All Learning is Social & Emotional

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm thrilled that my guest today is none other than Douglas Fisher. You might recognize the name Fisher from the writing duo Fisher and Fry, and I'm very honored to have Doug Fisher join me on the program today because he's been kind of an idol and role model of mine for a long time and is a person who wears many hats, which we'll hear about in just a moment.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_02:

So, Doug, I want to welcome you to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you.

[00:46] SPEAKER_02:

Glad to be here. So, your job is, just to be completely honest, a little bit strange. You have a setup where you actually do multiple jobs at once, in addition to the one that you're probably best known for, which is writing so many excellent books on literacy and staff development. Tell us a little bit about your setup at your school and at the university.

[01:05] SPEAKER_00:

Great. Thanks. So... I work for San Diego State University.

[01:09]

I am a professor in educational leadership, and I teach the instructional improvement courses for aspiring administrators, as well as some research courses for our doctoral students in educational leadership. I believe that as a faculty member, I have to live and breathe what I teach the students. So Nancy and I and another colleague, Ian, founded a school back in 2006. Currently grades 6 through 12, we educate about 760 kids, almost 70% of whom live in poverty. The vast majority of kids speak languages other than English at home. It's an amazing, wonderful place that I serve as one of the co-founders and leaders of the school.

[01:53]

My responsibilities include things like teacher evaluation, budgets, professional development, as well as making a commitment that Nancy and I would teach every year to kids in the school system. So that's the hat I wear. The university is a great role. The classes for the university are in the evening. Nancy and I job share at the high school, middle school so that we can accomplish that. And then we write about our experiences because we're around teenagers and young people all the time.

[02:22]

An amazing group of teachers that we can watch and observe and learn from so that we can try to share the best things we learn with a wider audience.

[02:31] SPEAKER_02:

That is a fantastic scenario that you have there. And I have to say, it sounds like you're doing three full-time jobs to do as much writing as you do. and to be basically a school leader and teacher and higher education faculty member. So the results of that kind of speak for themselves. Anyone who's seen your work, your books, or read your writing online knows how valuable it is to have that perspective. So if anyone in our audience is jealous of your setup there, maybe they can...

[03:05]

can up their game in terms of time management to make all that happen. You said you trade off in some of those responsibilities with Nancy.

[03:11] SPEAKER_00:

I do. Nancy and I, we would say we job share at Health Sciences. That works better for us so that we can accomplish the other roles that we have. If we're teaching a 9th grade class or a 12th grade class, it's the two of us together since probably both of us can't be there every day, but one of us can always be there.

[03:35] SPEAKER_02:

Let's talk a little bit about your latest project, which I'm sure is not your only project in the pipeline, but one that is becoming available to schools now. I got the flyer in the mail and saw it at, I believe, the ASCD conference as well. You have a new online platform, and people know I'm a big fan of online learning, called the Fisher and Fry Close and Critical Reading PD Resource Center. So tell us what this is about and who it's for, precisely.

[04:03] SPEAKER_00:

We wanted to provide good access for people to improve the likelihood that close and critical reading become the norm in schools. And we can write about it in journal articles. We can speak about it at conferences. But people need to dig deeply into this practice and try it on in the presence of their colleagues, get feedback, think about it, try it again. So we decided to put a bunch of our resources, our assets, if you will, into this online platform. We put PowerPoints up there, we put discussion guides up there, we put videos up there, classroom videos, videos of me talking, videos of Nancy talking, interviews with teachers from the beginning of their close reading to as they become more proficient in close reading.

[04:48]

What we wanted to provide was a one-stop place that people could go to to spark their learning and to have resources to come back as it gets deeper and deeper. We created a bunch of modules. We have a module on purpose and modeling. We have a module on scaffolded reading. We have a module on text-dependent questions. And we separated them out, K-5 versus 6-12.

[05:11]

So if you're working at a high school, you log into the 6-12 site. If you're working at an elementary school, you log into the K-5 site. So it's much more specialized with examples appropriate for the grade spans where you work. There are modules, areas, that anyone in your school can go into. So maybe you decide you're all going to watch a video on your prep or you're going to watch a video in the next week on your own time. So then when you come together, you can have a conversation about it.

[05:39]

There's other areas that are reserved for school leaders and coaches. to provide some guidance on how to use the materials that are there. The materials are expansive enough that it's going to go at least a year, if not two years worth of professional development. I don't know anybody who can go through all that content. in a school year. There's a lot going on there.

[06:00]

I have heard schools take on a module like text-dependent question for months and months and keep going back to it, keep going back to it. They go back and try on a lesson. They come back and go to the discussion guide. They go watch a video clip of another teacher. Then they come back to discussion. Our intent was to provide that resource that everyone in the school could log into, that it wasn't, you know, you had to pay $50 or $90 or $200 per person, but everyone can get in in a school and they can have some shared experiences to think through.

[06:34] SPEAKER_02:

Let's position this in terms of where schools are in their growth and in their needs. So a lot of us are dealing with new standards and new curriculum that are basically asking students to read and understand and respond to much more complex and challenging texts. And I think one of the first things that we did as a profession to respond to that was to provide the texts and to, you know, tell students that these, you know, these were the texts that that they're expected to read and understand. What does close and critical reading mean to you? And how do we, you know, how do we do that? In other words, what is it beyond providing the text and telling students what the text means?

[07:19]

Because I think this is something that we struggle with just in terms of clarity around what close and critical reading really means.

[07:25] SPEAKER_00:

Great question. And there's a lot of discussion about what this phrase means to different people around the world and lots of people have staked the claim like it means this or it means that. We've taken the tack that it's an instructional routine that has some common features. And the common features that we look for in a close reading is that it's a short, complex piece of text. It could be an excerpt from a longer text or a standalone piece. But it's short and worthy and complex.

[07:55]

And you're exactly right. There are new expectations for kids that they're going to have to read and understand way more complex text than they used to in recent years. And I think that's being touched around the world. It's not a local phenomenon in certain states in the U.S. Everybody is talking about how we get kids to read more complex text so they can be competitive in the world of work and college.

[08:21]

Absolutely. So we're all working on that irrespective of our various states or localities or territories. So we were thinking about short and complex pieces of text as an instructional approach and that you have to get the students to reread the text because the initial read isn't your deepest understanding. We go back to the text and we think about it and we come back to it later. But students and a lot of adults don't really like to reread. So we had to figure out what it takes to get people to reread.

[08:55]

We have recently watched 100 current close reading lessons. We're writing about this right now. And in these lessons, we watched the ways in which teachers got kids to reread. And there were only really three. Number one, they changed the task on the student. For example, a recent example was a teacher said, I'd like you to read this text just for the flow.

[09:16]

I want the words to wash over you. And the students did. And then she said, now I'd like you to go back and reread, and I'd like you to do some annotating. We're looking for the central idea. What is the author trying to tell us? And they did it because the task was different.

[09:32]

The second way we saw people get kids to reread was by asking really good questions. I'll come back to that. But a really good question can get a kid to reread. And third...

[09:42]

When we ask students for evidence from the text, they will go back and reread to find the evidence. And if they've annotated the text, they just read sections of it to find the right evidence for the question. So number two, we're looking for rereading to deepen your understanding. Number three, we're looking for some form of annotation, some sort of slowing down, marking a text where you can draw on the evidence that you've marked in your subsequent writing or your subsequent discussions. We want kids to think deeply about the text, marking central ideas, marking things that are confusing to them, marking questions they have. That can be online in a digital platform or it can be on paper.

[10:21]

We have to teach kids to do that. I was never taught to annotate. I ended up in college, and I had a roommate who was marking the text. It seemed like a reasonably good idea, so I started doing it. And I over-analyzed. I over-highlighted, because I never was taught how to think about a text.

[10:37]

So I want to make sure our students know how to think deeply about the text and mark it so they can go back and find it. There's nothing worse than opening a book that has yellow highlighter in it and there's nothing else. We have no idea why that was highlighted. We need to be more sophisticated on that. The fourth thing we're looking for, sorry, The fourth thing we're looking for is a collaborative conversation. For me, close reading requires, demands that students talk to each other about their understanding.

[11:08]

I don't think a close reading in the... If the students aren't talking to each other, I don't call it a close reading. I think close reading is peer-mediated and dialogic. And the last factor is the really, really good questions that we ask students that scale in their complexity across the re-readings.

[11:27]

Those five things are what I look for in a close reading lesson.

[11:31] SPEAKER_02:

So this sounds like the kind of reading that when students are asked to do it but maybe not set up for the optimal level of success with that, it sounds like they're being given a text that's too hard. I mean, do students feel that way the first time they're asked to do this that, oh, this text is just way above my level? I don't understand it at all. Is that kind of the experience? And what you're describing is different ways to kind of give students the confidence to tackle that challenging text and giving them specific things to focus on as they're doing that?

[12:03] SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And I think we should ask pretty low-level questions, almost giveaway questions. I call them motivational questions. Because when a kid gets an answer right on the first time, they are very likely to go back to that text and try a more complex question, and a more complex, and a more complex question. Starting off with the hard question, an inference question, or something super complicated, The student says, I'm stupid. I don't get this.

[12:33]

And they quit right there. If you ask them a question that's right there in the text, it feels kind of good. I got this. And they keep working it through. So there's some motivation we have to do. One of the things I'm thinking about as you asked me that question, though, is, yes, the students notice the texts are way harder than they're used to.

[12:53]

And when we say close reading, they know they're going to be reading very complicated texts. But the thing I started noticing when we started this process was the teachers. We don't like to see students struggle. It's not part of our culture.

[13:08] SPEAKER_02:

We want to help.

[13:10] SPEAKER_00:

Right. We want to rescue kids. We want to scaffold. We want to help. We do too much work. for them.

[13:16]

And that's our profession right now is if we don't scaffold, if we don't support kids, if we don't do that, we're bad teachers. So we have to change that, that some struggle, some cognitive dissonance, some effort and grit and perseverance is a good thing. I don't think school should be all day long, hard, difficult, complex, miserable. But I do think there are times in a class where it's worth it for kids to grapple with some ideas and get to the other side of it. I think it's highly rewarding. It feels amazing when you struggle through something and reach a new level of understanding.

[13:55] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And I'm thinking back to probably the closest experience I've had to that of really struggling with a text. And it was reading, well, certainly certain research literature comes across that way and takes a very close reading and maybe some discussion to really comprehend it and get what you're supposed to out of it. But reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which I still have not finished, as part of kind of a challenge or kind of an online book club thing, And I'm realizing as you were talking about what helps people get through complex text is that a big mistake I made was to just read it on my iPad with no annotations. And I could look up – one nice thing about that is I could look up any words that I didn't know and – David Foster Wallace had a particularly good way of expanding one's vocabulary, even if you think you know everything, you learn two words from his books.

[14:48]

But what I wasn't doing is processing what I was reading and reading with different purposes and different questions in mind, as you said. So I appreciate that experience, and I think as adults, we often don't experience that. I mean, I was a little bit humbled by, you know, after lots of grad school and lots of reading books that I thought were, you know, pretty challenging but not a challenge for me, to have that experience of slight frustration as an adult and think, wow, this is... This is actually a challenging text for me, even though I thought I was a pretty good reader.

[15:20]

I think we have to get into our students' shoes and learn to experience that as a good thing and not just a frustration that they need to be rescued from.

[15:29] SPEAKER_00:

I totally agree. And part of... what I think of as good professional development in this area puts people in that place where they are experiencing a close reading.

[15:43] SPEAKER_02:

I have had that experience where professional development has been set up in precisely that way and I totally agree. So how did you build that into the Close and Critical Reading PD Resource Center? So when teachers are learning this process of helping students access much more rigorous and challenging text, what do you take teachers through? What do you recommend that teachers go through in the online platform to gain that experience?

[16:08] SPEAKER_00:

online platform is the resource that teachers and leaders can use. In that platform there are examples that can be used in professional development of fairly complicated pieces of text with appropriate questions so that people can experience some success. So a coach, a PD provider, a principal, could plan a session with people using the materials inside the PD Resource Center to say, oh, here I'm going to use this poem that's in the Resource Center. I'm going to use this excerpt from science. I'm going to use this historical document. And I'm going to have teachers experience close reading with me being the lead on that, me meaning the coach or principal.

[16:52]

Then we can watch some kids. There's a video of me teaching some students. There are a lot of other teachers teaching students on our site. We're going to analyze what we experienced and compare it to what the kids experienced. What can we get to as the essential features of a close reading lesson that build that student's competence and confidence?

[17:13] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Doug, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how we might structure this across the course of a school year, where we've got lots of PD initiatives we need to factor in, lots of potential topics we could include, and I think especially at the secondary level, varying interest from different departments in this topic of reading. So, I mean, obviously our math department might not be as interested as English and social studies in close and critical reading. So what are some of your top recommendations for for school leaders as far as organizing literacy PD across the course of the school year?

[17:46] SPEAKER_00:

I think that human beings learn when they read, write, speak, listen, and view. It's how our brains work. All of us should be thinking about the role that these behaviors play for students. A math word problem is in part a reading problem. When kids explain their thinking in science, they explain it through verbal language or through written language. So we should be thinking through the various ways that input and output occur with learners in terms of language.

[18:16]

That doesn't mean that The science teacher or the math teacher is teaching basic reading skills to kids. That's not what I mean by that. But rather that all learning for humans is based in language. So we should think through the role that language plays in our class. And any part of the time that language is occurring, collaborative conversations, argumentation, how we teach kids to talk to each other, one access point for complex text is teaching kids how to have those collaborative conversations. And that can occur and should occur across the day.

[18:49]

That may be a very good place for secondary schools to start, is how much time do kids wrestle with complex ideas in the presence of their peers? That's one of the things I really look for. So they might start there. Other schools like to start with what's the learning target or the purpose or the objective and then align the experience that kids have to those learning targets. We've made the claim that a learning target has to include both content and language, that every teacher is always trying to teach content and language simultaneously. And it may be the disciplinary vocabulary is the language you're working on.

[19:28]

It may be more language functions like persuading or informing or explaining. But we're always trying to pair those. So a school may choose to start with what does a teacher expect kids to learn from the lesson. And that may be a good place to start. The resources are fairly extensive. Again, I don't think they're...

[19:50]

I don't think we should trudge through, you know, like, one month we're going to do this, one month we're going to do this, one month we're going to do this. I think we'd pick a starting place and get good at it and then say, where do we want to go next? A school that wants to start on collaborative conversations should hang out there. A school that wants to start on text-dependent questions can start there. And from there...

[20:07]

think through what is it we could learn next to take us to the next level?

[20:12] SPEAKER_02:

So one thing I might suggest is if you are an administrator and you have a literacy coach and maybe a key teacher leader, I think that what I would probably do is say to the two of them, hey, come in on some day that you're free over the summer or sometime when there's a little bit less time pressure on us, and take a look at this whole thing, look through the facilitator resources, the coaching resources, and then the actual participant materials, and let's pick out what we need to do. Let's pick out what's going to give us the greatest benefit right off the bat, what's going to address people's current challenges, and then really take people deeper on the process of guiding students through that complex text. Well, Doug, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your expertise from your perspective, both as a school leader, as a classroom teacher, and as a higher education professor.

[21:07]

Really appreciate your perspective and really appreciate the resources that you're making available in the Close and Critical Reading PD Resource Center.

[21:14] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you very much. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[21:20] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Fisher? As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed our conversation today because we got into the nuts and bolts of professional learning. And we talked about what it means to experience as learners what our students are experiencing. So I want to challenge you to put yourself in that position as a learner to really get into things that are challenging for you in terms of text, in terms of new subjects. And if literacy is not your area of expertise, you know, it's not mine.

[21:53]

But as a learner and as a leader of learning, I think it's critical that I get into that and develop the expertise that I'm asking my teachers to develop. And I want to recommend to you Fisher and Fry's PD Resource Center on Close and Critical Reading. And we're partnering with Corwin Literacy to make that available to you. And Doug mentioned that one purchase gets you access for your entire staff. And what Doug didn't mention is that it's ridiculously inexpensive. And I really think they probably should have priced this in the thousands of dollars because it is accessible to the entire staff.

[22:27]

and we'll give you more than a year of literacy PD resources for you and your coach and any key teacher leaders to work through and take your staff through. But it is only $250, and I don't know if they're going to keep that price long-term, but you can find out more about the Close and Critical Reading PD Resource Center at principalcenter.com slash literacy. So I hope you check that out. I hope you take them up on that ridiculously good offer of $250 for the entire year. And I hope you check out Doug and Nancy's books, Rigorous Reading and Text Dependent Questions.

[23:00]

They have terrific resources for K through 12. And I think it's something that every school should be involved in.

[23:07] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.