who just can’t answer the questions. What THEN?

Then they don’t go.

It takes willpower. It won’t always be easy. In this EGAT (Everybody Gets a Trophy) world, it’s hard to see a kid lose. You likely will have a sweet little girl who swears—with tears in her eyes—that she really did read the book, and turning her away may be the hardest thing you have to do. But be strong! We speak from experience when we say those sweet little girls have admitted to reading plot summaries on Wikipedia in an effort to pass the quiz.

You may have parents sending emails 18 minutes after dismissal the last day of quizzing, challenging your judgment and demanding a retake. It’s possible you’ll have colleagues who ask you to make an exception for a kid who would just be devastated if they didn’t get to go. STAY STRONG. You aren’t being mean; you are upholding high standards. There is a significant difference!

Here’s the deal. The majority of these kids will be back next year. And maybe even the year after that. And if we bend the rules for one kid who later brags that she didn’t really read the book, then we’ve lost credibility not just for this year, but for the foreseeable future.

We all know this, but it bears repeating: students learn more from failure than from success. The students who choose not to participate this time around may later come to regret it. They will remember that feeling and it may be just the push they need to take the chance next time.

The challenges Bilbo faced on his journey only served to make him more resolute, further developing his character. Don’t rob kids of the chance to grow. If you plan your quiz questions carefully and are confident in the legitimacy of the process, sit back, stick to your guns, quiz the kids, and watch the triumphant readers parade back to lunch.

Mary Cotillo, Erin O’Leary, and Kathleen McNeice all teach at Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, Massachusetts.



The Quest, Part 3: Goblin Caves and Spider Webs

The Quest, Part 2: Monday Morning Hobbit-Backing

Six Buses: The Quest for School-Wide Reading Begins!

This post originally appeared on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog in May 2011.

Tired of filling all your classroom wall space with charts, construction paper, and poster boards and then wondering how to recycle all that paper when it gets replaced with new charts and posters? Have you considered the reasons for inviting students to represent their thinking through visual texts? And have you tried using Glogs as an alternative?
  A New Reason
  Consider some of these ideas for creating a Glog:

• Collaborative groups can create Glogs about books they are reading during literature circles. They can pose questions that they might like to ask the author or a character.
• Students can create reviews of books they are reading. When seeking a new book to read, students can access each other’s reviews and get acquainted with their points of view.
• Groups of students can each study an author, including books written, style, genre, etc. and then create an author study Glog to share the information. They might identify their concerns or share their insights about issues being presented by the author. For example they might ask Sharon Draper if she experienced a personal loss that allowed her to so deeply describe the feelings of Andy in Tears of A Tiger.
• Students can create Idiom Glogs, Simile Glogs, Homophone Glogs, and others about tricky literary concepts. They can then offer tips on how to use these.

Learning About Glogs

To get started visit http://www.glogster.com/.

Glog Projects

Here are a couple of instructional examples that illustrate students sharing their voices and perspectives through a Glog.
  3rd grade Reading/Language Arts: Teacher, Kelly Johnson

Purpose: Create a Glog of a fairy tale character that conveys perspective differently than implied in the original text.

Task: After selecting a fairy tale, students worked in groups of three to think and talk about each character’s perspective of what was, or had occurred in the tale, and the perspective the author was creating. They were tasked with selecting one of the characters and retelling the fairy tale from a different perspective. For example, Cinderella could have left her slipper at the ball because she had not really liked the Prince or had not wanted to go to the ball. The wicked stepsisters could have been shown as sisters who were always bullied by Cinderella because she was prettier than they were. Students were asked to also discuss how the readers would perceive these character changes: Who would be the hero, the empowered, and the victim?

Ms. Johnson had assigned this task because she was attempting, within the context of critical literacy, to encourage her students to understand that in every story and situation they should analyze whose position is being supported by the author and whose voice is being ignored or silenced. After selecting their tales and characters, and creating the new perspective, students were then invited to share the selected character’s new perspective within the context of a Glog. Each group was asked to include photos and other visuals representing the new perspective. In addition, students were asked to include illustrations representing the setting. Students were able to scan in their own sketches of the scenes. Students could also include current or classical music that best illustrated the complexity of the problem being faced by the character. The solution to the dilemma was also to be included in the Glog in the form of a video the students created, a written paragraph, or an audio recording from the students themselves.
  11th grade Social Studies: Teacher, Javier Vaca

Purpose: Create a Glog persuading support for the “home front” efforts during WWI.
 
Task: Students worked as partners studying one of the following topics (Building Up the Military, Organizing Industry, Mobilizing the Workforce Ensuring Public Support; view an example here). Using a chapter from their social studies text, and related articles found via the Internet, their task was to first identify text-based visuals and information that had promoted “Home Front” support for WWI. Next, they interrogated the texts to determine who was being either supported or forgotten and what views were being either promoted or ignored. They then figured out ways to entwine their perspective as a way to communicatively engage with the author, and, finally, to use visuals to persuade others to their stance. Before beginning, students decided that they could persuade and inform by using visuals as well as words, and that they could then persuasively share their information within the context of a Glog.
  Benefits to Learning

These Glog projects supported the students in comprehending and then synthesizing the text-based information. Working as partners/teams, students were identifying, locating, and interrogating texts, and then discussing their thinking in order to negotiate the images and slogans that would persuade the audience viewing the Glog to view “home front” war support through the stance of the creators, or to have new insights and feelings about a fairytale character. In addition to reading information and reporting it in their own words, these students were also creating visual texts representing the newly learned information through images designed to persuade or to illustrate a new perspective.

Diane Lapp, EdD, is a distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University and an English teacher and literacy coach at Health Sciences High and Middle College.



TILE-SIG Feature: Create a Multimedia Poster Using Glogster

Engage: Plugged In

In the spring of 2012, a group of English Language Arts educators from Franklin, Massachusetts launched a highly successful middle school reading program around THE HUNGER GAMES. In this five-part special series, the teachers who orchestrated the whole-school read will detail, step-by-step, this year’s initiative. Parts I and 2 focused on how the team made this year’s book selection, THE HOBBIT, and encouraged student participation. In Part III, Mary Cotillo and Erin O’Leary discuss some of the challenges they’ve faced—and how they’re working as a team to overcome.

We know where we’re headed on this journey—we really do—and we know it’s going to be worth our while. How to get there? That’s another story.

Our merry band of literature lovers are much like Bilbo and the dwarves—prepared and peppy at the outset, tromping gamely through the Misty Mountains, blissfully unaware of the evils that are lurking around the bend.

If you are planning a school-wide reading program, please take a few moments to benefit from our experience as we highlight the pitfalls—both real and imagined—that line our path.

Challenge #1: Time

Although a read-a-thon may not seem like something that will dominate your life for several months, let us be the first to tell you: it can and it will.

We first hinted at our reading initiative in mid-October. We teased the reveal for about a week and made the surprise part of our journey. While we adults tend to get irritated when people (read: celebrities’ publicists) announce that they are going to make an upcoming announcement about an important announcement, our middle schoolers lapped it up.

After the reveal comes the reading. Not a big deal, right? Maybe not with a modern, popular young adult book with a glossy cover featuring knock-out models. But we’re not talking about heartbreakers; we’re talking about a furry-footed Hobbit. We needed to keep our initiative in the forefront of kids’ minds and capitalize on the tween desire to belong. Don’t get left behind! We peppered the school with propaganda, aired weekly videos encouraging reading, and ran daily “caught reading” contests. All of this takes TIME.

Here’s how we created our schedule: We knew we wanted the kids to see the movie as close to the release as possible, which gave us the target date of December 14 (before Christmas break—thank you, Peter Jackson!). Now, back up one week for those permission slips. If you want your students to have some level of accountability—a riddling or reaping or what have you—subtract at least one more week for that. That put us at a “due date” of December 3.

Which means our students had seven weeks to read THE HOBBIT. Literally, seven weeks.

Of course, our read-a-thon will not end when we walk out of the theater. The field trip is what requires the most planning and generates the most excitement among the kids, but we also rock some post-viewing school-wide events. In fact, we decided to save most of the activities for after the movie. It gives us some time to regroup, and also gives our little hobbits the chance to reconsider and join the throng. Last year we picked up an additional thirty-something tributes after the movie. Apparently, they didn’t know how cool we were.

Challenge #2: Faculty Support

Like any initiative, if your school is like ours, you’ll have reactions ranging from immediate “This is awesome! What can I do to help?” buy-in to “You’ve got to be kidding me, I can’t handle one more thing before Christmas” resistance.

If your budget allows, order copies of the book for your teachers. Make them signs for their classrooms, offer lessons, news stories, and articles, and provide logistical updates for your faculty as you are able. It’s not always easy, but don’t stress too much. Most are only concerned if an event interferes with their teaching day. If you can provide advance warning, most will happily accommodate.

However, there are some teachers who’ll be armed with a laundry list of questions, and you won’t always have answers. (See “Doubts” below.) Learning styles are evident even among adults. Some need to see the “big picture,” while others crave minutia, playing the “what if?” game. If you’re concerned with collegial dynamics, have the important stuff come from above. That’s what Gandalf is for. Remain as positive and kind as humanly possible; if your faculty isn’t excited about your initiative, the kids will suffer.

Overall, we’ve been blessed with incredible support that far outweighs any stray negativity that comes our way. We have more offers for support (and requests to chaperone) than we can possibly accept. We’ve found teachers are more than willing to tolerate disruptions to their schedule in exchange for the unifying effects of a school-wide adventure.

Challenge #3: (Self) Doubts

An adventurer’s greatest enemy is not a goblin or a giant spider or a dragon, but oneself. We intrepid few who willingly embark on such grand missions must be prepared to come face to face with our own doubts and fears. And, as was so beautifully illustrated to the Horace Mann Middle School contingent recently, we must be willing to stay the course.

THE HOBBIT is not THE HUNGER GAMES. Last year we had students falling over themselves to participate. This year, the readers are much more reluctant. The book is long. It has old-fashioned language. There are no mutts or fireballs or love interests. It wasn’t long before we faced what Mary at least considered to be a disastrous realization: we were highly unlikely to fill six buses.

“But we HAVE to fill six buses,” the doubting voice in Mary’s head cried. “We have a mandate! We have a precedent! If we don’t meet these new, higher expectations, what will happen next year? We’ll lose our budget! We’ll have to fight tooth and nail for support just like we did last year. Not filling six buses is NOT an option! We need to change the program!”

So we did…almost.

First, we did some research to figure out where the first movie ends (THE HOBBIT film adaptation will be a trilogy) and figured that students would have to read roughly five chapters to understand the first movie. We talked about eliminating the requirement to read the book, opening up the field trip to those students who had read at least the first five chapters. This would encourage those students who were stymied by difficult language, bolster our numbers, and ensure our literacy initiative would be funded in years to come.

Oh, and the message the kids would receive about not having to read the whole book? The lowering of our standards? We’ll just ignore those issues for now. We’ve got six buses to fill, people!

Thank goodness, once again, for coolheaded administration. When we approached our Gandalf with our worries and suggested plan of action, we were quickly set straight. It mattered not if we had 50 or 500 students participating; our program (and budget!) was safe. We were reminded to keep our eye on the REAL prize. We are in this not for movie premieres, not for newspaper coverage, but for the kids. We are encouraging a love of reading and literature, and to do that we absolutely must require the students to read the whole novel.

And as for Mary’s worries that we’d only have a handful of kids participate? That was proven wrong on the day before Thanksgiving break, when we held a surprise early-riddling. Twenty five students qualified in an hour. Not too shabby!

Mary Cotillo and Erin O’Leary both teach English Language Arts at Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, Massachusetts.



Six Buses: The Quest for School-Wide Reading Begins!

The Quest—Part 2: Monday Morning Hobbit-Backing