Thinking for Ourselves:
Literacy Learning in a Diverse Teacher Inquiry Network

Taffy E. Raphael, Oakland University
Susan Florio-Ruane, Michigan State University
Marcella Kehus, Berkley Public Schools
MariAnne George, Rochester Hills Community Schools
Nina Hasty, Detroit Public Schools
Kathy Highfield, Holly Area Schools

Common Ground
Why We Need One Another
Our Storied Lives Curriculum
Book Club Plus
Assessment Research in Book Club Plus
Thinking and SPeaking for Ourselves
References

(Submitted to The Reading Teacher, article is based on the Research Awards Address presented at the annual meeting of the International Reading Association, May 2, 2000, Indianapolis, IN.)

First, the topic suggested for the address was teacher research. This reflects a noteworthy acknowledgment of teacher research by IRA at a time when what "counts" as research is hotly contested. We value IRA's recognition which underscores the importance of teacher research, not only for the individual teacher, who learns more about his or her own practice by means of it, but for the field of literacy education as a whole.

Second, our presentation in May, 2000, reflected the first time the research awards address had been so visibly a collaborative venture. The authors of the research awards address, and this article, are members of the Teachers Learning Collaborative (TLC). Inviting a group of teachers and university-based teacher educators to present their work underscores IRA's recognition that to solve real problems that exist in the real world in and out of schools, professionals with different expertise who work in different professional contexts must come together for sustained work. It is precisely because we are not all the same that all our voices and perspectives are needed. In this article, based on the IRA Research Awards Address, we describe collaborative teacher research on complex learning in the context of our practice as literacy educators.

The TLC is a Network of three teacher study groups (Literary Circle, Book Club Plus Study Group, and the Literacy Circle Study Group) across southeastern Michigan, supported in part by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement and in part by the Walgreen Teachers in Residence Program at the University of Michigan. However, the Network primarily is supported by individuals' voluntary commitment of time and energy to something in which we believe. Together, the six authors of this paper represent a larger group of more than thirty Michigan teachers and teacher educators comprising the TLC. Members of our group are actively engaged in teacher research, though in various stages, from defining questions to collecting data, to analyzing and going public with what we have learned.

Common Ground
We believe that inquiry is central to the work of teaching, that it requires community, and that communities of practice can take a myriad of forms. We live and work many miles from one another—along traffic-choked freeways throughout southeastern Michigan. We give up Saturdays and evenings to keep in touch about our work. And we have had to become computer literate to communicate with one another by means of e-mail. What holds a group such as ours together? It is the common ground of a problem of practice with which we all struggle in our respective teaching contexts: How can we re-engage low-achieving readers?

We come to this question as experienced teachers who have often felt frustrated and isolated in our work. Too often, we have identified struggling readers and worried that our very interventions to support their learning of skills and strategies have, in fact, derailed them from literacy. While they spend most of their time in drill and practice, our more able readers seem to move quickly beyond grade-level expectations and engage in reading, writing, and talk about text in motivating and empowering ways. Thus, without intending to do so, we sometimes find that we have set up classrooms in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How can we create classroom learning communities in which the skills and strategies we diligently teach are practiced by all of our students in powerful, engaging ways? In TLC we have an opportunity to ask and answer this question in studies in our own classrooms and in conversation with one another. Some members of TLC teach in Title I schools where there are many programs and pressures to raise literacy achievement. Some work in more affluent school districts and have greater autonomy to create individual programs, yet still are accountable for students' learning and their performance on high-stakes achievement tests. In each case, we find that it is easy to lose our way as we try to construct coherent, meaningful literacy experiences for all our students. Figure 1 illustrates an example from one of the school districts of the forces that influence the teaching of literacy in one of our member’s classroom.

Figure 1

Describing this figure during our IRA Awards Address, Nina Hasty, one of the teacher authors of this paper, said the following:

The circles in this diagram illustrate the various groups with a stake in literacy instruction in my district, and many people have had a voice in these—publishers, administrators, curriculum specialists, politicians, university professors. Notice that the teacher is at the center of this diagram. I am in the center in terms of my direct work with children and my accountability, but it is hard for me to have a voice about my own practice outside the confines of my room. In a group such as TLC, I use my own voice to learn with other teachers so that I can improve literacy education for youngsters. In inquiring into the factors that shape my practice, I am discovering that the curriculum is not the reading series. It is not is the MEAP test or my district's exit skills for promotion to the next grade. The literacy curriculum is about spoken and written language. The curriculum is an ongoing conversation with and among my students.

This conversation, as Bruner (1986) has taught us, folds back on itself and gets more complex as we learn. As such, it frames what we read, write, say, and hear in the process of learning literacy. In the learning conversation in Miss Hasty’s classroom, she and her students talk and wonder together about how language works, what written language is used for, how authors use different kinds of text to convey ideas, how to make sense of their lives through reading and writing, and how their lives are "storied."

Why We Need One Another
To understand how our community of practice worked to explore problems of practice, it's useful, we believe, to understand the history of our Network's development. All the members of the Network were interested in re-engaging low-achievers through authentic interactions with literature, and most of us were particularly intrigued by the idea of having our students participate in book clubs, using and adapting the Book Club program (Raphael, Pardo, Highfield, & McMahon, 1997) for our classrooms. But, we realized that two things stood in our way: (1) few of us had any experiences participating in book clubs with friends or colleagues; and (2) we wanted Book Club to be more than an enrichment activity for already-successful decoders.

In their role as teacher educators, two authors of this paper were particularly concerned with the problem of teachers being asked to teach in dialogic ways without having experienced this kind of teaching for themselves, and with a related problem of practice. Teacher education students and practicing teachers rarely have the opportunity to experience sustained exploration of a complex idea, let alone through dialogic practices. One such complex idea that we have found to be particularly challenging is that of culture—especially as it is manifest in classrooms throughout the United States, and as it affects literacy teaching and learning.

In the beginning of what became TLC, Florio-Ruane adapted the Book Club instructional framework developed by Raphael and her associates to teachers' learning about culture. Book Club had been developed to support youngsters' skill development in the areas of comprehension and interpretation of text, and Florio-Ruane modified it to apply to adults and to develop the cultural theme in a masters level course she then taught. In this initial book club course we read, wrote, and spoke about culture in response to autobiographical literature. In addition, we thought about our own development as literacy learners and as members of a culturally diverse society, as teachers in the course developed vignettes revealing their own autobiographies as literacy learners. Course members remained together, meeting monthly to form the Literary Circle. Our ongoing teaching and research finds that because culture was so hard for us to talk about, sustained reading and conversation engaging multiple texts are needed repeatedly to explore the concept. Thus conversation can be a powerful way to learn about complex concepts in indeterminate domains (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988; Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1992).

There is a family resemblance between teachers' leaning about a complex construct such as culture and the kind of curriculum conversations we want to see—and to support—through our students' reading, writing, and talking about text. Children's conceptions of culture, both in their own lives, and as a key part of learning to contribute to a democratic society, are like our own—remarkably, but not surprisingly, impoverished. Learning about democratic values—currently listed as one of the primary national goals within national and state social studies standards—requires not only the expository knowledge that typically is transmitted through textbooks, but also the important experiences that stem from engaging with that process. Thus, a second "node" in the TLC network formed through the creation of the Book Club Plus Study Group, focused on extending what we had learned through the course and Literary Circle to developing meaningful literacy curriculum for diverse learners.

Our Storied Lives Curriculum
Being a literate individual is more demanding today than ever before, and the challenge to educators is greater today than ever before. Not just the "college track" but "every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well" (from National Education Goals Panel, 1995, p. 11). Political leaders have established the goal that all students leave third grade able to read a national priority. However, in addition to decoding print, all children need to engage in the higher order thinking associated with literacy. To this end, the members of the TLC network recognize that as literacy teachers we have dual and what have sometimes been characterized as competing obligations.

On the one hand, we are obligated to make sure all students have decoding skills sufficient to read independently. Thus, it is vital for all students to have sufficient practice using reading materials that are at their instructional level. On the other hand, it is a crucial goal to make sure that students learn to think as readers and writers. Students must therefore also have access to age-appropriate material that challenges their thinking and fosters thoughtful talk and writing about text. We cannot choose between these two obligations; nor must we view them as being in opposition. Good literacy education must involve both.

As things currently stand, low-achieving readers may conceivably go through school never engaging with challenging texts appropriate for their age level, texts that require higher order thinking and interpretation skills such as those laid out in our national agenda. Moreover, these struggling readers do not have the opportunity to talk with peers about such materials and the ideas they contain. Further, in such circumstances the classroom becomes stratified. It is difficult in that setting, if not impossible, for low-achieving readers to join, or for the teacher to create a functioning community of learners. TLC identified this problem at the core of the re-engagement of struggling readers. Over the past three years the teacher researchers in TLC have designed, taught, and evaluated a curricular framework aimed at solving this problem. We call the framework Book Club Plus.

Book Club Plus
In Book Club Plus, we created a design based in thematic units that enable us to take advantage of two contexts for reading, writing, and talk about text as illustrated in Figure 2. These two contexts are Literacy Block and Book Club. Each is an extended period of time in the school day within which important activities take place, each serving a different purpose in students' learning.

Figure 2

In one context, Literacy Block, activities related to the skills and strategies of reading and writing are taught and practiced. They may include writers' workshops, practice activities to foster word-level decoding skills; reading (or listening to) books individually or in peer groups, and so forth. However, one important feature of Literacy Block is guided reading, or teacher-led discussion around specific skills, strategies, and words to be taught. Students learn these within the guided reading groups using texts at their instructional level. These texts are all thematically linked to the unit in which the entire class participates and to the books that are discussed in weekly Book Clubs.

In the other context, Book Club, heterogeneous student-led book clubs are the sites where students apply the strategies they have been taught by discussing compelling, age-appropriate literature. Access to the literature discussed in the Book Clubs can involve a variety of routes: independent reading, buddy reading, listening or viewing centers, and teacher read-alouds. What is crucial is not that every child read every Book Club book independently, but that all children have access to the challenging, age-appropriate text and all students write and speak in response to it. As they respond to the texts and to one another, students learn to link texts to examine complex ideas.

Culture is one of the complex ideas we explored to anchor our yearlong curricular theme, "Our Storied Lives." Students address this theme in three 6-8 week units: Stories of Self, Family Stories, and Stories of Culture. This progression of units allows us to begin with a focus on the self, a concept that fits with curricular materials across grade levels, and it contextualizes the self within the broader areas of family, community, and society.

Each unit within the "Storied Lives" framework draws upon a set of books that allows the particular focus to be fully developed. Focus development occurs through the Book Club book, the guided reading books and/or stories, the teacher's read aloud, shared reading books that are often the basis for mini-lessons during Writers’ Workshop, and the classroom library which often serves students’ sustained silent reading. Further, each unit includes a culminating project requiring students to apply and integrate language arts skills and strategies along with the overarching theme. Teachers alternated students’ Book Club activities (2-3 days per week) with the guided reading and independent unit work of Literacy Block (2-3 days per week).

Table 1 lays out the books we used when teaching the Family Stories unit. We featured work of Patricia Polacco, a prolific Michigan author who bases her writings on her own life, highlighting relationships among family members, cultural heritage, and family stories.

Table 1: Family Stories Texts

Context Books Used in Grade 3 Book Club Book Chicken Sunday Guided Reading Above grade level: Meteor At grade level: Some Birthday Below grade level: My Rotten Red-Headed Brother Read-Alouds (also used as models for process writing activities) Babushka's Doll The Keeping Quilt Thank You Mr. Faulker The Bee Tree Boat Ride with Lillian Two Blossom Picnic at Mudsock Meadow Aoolemando’s Dreams Pink and Say Thundercake Tikvah Means Hope Firetalking [Palacco autobiography] Viewing Dreamkeepers

In describing this unit we make reference to students' work in the classroom of Marianne George, one of the authors of this paper.

The culminating project that students in Mrs. George’s third grade classroom created involved oral re-tellings of family stories based upon artifacts that they valued. For example, Nathan’s grandfather’s father had come from Ireland. When it came time to share his family story, Nathan brought a pickle barrel he and his father had made and shared the story he had learned by interviewing his grandfather. As Nathan tells it, his great-grandfather had to leave Ireland rather suddenly and in secret, so he stowed away inside a pickle barrel and escaped on a boat. The interactions Nathan had with his father and grandfather brings home the importance of such assignments, while the family story content highlights one of the many histories of how America was built.

The variety of artifacts students brought to this task reflected what they had learned from reading picture books such as William Joyce’s (1997) The World of William Joyce Scrapbook and hearing autobiographies of Roald Dahl, Gary Paulsen, Jean Craighead George and others. Moreover, they were informed by their continually developing reading, writing, and discussion skills as well as their knowledge of culture and of how lives are presented and re-presented. These family stories are so deeply rooted in the students’ cultural heritage that it was a natural transition to the third unit in the theme, Stories of Culture.

The students learned what an artifact was and, in so doing, discovered culture in material aspects of everyday life. They saw how these matter—not just as festivals or tokens of ethnic identity—but as receptacles of collected and collective meaning, signals of the shared activities and understandings within social groups. Writing and oral language are artifacts of culture by this definition as are such objects as pickle barrels.

In Mrs. George’s third grade, students learned about themselves and each other, and their relationship to other family members and their cultural heritage. In Marcella Kehus’ eighth grade class, students used different books but a similar thematic focus and instructional framework to explore more complex issues of identity, conformity, and social responsibility.

Mrs. George’s ongoing teacher research examines whether and how this curriculum supports students' learning to make intertextual connections—across texts, between the texts and their own lives, and across the contexts of writing, reading, and discussion—to understand a complex concept (Hartman, 1991). At least two decades of research document the importance of background knowledge for text understandings, and important sources for such knowledge include other texts students read, as well as the "texts" of their own lived experiences (Anderson, Hiebert, Wilkinson, & Scott, 1984; Sipe, 2000). Mrs. George chose to study intertextual connections for many reasons, with one of the most important being how such connections impact students' response to literature, their text comprehension, and the interpretations they make.

Two examples illustrate the intertextual connections students make and why we teach so that students come to value such connections. In the first example, we highlight how Mrs. George’s students used text-to-text connections as they responded to books within the family stories unit. In the second, a connection from text to life helped one of her second language learners find a way to talk about his own feelings of frustration in dealing with living in a new country.

The first example is taken from an entry Mrs. George made in her teacher researcher log, dated Feb. 12. Following a read aloud, she was eavesdropping on her students as they talked during snack time. In her log, she wrote,