The Next Hunger Games?

by Bethany Bratney Book Reviews Notes from the Classroom

testing When teens go crazy for a book or a book series, it’s a school librarian’s dream come true. But with the success of one series, next comes the pressure of finding something similar to keep the reading momentum going. For the last few years, I’ve been chasing The Hunger Games and Divergent, digging through dystopian lit in search of the next epic YA page-turner. Well, dystopian fans and those who love them: look no further than The Testing series, by Joelle Charbonneau.

The Plot (Book One, No Spoilers)

Malencia (Cia) Vale is thrilled to learn that she has been chosen for The Testing, the rigorous process that candidates endure to qualify for the one remaining University. She has longed to follow in her father’s footsteps, and to leave her small, quiet Five Lakes Colony to see Tosu City, as well as the wider world that an education from The University can bring. But as she leaves, her father warns her to be extremely cautious. The Testing and the people who run it are not always as they seem. When the extreme and potentially dangerous Testing process begins, Cia sees that the stakes are much higher than she thought–and that her father might have been trying to protect her from hidden evil.

The Answer to Your “Hunger Games problem”

The Testing series has many similarities to both The Hunger Games and Divergent. Yet it is different enough to hold even a reluctant reader’s interest.

Readers will find a similarly powerful female protagonist, one with a specialized set of skills that makes her particularly exceptional in her new environment. Governmental corruption and conspiracy drive the action to continually new heights. Readers experience plot twists that drive the story at moments that otherwise would be routine. Hints of romance bloom between Cia and her old Five Lakes friend, Tomas, but never distract from the primary story. The books have similarly high levels of violence as The Hunger Games. The book covers even bear some resemblance to their dystopian predecessors.

With this series, teachers and parents will once again find their students reading for fun and asking for books as gifts. And with the film rights optioned by Paramount, the odds of seeing this trilogy become a movie series are high. I’ve field-tested the series with the students at my high school, and it has been a huge success. All of my copies are currently flying through the 9th grade at rapid speed.

Book Details

Interest Level: Grades 7-12 (violence is prevalent, making it questionable for younger readers)
Reading Level: Accelerated Reader 5.6; Lexile 830L
ISBN: 9780547959108
Format: hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
Publication Date: June 4, 2013
Awards: YALSA Quick Pick Top Ten 2014, Anthony Award 2014

Bethany Bratney (@nhslibrarylady) is a National Board Certified School Librarian at Novi High School. She reviews YA materials for School Library Connection magazine and for the LIBRES review group. She is an active member of the Oakland Schools Library Media Leadership Consortium as well as the Michigan Association of Media in Education. She received her BA in English from Michigan State University and her Masters of Library & Information Science from Wayne State University.

Writing Begins With Reading

by Hattie Maguire Book Reviews Notes from the Classroom Professional Learning

shutterstock_276546899 In a burst of unexplained energy (see my last blog post for more on my ongoing problem with this), I signed up for several sessions in Oakland Schools’ Literacy Webinar series. Some of the writers in the sessions were familiar to me, so I signed up for those sessions. But the first session—Revising Rhetorically: Re-seeing Writing through the Lens of Audience, Purpose, and Context—grabbed my attention, since I was knee-deep in introducing my new AP Language students to recognize audience, purpose, and context.

The webinar is next Thursday, October 22, and the session is followed by an optional discussion with Dr. Jennifer Fletcher about her book Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response. Still riding the wave of energy, I ordered the book. Unfortunately, by the time it arrived, the wave was long gone. It sat on my desk under a pile of papers waiting to be graded.

Finally, I picked it up. The first chapter is “Open Minded Inquiry,” and right away I was hooked. Fletcher marries argumentative writing with critical reading, explaining that “a rhetorical approach to texts acknowledges that writing begins with reading.” She writes about teaching students to do “reconnaissance listening”; that is, we must teach students to “listen” to conversations they wish to join.

Listening to the Conversation

Dr. Jennifer Fletcher

This concept hooked me, and I realized that I needed the book fourteen years ago, when I started teaching Debate. At the time, students would come to me, completely dismayed, and say they needed to change their topics because there was “no information” to support their arguments. A quick discussion with the student would usually reveal the same problem: there was “no information” because the argument was not a good one. The student had tried to cherry-pick evidence to support a side, rather than read about the topic—listening to the conversation—and then develop a position.

All through the opening chapter I was silently high-fiving Fletcher. She was nailing down every problem I’ve had when teaching students to argue effectively—both in my Debate classes and in argumentative writing assignments. Even more, her book gives specific techniques to tackle these problems, alongside useful classroom activities. Loads of them.

Several times I found myself wanting to ditch my planned activity for the day, and to replace it with one of her ideas. I didn’t—I’m trying to resist the urge to change things up quickly without thinking them through. But I know that I’ll be using her activities as I plan my upcoming units and rethink my course for next year. I’m hoping the webinar next week will help me get started on that rethinking.

Thursday, October 22, is coming up quickly, but you can still sign up for the webinar. You don’t need to read the book prior to the webinar, but I’d encourage you to get your hands on a copy. It’s a practical resource for helping our students think and read critically, and then enter those conversations with well reasoned, logical arguments.

Hattie Maguire is an English teacher and Content Area Leader at Novi High School. She is spending her fifteenth year in the classroom teaching AP English Language and Composition and English 10. She is a National Board Certified Teacher who earned her BS in English and MA in Curriculum and Teaching from Michigan State University.

Review of The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo

by Jianna Taylor Book Reviews Oakland Writing Project

readingstrategiesbook During the second half of the school year, I opened my classroom up to a doctoral student from the University of Michigan who was studying what untaught and sometimes intangible things make teachers successful. It was a wonderful experience, and I learned a lot about myself as a teacher through the reflective nature of the process. As compensation for my time and energy, I was presented with a $100 gift card for Amazon. I knew exactly what I would buy: books! One book, in particular, was on my wish list, Jennifer Serravallo’s The Reading Strategies Book. I had seen the publisher, Heinemann, promoting it on Twitter, and it looked really useful and practical for teachers on a day to day basis.

The book arrived in early June, and I set it aside to look at once the school year ended. In mid-June, I was a presenter in the 6-8 Informational Reading & Writing strand at the MiELA Network Institute. I hadn’t yet looked through The Reading Strategies Book, but I threw it into my crate just in case I got some extra time. My co-presenter, Cory Snider (@sniderc), and I wanted to be especially mindful of the needs of our participants since a number of them were returning from the year prior. So as we were looking through the exit comments at the end of day two and thinking about our plans for day three, I grabbed The Reading Strategies Book out of my crate and started skimming it.

Based on the reviews I had seen, I had a hunch the book was going to be good, but I didn’t know just how good it would be. As Cory was busy trying to put the finishing touches on our presentation for the next day, I kept yelling, “Cory! Look at this one! It’s perfect!” or “Cory! Isn’t this just the best idea?!” While he did agree that the book seemed pretty great, I think he probably could have done without my outbursts every 30 seconds. We ended up incorporating a number of Serravallo’s strategies into our plans for the next day, and the participants were just as excited as we were about the potential of this book. One group of participants is even planning to use it in their PLC’s next book study based on our recommendation.

The beauty of The Reading Strategies Book is in its simplicity, consistency, and organization. The 300 (!) strategies are broken up by goal, which mimic goals that we might have as teachers as we help students navigate various text types. These goals range from support for early readers to comprehending fiction in a variety of ways to improving comprehension of nonfiction to deepening students’ speaking and listening skills. Serravallo has organized her book so that each strategy fits onto one page, which includes:

a description of the strategy itself
a teaching tip or the language she might use in a lesson
prompts to use when talking with students
an image that shows an anchor chart or sample student work (I found these especially useful in helping me visualize what a strategy actually looks like in a classroom)
a suggested level, based on the Fountas and Pinnell Text Level Gradient (I can see teachers adapting them up or down to fit the needs to various students at various levels)
the genre or text type with which to use the strategy
the skill the strategy helps develop
a citation if the strategy came from somewhere else

I have so many pages bookmarked, especially in the nonfiction sections. I anticipate using this book regularly, and I’ve already told a number of my colleagues about it. A science teacher in my building even saw a tweet I made about it and wants to see how it can help her support her students’ understanding of science texts.

Jianna Taylor (@JiannaTaylor) is an ELA and Title 1 teacher at Orchard Lake Middle School in West Bloomfield. She is a member of the AVID Site Team and Continuous School Improvement Team at her school, among other things. She is also a MiELA Network Summer Institute facilitator and member of the OWP Core Leadership Team. Jianna earned her bachelor’s degree from Oakland University and her master’s degree from the University of Michigan. She also writes reviews of children’s books and young adult novels for the magazine Library Media Connection.

Review of Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World

by Jianna Taylor Book Reviews Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

As I mentioned in my review of Upstanders by Smokey Daniels and Sara Ahmed, I read a lot of professional books, especially in the summer. It’s late July as I’m writing this, and I’m on my eighth book of the summer, half of which have been professional books to grow my knowledge as a teacher (stay tuned for a review of Jennifer Serravallo’s The Reading Strategies Book).

After writing the review of Upstanders, I asked Delia DeCourcy, one of Oakland Schools’ literacy consultants, if she had any books she thought I might like to read and review. She sent over Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World by Kristen Hawley Turner and Troy Hicks, and I immediately knew this book would be right up my alley. Turner and Hicks begin the book with the “NCTE Policy Research Brief: Reading Instruction for All Students,” which acts as a framework and rationale for teaching students how to be connected readers and is referenced throughout the book.

Because teaching students to be skillful readers of digital texts is new to many teachers, Turner and Hicks carefully ease us into this world of connected reading by writing about their experiences, the experiences we as readers might have had, and how teachers might become more connected readers, for the purpose of knowing what their students will experience, as well as for simply growing their personal learning network (PLN). The authors include requisite theory for their work, then dig into what many teachers want from a professional book: practical application that can be used in the classroom. Turner and Hicks do not disappoint: Connected Reading is full of projects, ideas, and actual lesson plans that teachers can easily make their own and implement. Topics range from digital citizenship to making decisions about how best to search for information to collaborating on texts being read in class.

What may be the best part of this book is that it embodies the very principles that the authors espouse: the book itself (although a print text) is a great example of what connected reading could be even if students do not have digital texts. Connected Reading is filled with QR codes that take readers to additional content, much of it multimedia, but also connects to the authors’ wiki page, which offers additional resources and ways to connect and extend the conversation.

I started reading this book in the last few weeks of school, so I didn’t have much time to integrate its ideas into my practice, but I did notice myself becoming more aware of how students’ reading changed across platforms. I recall a distinct moment near the end of the year when I must have been giving directions, and I started saying something about how their reading of our last book was going to be different because they would be reading it and annotating digitally, and more important, collaboratively.

For our last unit, I knew that I wanted to try out some of the ideas from Connected Reading so that come September, I could dive in more completely. Since my district was not in the position to purchase ebooks, I was given permission to scanin its entirety the informational book we were reading as a class and post it chapter by chapter to Google Classroom, which is a closed system and accessible only to students in my class. (While I was posting to a closed system, there does seem to be a gray area in terms of copyright. I was using the scanned copy solely for educational purposes and Turner and Hicks even encourage teachers to have students scan or take screenshots of individual pages for annotating and collaborating.)

After scanning a chapter and posting it to Google Classroom as a PDF, students downloaded the chapter onto their Chromebooks using the Chrome extension Notable PDF. A quick note about Notable: this is one of my favorite and most used Chrome extensions both personally and professionally. It allows users to highlight, underline, strikethrough, and make comments on PDF documents that can be saved permanently. It also includes Google Drive integration. Depending on how a document is downloaded from Google Classroom, all students in a class or a group could be collaborating on the same document or it can be shared between student partners as well. Similar to the commenting feature in Google Docs, each person’s name shows up when he/she makes a comment so that students can easily see what their classmates are thinking as they read.

As my classes worked through the MAISA informational reading and writing units, we would practice various annotating skills depending on what our purpose was at the time. Sometimes students read in partnerships, sometimes they read independently, and sometimes we read as a whole class, annotating together and showing our collective thinking. Because students had such an intimate knowledge of the text through their annotations, their final project was to decide on a topic mentioned in the book they felt could have used more explanation and write their own “insert” chapter about that topic that mimicked the text features of the original book. Examples of this project can be found here.

As I think about next school year, I will definitely be incorporating Turner and Hicks’ ideas about teaching students to be skillful readers of digital texts with lessons on digital citizenship, setting up a digital reading life, looking into freely available digital copies of texts, and ways to help students navigate this digital information world in which they are already immersed.

Review of Upstanders: How to Engage Middle School Hearts & Minds with Inquiry

by Jianna Taylor Book Reviews Oakland Writing Project

9780325053592 Anyone who knows me knows that I am a voracious reader (comes with the English teacher territory, right?). Anyone who knows me really well knows that I’m not just reading books for pleasure, but that I’m a voracious reader of professional books. Case in point: I read five books about grading last summer. Riveting stuff.

A few months back, a colleague from the MiELA Network conference suggested I read the book Upstanders because it might help with my conference session this summer. The title and back cover information intrigued me, so I immediately ordered the book and awaited its arrival. My reading rate during the school year is definitely much slower than during the summer because there is so much else I have to do, but by any standard, I devoured Upstanders.

Of all of the professional books I have read, this is the first that felt as if it were written directly for me and the type of teacher I am. I could see myself as a teacher in the pages, but more than that, I could see a better version of my teacher self in the pages. I felt like I had a model of the type of teacher I want to be that wasn’t a huge leap from where I already am. Many times when I’m reading a professional book, I’ll want to do something the way the authors do, but I’ll know that that isn’t me or that the change seems too overwhelming, which leads me to not change at all. I was so enamored with this book that I tweeted at and sent emails to the authors–and they responded!

Upstanders is written as a collaboration between Daniels and Ahmed and offers a glimpse into the workings of Ahmed’s classroom, since she is still a practicing teacher. As the title would suggest, inquiry is a hallmark of Ahmed’s classroom, so I decided to try out some of her and Daniels’ ideas. To get her students engaged in inquiry work consistently, she has them involved in “mini-inquiries,” which are “quick exercise[s] in honoring our curiosity and finding out information about things that puzzle us in the world” (106). Mini-inquiries can take anywhere from a few minutes to a class period to complete, as they are supposed to be what the name suggests: mini. Sometimes Ahmed’s students are looking into a topic she suggested or a topic that grew out of a class discussion. Other times, students are researching something they are interested in finding out more about. I really liked this idea and wanted to incorporate it into my practice, but I worried about taking time away from our already packed curriculum. As the authors suggested, though, a great way to try a mini-inquiry is on one of those days right before a break where you’ve finished a unit but don’t want to start another one. So the day before mid-winter break, I found myself with the perfect opportunity to try a mini-inquiry.

That day, I began the lesson by talking with my kids about how we were going to try something new, and that we would research the random things we’ve always wanted to know. They kind of looked at me funny, so as an example, I told them a story about how whenever I walk by this particular building in the winter, I see that the water has frozen in motion as it came out of the gutter. I always thought that I wanted to be there at the exact moment the water went from a liquid to a solid since the ice looks like a frozen waterfall. I then went on to explain that if I wanted to make this a researchable question (which we had talked about in the argument paragraph unit we had just finished), I might say, “How does moving water freeze?” I then asked students to brainstorm the things that they had always wondered but never bothered to look up or learn about. After students had talked with a partner, we created a class list of wonderings to keep up throughout the year (see the image below). Some of the wonderings are very profound and some of them are less serious, which was OK for that day’s purpose.

Whole class generated list of our wonderings

Once students turned their topics into research questions and I briefly modelled how I might go about looking for information related to my question, they took out their Chromebooks and began researching. After just a few minutes, hands started popping up:

“Mrs. Taylor, come LOOK at this!”

“You have to see this!”

“Can you believe this is true?!”

“That is not what I expected to find out!”

As students began finding information that related to their questions, I urged them to post it on our Google Classroom wall under the thread I had begun with my question and an article about it.

Google Classroom wall

As the hour ended, many students had found some kind of answer to their question and shared with the whole class, many of them fascinated by each other’s findings. I had not anticipated this, but as I was wrapping up the hour and talking through what students had done, I noticed that within one hour, students had truly gone through the entire research process in an abbreviated form that we had spent many weeks going through with the argument paragraph. Students brainstormed topics they were interested in learning more about, created research questions, sorted through various sources on the Internet to choose good ones, and shared their learning with others.

As I envision future research projects, both this year and in the future, I can see how engaging students in mini-inquires will help pique their interest and allow them to continue to hone their research skills. This could be a great way to start a unit or allow students to learn about different topics within a unit. In fact, the Common Core asks that students be involved in short research projects throughout the year that focus specifically on creating research questions and finding information to support them (corestandards.org). Mini-inquiries could be a great way to achieve this in addition to all of their other benefits.

Daniels, Harvey, and Sara K. Ahmed. Upstanders: How to Engage Middle School Hearts and Minds with Inquiry. New York: Heineman, 2014.

Jianna Taylor is an ELA and Title 1 teacher at Orchard Lake Middle School in West Bloomfield. She is a member of the AVID Site Team and Continuous School Improvement Team at her school, among other things. She is also a MiELA Network Summer Institute facilitator and member of the OWP Core Leadership Team. Jianna earned her bachelor’s degree from Oakland University and her master’s degree from the University of Michigan. She also writes reviews of children’s books and young adult novels for the magazine Library Media Connection.

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