Literacy Retreat, Session 2 Recap: Executing Complex Tasks After Reading

Welcome back to learn more from the Smekens Education Literacy Retreat I recently attended.  If you would like to view my first post in this mini-series, Achieving Complex Thinking During Reading, click HERE.  Let's get started!
 
Session 2: Executing Complex Tasks After Reading

You may be wondering What makes a task go from simple to harder to complex?  Well, when students have to juggle multiple thinking processes to complete an activity, the complexity increases.  Having students simply regurgitate information from a text is easy, as can be summarization of a text, which is recalling events and details in the students' own words.  However, when students are asked to break something down, the task becomes much more difficult.  

Kristina Smekens discussed how teachers need to be able to recognize the characteristics of complex tasks before they can create tasks for students to execute after their reading.  Using Norman Webb's Depths of Knowledge (DOK) levels and following the close-reading framework can help guide teachers.


Some attendees at the conference asked Smekens, Is DOK just a new name for Bloom's Taxonomy?  The answer is no.  Bloom's Taxonomy consists of a variety of verbs, but DOK is not about the verbs.  DOK is about the context or the depths of thinking.  Click HERE to get a betters sense of the difference between the two. :)

As an introduction/example activity, the attendees were given strips of paper and asked to place them in order based on complexity of the task.  At our table, we discussed what made each activity more complex.  The example of the strips are placed in order of complexity below.

• Execute a concept I read about in a professional book using the ABC chart.
• During a team/grade-level meeting, summarize the ABC lesson I executed.
• During a faculty meeting, brainstorm applications of the ABC Chart in all content areas/elective courses.
• Plan and present a conference breakout session on 20 different applications of the ABC Chart to target persuasive/argumentative, informative and narrative writing in k-12 classrooms.

Are you able to see in terms of what makes a task more complex based on this example?  It certainly helped me have a better understanding.  At the retreat, we were told to think of the standards as a ladder starting with shallow [tasks], then going into the deeper end of the [task] pool. 

 Teachers need to ask themselves when planning for students How cognitively demanding do I want the activity to be?  In terms of standardized tests, about 20% of the test questions fall under DOK Level 1 and DOK Level 2, while 80% of the questions fall under DOK Level 3 and 4.  This means all students must be exposed to complex thinking and complex tasks. As we know, students are not all on the same learning and thinking levels. Teachers must be prepared to vary their level of support.  Scaffolding is KEY!

In terms of matching the level of the reader and the level of the text, there is definitely a place for that within the classroom.  As it was mentioned at the retreat, the place for leveled texts is in literacy stations and at home for nightly reading/homework, not necessarily guided reading.  Say what?!  Yes, it's true according to Kristina Smekens.  She mentioned  teachers can not have students live in the leveled book zone, if you want them to think on a more complex level.  This is the same claim I heard from Timothy Shanahan at the Illinois Reading Conference last October.  (He's one of my favorite literacy researchers.  He goes against the norm!)

Complex tasks and complex texts should always be done and used in class with scaffolding.  If teachers are there to offer a variety of support to their students, staying on "instructional level" material is not always necessary.  Teachers need to honor different levels of support and guide students to the answers using prompts and cues.  For example, teachers should guide students' eyes to the visual cues in the text.  As teachers, we want students to grapple with the text and their thinking.  We want them to still feel the frustration, but have them know they're not, in Smekens' words, "left alone on an island of complexity!"   

Teachers should allocate time for whole class discussions.  Discussions permit students to pool their thinking together.  Remember, these discussions are complex, so allow collaboration!  We were told to consider it similar to a college study group after a lecture.  You may leave a lecture clueless, but hearing others' thinking in a study group may help you understand concepts more clearly.  

A heed of warning: students can hide in whole classroom discussions.  Have you ever noticed the same three kids participate every. single. time, while others seem to make themselves "look busy"?  That is the time to intervene!  It is important for teachers to move to the small group format for certain students to scaffold their thinking.  Make sure to provide various types of scaffolding, such as teaching comprehension strategies and defining key words for students.  The point of the lesson is not to figure out the meaning of a word.  Teachers, you need to act like a dictionary and define the word for the students, then move on to the heart of the lesson!  

Before the session ended, two technology resources were mentioned.  The Fotobabble App (or website) and the Skitch App can be useful when students are analyzing a text.  Fotobabble enables students to take a photo of any text, photo, illustration, graph, etc. and record an audio analysis of the image.  Skitch allows students to annotate their thinking on any document, including a PDF, photo, chart, map., etc.  I've used Skitch with my students and they love it!

The professional texts recommended during this session were 50 Common Core Reading Response Activities and Reading to the Core.  I do not own these books, but they've been added to my Amazon wish list! 

I hope this information was useful to you.  Thank you to Teaching Super Power and Kimberly Geswein for the clip art and fonts in my DOK image.  The next session I will be discussing relates to writing: Building Stronger Beginnings and Endings.  Stay tuned!

Literacy Retreat, Session 1 Recap: Achieving Complex Thinking During Reading

Let me start off by saying, the Smekens Education Literacy Retreat was amazing!  I learned a great amount in such a short 2-day time frame.  The main presenter, Kristina Smekens, is highly knowledgeable. The way she shares information is entertaining and fun, which is always a bonus when sitting for 2-days.  If you ever get a chance to attend the retreat, take it!  I'm hoping to attend annually, since the topics change each summer.  Anyway, in the upcoming weeks, I will be sharing information from the eight sessions I attended.  I don't have specific dates of when I'll be posting, since I am supposed to be taking a break from educational-related things (Yeah, right!), but here are the session topics: :)

1. Achieving Complex Thinking During Reading
2. Executing Complex Tasks After Reading
3. Building Stronger Beginnings and Endings
4. Teaching Academic Vocabulary with Six Interactive Strategies
5. Differentiating to Support English Language Learners
6. Inferring Ideas from Visuals & Multimodal Texts
7. Revitalizing the Writing Process
8. Using Mentor Texts to Teach Sentence Variety

One more thing before I fill you in on the first session.  I strongly recommend getting Chart Sense K-2, Chart Sense 3-8 and Chart Sense for Writing written by Rozlyn Linder.  I purchased these professional texts last summer and have certainly not regretted it.  

I have used Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and this blog to get the word out about these books.  The reason I am referencing them is because of their repeated mention at the Literacy Retreat.  It seemed as if a high percentage of the mini-lessons discussed at the retreat were taken from these books!  Rozlyn Linder, the author of the Chart Sense books, is a genius.  There are tons of Reading mini-lessons organized by the standards and each mini-lesson contains useful and extremely easy-to-implement anchor charts.  My Chart Sense books have been tabbed, dog-eared and highlighted and are definitely some of my "must-have" resources.  

Okay, moving on. There was so much information shared at this session.  I will be sharing a few key points, some anchor charts, a fun activity and three online resources mentioned within the session's duration.  Here we go! :)

Session 1: Achieving Complex Thinking During Reading
The essential question for this session was based on the image below: How do you get kids to think across the continuum of complex thinking? 

When students are asked to read a complex text, they first need to learn how to peel back the layers of a text before digging in.  We, as teachers, need to get students to think at different levels starting with the Word Levels and then progressing to the level of Discerning Greater Meaning.  As you may already know or have personally encountered within your classroom, students have a hard time with thinking in terms of "the bigger picture", which includes thinking about characters across a text.  

The Critical Consideration level is where teachers begin asking students to analyze more deeply about a text.  For example, a prompt used at this level may be, What is the character's purpose for doing this?  Kristina Smekens mentioned the Critical Consideration level is where teachers often start to lose kids in terms of comprehending a complex text.  However, once students are more secure at this level, asking them to begin synthesizing across multiple texts can begin to happen.  Synthesizing happens in the Discerning Greater Meaning level.  This last level on the continuum is where students are asked to do something with what they learn during reading.  

Underneath the continuum, you'll notice DOK Levels, which stand for Depths of Knowledge Levels. Students need to be able to think at a variety of levels.  Click here to learn more!

Phase 1 is considered *Simplistic Thinking* where students are asked to recall, draw, list, illustrate, etc.  It's important for students to start at this level.  As teachers, don't jump into complex thinking questions during the first read!  Stick to the standards- R2.1, R2.2, R2.3 and have the students reread a text multiple times.  Always ask face-value questions when students first read a text.  

Phase 2 is known as *Moderately Complex Thinking* where students are asked to assess, compare, conclude, revise, etc.  In this phase, students need to question the author and analyze his/her choices of why certain portions of the text were added, as well as think about figurative and technical meanings, author's purpose, and vocabulary.

Phase 3 is *Complex Thinking*.  Students need to apply concepts, analyze, connect, create, critique, prove, etc. during reading.  This is the point where students go complex!  Teachers need to get students to zoom in on some portions of a text, but zoom out again to synthesize information across multiple texts.  For example, students may be asked to look at arguments in various informational books or make text-to-text connections.  Teachers may want to give students books on the same topic to compare or books written by the same author or with the same theme.

Anchor charts are known to support students' thinking on more complex levels.  Students usually are able to retell what happens in a text, but teachers need to get them to discuss, for instance, how the characters interact with one another, too.  They need to be able to track events in sequential order.  Start simple by asking students to discuss a particular character: How is the character acting?  Then move them onto more complex questions about multiple characters: How are characters interacting with one another? What sort of relationships do they have? Below is the Interaction Tracker used as an example at the retreat.  Click on the image to download two available versions.

Students are used to What is the answer?  However, the times have changed, as we all know.  With the Common Core State Standards, teachers need to ask students What is the answer? Why? What's the evidence to support your thinking?  This is a HUGE shift in thinking.  Krista Smekens said "Do not be satisfied with students' *right answers* to your questions because they could have been a guess.  Instead ask, Where in the text are you getting this?"  

Discussions about textual evidence were a strong focus in this session.  The retreat attendees were warned to remember: All evidence is a detail, but not all details are evidence!  Teachers need to make students become aware of what constitutes as strong evidence.  Just because it's in the text doesn't mean it backs up and supports the evidence.  Writing details from a text is NOT EVIDENCE, but citing directly from the text IS evidence.

Kristina discussed various mini-lessons to bring back to the classroom.  Many of the ideas to get students to achieve complex thinking during reading were directly taken from my favorite Chart Sense books.  I used my copies of the books to take pictures of some charts mentioned at the retreat.  If you're interested in a viewing a previous post I wrote regarding textual evidence using a few of the charts, click HERE.  This post will also lead you to a textual evidence freebie I've created. :)   

One of the best highlights about the Literacy Retreat was the giveaways.  The attendees were given numerous goodies.  One of the goodies was a set of bags called Finding Author Evidence.  I love them!  I'm looking forward to this activity in the Fall.  Even if you don't have a set, any gallon-sized Ziploc Bags will do.  You can have your students create their own. :) 

For this activity, once students finish reading a text, the teacher should start by providing a claim or inference for the students.  Be careful not to start off too complex by having students think up their own claim or inference.  As an example, the teacher may state the claim: "I think this character is a bully!"  Have students work together in small groups to support the given claim.  

Kristina stated that finding textual evidence should be a kinesthetic activity.  Students should record text evidence on sentence strips, notebook paper cut into strips, Post-It Notes, or whatever else you can find.  They must be able to move sentences around and discuss their reasoning for the evidence with peers.  Sorting sentences to prove the claim (ex: the character is a bully) will allow students an opportunity to rank the evidence in order of importance.  The discussions with peers is what gets the ideas and learning started.  Students need to see others' perspectives!  I've provided the corresponding graphic organizer for this activity, if you would like to give it a try with your students, too.  Just click on the image to download.

Last, but not least, below are some online resources teachers can use with students in the classroom to develop complex thinking skills.  I'm only familiar with Time for Kids, so the other resources are on my list to investigate when school starts again. 

• VOKI: Have students apply Point Of View in Finish the Story narrative prompts with VOKI.  Use this online resource to design an avatar emulating a character.  Voices are recorded into a computer and recited back as a character.  Fun! 

• Time for Kids and ProCon.org are great resources for students to analyze and evaluate arguments.  According to Kristina Smekens, students need to learn to distinguish claims versus reasons versus evidence.  These online resources were recommended when teaching students how to track an author's claim with his/her reasons and support.

I hope you found this information useful.  If you liked what you learned, stay tuned to Literacy Loving Gals via Bloglovin', so you don't miss a post.  As I revealed, I'll be sharing information from each session attended at the Literacy Retreat.  Before I go, I want to thank A Little Piece of Africa for the arrow graphics and Kimberly Geswein for the fonts in my images. :)