Wish List: Books for Classroom Library

Help turn a teenager into a lifelong reader!

Many of you may know that I have started a choice reading component in my classroom that has led to me building a classroom library.  While I still send students to the school library, having the books within reach saves instructional time and allows me to help match books and students during small transitional moments in the classroom. 

My colleagues and I are trying to build a community of readers within our classrooms.  With kindness of family, friends, and benefactors, I have been building a classroom library with materials for high school students of all reading abilities.  Watching most of my students become engaged readers has been encouraging and uplifting, but all this magic requires BOOKS and LOTS of them.  Please consider donating to our book drive.  I am in need of new or used books that would appeal to teen readers; however, I will be happy to accept books that can be sold or traded to get the books that we need. 

most of my students will have read between 6 and 10 novels this semester.  At least two will surpass the 20 novels read mark.  That's no small feat for a high school student.

The books listed below are all book that my students have specifically asked for:

Books by Gary Paulsen

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
The River by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Return by Gary Paulsen
Brian's Hunt by Gary Paulsen

Books by Katie Alender
Bad Girls Don't Die (I have one copy, with a waiting list)
Bad Girls Don't Die: As Dead as It Gets (many requests!)
Bad Girls Don't Die: From Bad to Cursed


Books by Carl Deuker

Heart of a Champion
High Heat
Night Hoops
Painting the Black
Payback Time
Gym Candy 
Runner     

Books by Dave Pelzer

A Child Called It
The Lost Boy
A Man Called Dave
The Privilege of Youth
Help Yourself for Teens

Various Sports Books

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger

Though my Eyes, by Tim Tebow

Books by Nicholas Sparks

Safe Haven
The Best of Me
The Lucky One
Dear John
Nights in Rondanthe
A Walk to Remember
Message in a Bottle

Books by Tess Gerritsen
(the Isle/Rizzoli Series)
The Apprentice
The Surgeon
Vanish
The Sinner
Silent Girl
The Mephisto Club
The Keepsake
Ice Cold
The Silent Girl
Last to Die
Body Double

Books by Anne Rice
Interview with a Vampire

Books by Sarah Dessen

Books by Heather Brewer
The Vladimir Tod Chronicles
Eight Grade Bites
Ninth Grade Slays
Tenth Grade Bleeds
Eleventh Grade Burns
Twelfth Grade Kills

The Slayer Chronicles
First Kill 

Books by Robert Rigby
Goal II: Living the Dream
Goal: Glory Days





 
 

Reading with an Analytical Eye: Why We Write about our Reading

When I was writing every day to my class, the quality of my student's journal responses improved.
Note: please forgive the first-draft, unedited writing.

After many hours of research and thought, I am getting a clearer vision for the purpose and expected out come of our Reader Response Journals.  I want my students to have daily thought-clarifying experiences that relate to their reading. I believe that the process of articulating their thoughts about their reading will improve their analytical and thinking skills.  I also believe that their engagement with this type of thinking must occur every day.   Last semester, I personally learned how difficult it was to write about my own reading as I tried to model the sort of thinking that I wanted my students to practice.  Each night as I finished my own choice reading, I could easily say, "That was good", but  articulating how the author created that feeling in me was agonizing at first.  The next morning, I would compose a letter to my students containing my thoughts about my reading.  After writing many of those letters, I now read with that "filter", always thinking of how to discuss the author's craft and literary elements such as characterization, conflict, metaphor, suspense, theme, symbolism, and so on.  I want my students to develop that same mental process, and I believe that reader response writing is a proven way to develop those critical thinking skills.

As a result, I have developed a list of possible journal prompts for students that should focus their thinking while they are reading in their independent reading books.  I developed this list in response to the common complaint that my daily journal prompts didn't always fit a student's reading experience from the night before.  By providing choice, but requiring variety, I hope to encourage more active reading.  Another advantage of this process should be that students will have questions in mind before they do their reading.  If they are reading these writing prompts in mind, they should become more engaged, analytical readers.

Certainly modeling will pay a large part in my student's ability to craft this sort of writing.  I am very grateful to have a new document camera so that I can display my own journal.  As you can see from the sloppy, brief letter to my students, I find the white board to difficult place to communicate your thoughts.  Now the challenge is to carve out time for my own choice reading on top of planning, assessment, parent contacts, meetings, paperwork, and family life.  Sustaining my own reading life is worth is though; the more share my reading life and experiences the more honest and courageous my students become in their reading lives.

Blogging How to Create and Use Rubrics: Part 2

What Not to Grade:  My rubric has criteria that are not aligned to my intended learning outcomes.

Brookhart sure does pack a punch in Chapter Two, "Common Misconceptions About Rubrics."  I was quickly taken aback as the author made me think twice, and then three and four times, about the purpose and outcomes of using rubrics.  According to Brookhart, many of the rubrics commonly used or circulated on the Internet are simply tools that measure compliance and not learning. (Ouch!) Brookhart also makes note of the prevalence of "so many near-miss — engaging but "empty" —classroom performance tasks." (17)  (Ouch, again!)

This chapter warns against "confusing rubrics with requirements and quantities" and discusses the misguided nature of creating rubrics that are simply checklists in disguise:  "What is at issue is the use of task-based (rather than learning based) rubrics that count or enumerate aspects of the directions students are expected to follow.  The resulting "grade" is a measure of compliance and not learning."  (21) This certainly gives me something to ponder as I set a new course within my own classroom.

Self-Reflections

Q:  Think about a performance assessment that you have used and scored with rubrics.  Were the criteria in the rubrics about the task or about the learning outcomes the task was intended to have students demonstrate?  Do the task and the rubric criteria need modification, and if so, what would that look like?
 A. I have used rubrics to grade two assignments and to grade participation in a Socratic Seminar.  The first assignment was a Glogster project.  I found the evaluation process to be tedious for that rubric, but upon reflection, I see that that rubric was partially based on the criteria for the task and didn't really measure the learning outcomes.  That rubric definitely would need to modified.  On an interesting note, I felt very frustrated by the whole assignment.  I noticed that the "A" students earned A's, the "B" students made B's, and so on.  I felt that, with just weeks to go before the state exam, I didn't have time for something that did not improve students outcomes.

Q: Were you familiar with the argument against rubrics that merely summarize the requirements of the task, as opposed to rubrics that describe evidence of learning?  If the argument is new to you, what do you think of about this issue now?
A.  I was not aware of this argument.  I agree that rubrics that merely summarize the task requirements would not provide the evidence needed to assess learning.  I am trying to adopt a SBG (Standards Based Grading) model in my classroom, and I was struck by Brookhart's criticism of neatness as a criteria — a fairly common grading practice — when neatness is not one of our learning goals as defined by our standards. 

Blogging "How to Create and Use Rubrics": Part 3

These Reader Response Journals are helping me to learn the strengths and weaknesses of my student's
reading and writing skills, but how do I assess them -- and assign a grade -- in a reasonable amount of time? 

So now I am faced with a real conundrum.  I have stacks and stacks of journals to be graded, and each one takes a prohibitive amount of time to grade using this somewhat ineffective rubric that I created.  After reading chapter three of How to Create and Use Rubrics, I am getting a clearer picture of the source of some of my problems.  This chapter, entitled "Writing or Selecting Effective Rubrics", provides some doable adjustments that teachers can easily make to increase the effective of rubrics as a tool to improve learning outcomes; however, some decisions will (in may case) create major paradigm shifts in order to align performance tasks to learning outcomes. To highlight the major points of the chapter:

1. Rubric characteristics should be on a quality continuum from high to low. (24)
   This much I knew.
   
2. Effective rubrics do not list all possible criteria; they list the right criteria for the assessment's purpose.
   This seems like a no-brainer, but I see now that I have elements in my rubric, such as neatness, that are not relevant to the standard that I want to address through this task.
3. The overarching question to ask yourself: What characteristics of student work would give evidence for student learning of the knowledge or skills specified in this standard?
   This one makes my brain hurt.  I will need to continue to reflect on this.
4. Aim for the lowest-inference descriptors. 
   While she advocates against using the rubric descriptors as a dressed-up checklist, she advises teachers to choose precise words that clarify instead of words that are open to several interpretations.

Brookhart included a rubric "makeover" in this chapter, which I found very helpful.  She added a before and after shot of a rubric for a elementary science class that underwent her keen evaluation and remodeling.The improvement is substantial, creating a targeted rubric that addresses a learning outcome.  I realize now that some of my criteria are unnecessary and cumbersome.  I also need to reflect upon my desired learning outcome in order to narrow the focus.  In either case, it looks like my rubric needs a makeover.

I have read ahead a bit, and I was struck by how vital it is to have students analyze the rubric and how the growth comes by having students assess themselves using the rubric.  While everyone of my students had a copy of the rubric taped into their journals, I don't think that any of them actually evaluated themselves against it before submitting them for interim grading. I was disappointed the vast majority of the work that I saw.  So not only am I overwhelmed with the time commitment of grading these rubrics, I'm not happy with the quality of most of their products.

Blogging Brookhart's How to Create and Use Rubrics

If you have a love-hate relationships with rubrics as I do,
Susan Brookhart's book could help you problem solve your way to rubric peace.

I have been intrigued by the possibility of blogging through professional development titles for some time.  So in light of my six-word memoir, "Tired of fear bringing me down", I am diving in to the world of public writing.  Here's hoping that I survive the disparages of the inevitable critics.

Last semester, I tried to embrace the "Rigor and Rubrics" rally cry heralded by my school's NCDPI Transformational Coach.  After my initial foray into Rubric-World, I have come to appreciate their value and their liablility.  As of late, I have been feeling their pressing burden as I have been grading Reader's Response Journal's using an analytic rubric to the tune of twenty minutes a piece.  While my dining room table was slowly bowing from the weight of eighty-eight journals, I scribbled the calculation in the margins of my notes: 29 hours.

So my dilemma is two fold: how to rescue myself from such a heavy immediate chore while, at the same time, pushing my students towards the sort of deep-analytical thinking that I was hoping to develop through their journals.  How convenient that just last week a copy of Susan M. Brookhart's How to Create and Use Rubrics arrived in my mailbox.

In the spirit of the blogging trend and the self-reflections so valued in the educational field, I have chosen to complete the marginal exercises scattered throughout the text in this forum. 

Q: What is your current view of rubrics?
A:  Rubrics can be valuable in that they clarify expectations for students and potentially elevate the standards of quality.  On the flip side, every analytic rubric that I have created has taken between fifteen and twenty minutes to score.  I do not have an extra thirty hours a week to devote to my job when I have other work that needs to be done:  calling parents, developing instructional materials, grading other assessments, lesson planning, and managing a choice reading program that takes significant out-of-class time to maintain.  So, I am on the fence as to whether I consider myself a proponent of the rubric movement.  I am hoping this book will help me create clear, fair, sustainable -- and dare I say -- rigorous assessment practices.

Q: What evidence would it take to convince you that using rubrics with learning-based criteria in your classroom would enhance student learning of content outcomes and improve students' learning skills as well?  How can you get that evidence in your own classroom.?
A:  At this point in my career, I am convinced that using well-crafted rubrics would enhance student learning and improve learning skills, as well.  For me, the difficulty seems to be with the time invested to actually evaluate a student product.  With regard to Brookhart's text, I would say that the outcomes of some of the mentioned studies on rubrics were encouraging.  I especially took note of the study that showed that college biology students, who evaluated a peer using a rubric, came to the same conclusions as their teacher (13). My faith in rubrics as a fair way to evaluate writing  increased earlier this year when my high-school aged daughter's Civics teacher used a rubric to grade an essay; I read the essay, used the rubric to evaluate it, and came to the same evaluation and grading conclusion as her teacher.  As far as rubrics improving learning, I predict that the quality of the rubric will affect the quality of the learning.