Did you ever spend your life teaching something, only to have someone come along and sum it all up in a sentence or two, with more precision and accuracy than you ever did?  It happened to me this summer when I heard my friend and former TC colleague Dorothy Barnhouse speak.  She is the author of Readers Front and Center (Stenhouse 2014) and What Readers Really Do with Vicki Vinton (Heinemann 2012).

She told us about a struggling middle school reader she's been working with.  He was reading a text out of a reading anthology.  To Dorothy, the text was immediately recognizable.  It was Chapter 31 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  It describes a dark setting with a sliver of light.  The student got every word right.  Dorothy asked him where the story takes place.  Noticing that it was a dark place with just a sliver of light, the student said that it's in a movie theater.  Dorothy worked some more with the student to figure out his reasoning.

That night, she looked at her own copy of Tom Sawyer.  She reread Chapter 30 and realized that it gave the perfect setup for a reader to know that the characters are in a cavern.  She then reread Chapter 31 and saw that without the context clues in the previous piece, a reader, especially a 21st century middle school student in Brooklyn, might have no way of knowing that the scene is in such a faraway remote place.  It's because there is no context!  There is no context from the student's prior knowledge.  There is no context from the previous chapter.  There is no context in the explicit language of the chapter itself.  "Context," Dorothy told us, "is key."

In a previous post, I wrote about Plato's Allegory of the Cave.  Plato writes about how confusing it would be to interpret the world simply through the shadows of reality.  When you only see the shadows of truth, you can be very confused about what's going on around you.  Inadvertently, we do this every time we remove the context of something and turn it into an activity.  Here are some ways in which you can add real context to seemingly isolated activities...

1. When teaching new vocabulary, immerse it in the context of something real.  Name where you found the word and why it's useful.  If you or a student discovered it in a book, describe the context around the word.  It will help students to better understand the nuances.  This will help them use it better and more often! 

You should also have kids orally create sentences with a partner for the word.  It takes away some of the, "I'm doing this for the teacher" flavor of the traditional writing a sentence for each new word activity and make it seem more real.  The nuances will shine through much more, because kids will develop context through the oral revision of sentences with their partners or the whole class.

2. When asking students to write about their reading, the context is definitely important.  Think about the purpose of writing about reading.  Is it to simply prove to the teacher that they read the chapter?  (although, most savvy students figure out ways to do this without really reading)  Or is it to develop their thinking so that they can read on with greater depth and synthesis? 

The latter might create sketches, abbreviations, and other messy icons of thinking.  However, the thinking is what we're going for!  The writing about reading is actually a part of the process of reading, not an end product that's just for accountability.  Once kids tap into how a timeline, a jotting about a thought, a T-chart, or a sketch can make them think more deeply in their text today, it can create greater context for their continued reading tomorrow.

3. When imagining the physical layout of the room, try to establish a learning context for the charts on the wall.  Which charts are helping students act with greater independence, because they've had a hand in creating them?  This doesn't necessarily mean that their handwriting is on the charts, but that they were created with the students during and after learning something. 

When kids can look at charts and be reminded of something they learned how to do, these strategies are triggered and strengthened at each glance.  That's why we tend to not reuse charts from previous years, instead opting to recreate these with each new class.  This is also a good argument against buying ready-made charts in the store with things like classroom rules, examples of grammar and punctuation, or content-specific vocabulary.  These have context, but the context doesn't match that of the experience of your class, and in that way, they're very limiting.

4. When teaching our minilessons, we have to pay close attention to the connection at the beginning and the link at the end.  By naming how what we're about to learn is important to reading, writing, learning as a whole process, we are establishing context.  We say, "Something I've noticed," or "Something good readers or writers do is," to help them see how useful this new knowledge is and how it fits in to everything else that they do.  We almost have to sell the minilesson in that way...telling them how urgent today's strategy is for what they do each day.  At the end, by saying to students that what they just heard in these 10 short minutes will help them today and every day when they do similar work, we are establishing context.  By holding them applying these skills each day in their lives as readers and writers and learners, we are strengthening the context. 

So, imagine a world without context.  We'd be filled with shadows and misunderstandings.  Sometimes we get so upset (and rightfully so!) at the policymakers and politicians who are calling the shots of how and what we should be teaching.  I don't think it's because any of us are closed-minded, after all, we are in the business of learning!  It's because when those people tell us what's wrong with classrooms, they are talking without the context of being in classrooms every day, teaching real kids with real problems.  They don't have the context to really understand our world.  It's for this very same reason that we need to have context at the heart of our teaching---context is at the heart of true understanding!

Let's think of all the acronyms that are crowding our classrooms these days?  SGO, SCiP, PARCC, SGP.  That's four.  They don't include local acronyms that vary from place to place.  There are so many that New Jersey has its own link to define the various acronyms that we need to know.  Yes, the acronyms have their own website!!!  http://www.state.nj.us/education/genfo/acronyms.htm.  Doesn't that seem just OOC?? (Out of control...)

It seems kind of crowded these days in our schools next to all these snappy sounding initiatives.  They're taking up all the air in the room, you might say.  You might agree that they're taking away some of the great joy that we relished before these most recent years of change.  What can we do about this?

This summer, my friend Patty McGee held a keynote address about bringing joy back to teaching.  In it she talked about a scientist named Dan Gilbert at Harvard, who is a happiness expert (yes, that's a real job!) 

Often, we put happiness at the end of our journey.  We postpone it.  We say, "If my students will ____, I'll be happy."  The blank is often something very goal-oriented...learn a concept, get a good score, get along, become more organized.  Sometimes the goal is something else, about the more adult aspects of our work.  "If only ______, I'll be happy."  That might mean getting a new contract, surviving an observation, being done with a parent conference. 

Patty reminded our audience how important it is to not postpone the joy, but to make it a part of the journey instead.  Find smaller bits of it through the smaller successes of the journey itself.  If you are helping your kids work through a conflict, don't wait until it's over (and you're tired) to find satisfaction.  While you're working through it, take satisfaction that you are teaching them something so important that it will impact every relationship they ever have in their lives!  Instead of feeling frustrated that a child isn't reading at that higher level, take joy in the fact that you are in the moment of helping her learn the skills that are necessary to have deep comprehension where she is, and that that is leading her somewhere new in the long run.

It's September!  There are lots of miles and months of learning to go before we reach the final destination of this school year.  There are many things in our work over which we don't have much control right now.  However, you can take control of your joy.  Find it in the act of teaching.  Find it in the act of your own learning.  Find it in the kids who led you to this career in the first place!  This doesn't mean to ignore the problems of what's going on around us.  It means not waiting until all your goals are met to be happy about the work you're doing.  It means focusing on what's right and on the joy of the journey itself.  Bring back that lovin' feeling!  You're the only one who can!

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

That awkward silence! 

Just like on a first date, finding something to talk about. 

White space that we just want to get out of!

But it's so telling!

We're all afraid of the awkward silence.  We ask questions.  Students don't answer.  Often in an attempt to alleviate the awkwardness of the moment, we jump in with the answer, or give very low level clues to help the student arrive at the answer.  Sometimes they get the answer right.  They guess what's in our heads.  They got the final product we wanted.

But they don't really learn anything.  Except one thing.

They learn to become passive, because if they wait long enough, the teacher will give them the answer.  Is that a college and career ready skill?

So, instead of fearing the awkward silence, think of it as a chance to wear your assessment hat.  Yesterday, I was working with a 1st Grader.  Her teacher and I were assessing her reading level.  Based on last year's work, we started her assessment at Level E.  "Oh that's easy," she said.  "I read lots of books like that last year."  She began reading a book called In the Mountains by Mary Cappellini.  The first line reads, "I saw an owl inside a tree."  She bravely attacked the words on the first page.

"I...was...an...I don't know that next word," she told me, her eyes waiting anxiously for me to give her the word.  "What do you think?" I asked. 

Silence. 

More silence.

Her teacher hedged in her seat.  So did the student.  She went back to the text.  "Owl...I saw an owl in-...[looking at picture of the owl]...inside the tree."  Wow!  She got the word right, but she also learned from the reading.

She read the next page.  The words said, "I saw a deer stare at me."  She read the words, "I...was [notice that? same mistake again!]...a...[long pause]...deer...I saw a deer...st...[very long pause]..."  It was getting half-past awkward, over 2 minutes, so I said, "stare, do you know that word?" 

"Yes, I have staring contests with my brother all the time!" she said.  Clearly, she knew the word.  "So, finish up the sentence," I told her.  "I saw a deer stare at me," she said. 

What did her teacher and I learn?  We learned a lot more than if we had just given her the words.  We learned a lot more than what her level is or isn't.  We learned a lot about how she reads.
We learned that when she can't decipher words, she goes for the visual cuing system, and not the meaning, and not so much the structural.  She goes for those once she has some footing based on visual cues.  We learned that in a heavily pattern-based Level D text, she doesn't recognize the patterns in the text.  We learned that even though she knew words like "stare," she didn't recall her bank of familiar words.  All this sets us up for our next few conferences!

But most importantly, we learned that if we used enough wait time, we would learn so much more about the child's process of thinking and learning than in hearing her get the answer right by just repeating it after us.

This happened in reading.  The same silence of wait time can happen in writing, math, science, social studies, art, music, foreign language, driver's ed, discipline, anything!  If you wait long enough, you'll learn a tremendous amount about the student's learning, and the road map of how to reach and teach them will magically unfold in front of you! 

An awkward silence is a learning silence!