Celebrating Reading with Furry Friends! by Mary Noschese

Celebrating Reading with Furry Friends! 

by Mary Noschese

Personal Experience and Dreams

Bringing reading dogs to my classroom has been a decade-long dream for me. My late mother, Joanne, a special education and elementary teacher herself, brought many reading dogs to her school throughout her long career. My sister, Ann, and I always try to find ways to honor her through her love of reading, children, and dogs. Now, that love of reading (and dogs) lives on as her legacy reignites at WPSD! 

Reading Dogs

Reading Education Assistance Dogs (R.E.A.D.)Ⓡ are trained therapy dogs with even more training than the typical therapy dog. They are taught to sit quietly for extended periods of time, look at a book, and pay attention as students read aloud. Children who take part in this type of reading program have improved their reading skills and confidence. They can read at a faster rate, concentrate longer, and increase their reading comprehension. Reading to dogs helps students relax and enjoy the reading experience. 

The Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf

The Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (WPSD), a non-profit, tuition-free school, provides academic and extracurricular programs to deaf and hard of hearing children from birth through twelfth grade. Founded in 1869, WPSD continues its tradition of excellence through services to children across Pennsylvania. WPSD’s barrier-free, all-inclusive communication environment meets the needs of the individual student. American Sign Language, Sign Supported English, and Spoken English are all incorporated to promote the academic, social, emotional, and physical development of our students. 

Read Across America for Older Readers

Every year, the WPSD middle school ELA team adapts Read Across America day for their more mature readers. Students read books, classroom magazines, passages, or articles throughout the morning. They create a *Thinking Map to show what they have learned from their reading (**student work below). Each map earns them 5 tickets to enter the change drawing for different prizes. Students can also earn tickets by reading with a friend who needs support or taking an Accelerated Reader quiz from their library books. Students have a chance to win many different prizes from gift cards and graphic novels to sports equipment and other teen-trending accessories. 

Furry Friends

In February of this year, the WPSD Middle School ELA teachers prepared a fun and surprising unit for their students! Each class read about all kinds of dogs: working dogs, guide dogs, therapy dogs, search and rescue dogs, police dogs, fire dogs, military dogs, and even R.E.A.D dogs! Students created different types of research projects and presented them to their peers. Unbeknownst to them, they were preparing for their surprise guests for Read Across America Day. On March 3rd, the Humane Animal Rescue and Animal Friends surprised our students with their teams of READING DOGS! These lucky and very grateful students spent time reading to Lyric, Tigger, Clancy, and Captain Crunch (“Cappy”) in a safe and non-judgmental environment. Students could relax and practice their reading skills in the company of a soft and cuddly friend. Each dog earned many belly scratches and hugs for their patience and listening skills. It truly was a terrific experience, and PAWesome memories were made! Our students had a great time reading to such a loving, attentive non-judgmental audience.  

How to Bring Reading Dogs to Your School

Does this sound like an event you would like to host at your school? The first thing I did was write a small proposal to our administrators for permission to host this type of event. After the pandemic, I saw that our middle school age students could really benefit from an experience like this, and our administration agreed! I started by contacting a close colleague of mine that volunteers at the Humane Animal Rescue and Animal Friends. She reached out, and several dog teams responded! We were so thrilled to have groups from each organization come to read with us. 

We were thrilled to have WTAE-TV capture this magical event!  Check out their wonderful story!

*Thinking Maps© are similar to graphic organizers; which promote student activity, in that they are visual representations, but they do much more than that. They are visuals that support representations of an actual thought process. Thinking Maps© are visuals of our eight cognitive processes we use to make sense of the world. Created by Dr. David Hyerle, each of the eight maps are linked to specific higher order thinking patterns. Dr. Hyerle states that “Thinking Maps are eight fundamental thinking skills defined and animated by maps and introduced as a common visual language for thinking and learning across whole learning communities.” They help students become aware of and create mental operations in their learning environment. They do not work only for students. Thinking Maps© are great for educators, as well. These maps aid in the writing process and for planning instruction. 

**Student work: As you can see, these Thinking Map scaffolds can be modified to fit all level readers. Some students could draw their story, while others could develop their own categories and details. 

Author Bio:

Mary Noschese is in her twentieth year as an ELA Middle School Teacher, Reading Specialist, and Instructional Coach. She has spent most of her career at WPSD, helping students find their love for reading. She is currently a second year doctoral student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for Curriculum and Instruction. She loves exploring and traveling with her husband Aaron, daughter Lucy Jo, and big red dog Copper. 

 

The Persistent Narrative of Learning Loss in the Face of Genuine Student Needs by Hannah Lewis

The Persistent Narrative of Learning Loss in the Face of Genuine Student Needs

by Hannah Lewis

Teachers, how tired are we, as we navigate this year’s standardized testing sessions, of hearing about learning loss? If you are like me, the term triggers clenched teeth and rolled eyes. So when I saw this PBS segment earlier this month about how parents’ perceptions of their children’s grade level performance were not “accurate,” I thought, Oh, a new angle to stoke alarm about how doomed this generation of children are academically…

Does this mean that I don’t care about my students’ learning, or about how accurately parents understand their children’s academic performance? I like to think not. I tend to hold my students to what I consider to be quite high standards, and to dialogue regularly and specifically with parents and caregivers about students’ performance. 

So what’s my beef–what’s our beef, perhaps–with this language? 

The fact of the matter is, my issue is twofold. 

Academics at the Expense of Social-Emotional Needs

First, the kids are not alright, and that should be the primary focus of everyone in education or who works with children in any capacity. In March, the CDC released a report that, in my mind, painted a much grimmer picture than any set of test scores I’ve ever seen. One in five teen girls has experienced sexual violence in the last year. Three in five felt “persistently hopeless.” One in four seriously contemplated suicide. And LGB teens reported similar concerns. Make no mistake: these statistics should alarm us all. 

I have always hated that old saying we hear so often in “trauma-informed” professional development sessions: “You have to Maslow before you can Bloom.” I don’t believe that’s true. Many of our students experience ongoing trauma, chronic stress, homelessness, food insecurity, and other obstacles; they are still capable of learning. That said, when students are so persistently traumatized and sad, I am not sure that reading remediation programs and math drills are the best solution for their mental, emotional, or academic progress. 

Reading and writing are incredibly powerful tools to leverage for social and emotional healing. At the WPCTE HOPE through JOY conference, one of the most powerful sessions I attended, Dr. Richard Koch’s “Trauma-Informed Teaching is an Act of Love: Building it in Our Classrooms,” explored how to ignite students’ enthusiasm for writing through authentic and mindful writing opportunities. Not once do I recall Dr. Koch mentioning students’ grade levels or career readiness–but of course, students who are enthusiastic about writing, and who associate writing with positive self-perception, will engage with it more and will get better at it, by whatever arbitrary metrics we choose to use to assess them.

What Even is a "Grade Level"?

And that arbitrariness is my second complaint. When we say students are reading at a second-grade level or a tenth-grade level, these numbers really don’t mean anything. Half of U.S. adults read at or below what we consider a sixth-grade level. This information raises the question, “Why do we expect seventh-graders to read better than their parents?”

Obviously (at least I hope it’s obvious!) I’m not suggesting that students who reach what we consider to be a sixth-grade reading level are done learning. Rather, I just want to point out that this categorization is random and arbitrary and reflects little. To develop students’ reading levels, we should introduce them to high-interest, rich, engaging texts that they will approach with curiosity and work to understand. Instead, what we too-often do when faced with a deficit-remediation model is drill students with passages that mean little to them and standards-aligned questions for them to answer correctly or incorrectly. My preference would be to engage them in authentic conversations about characters’ dilemmas, how they navigate the world, and what the author of a text is suggesting about life. 

It’s easy to see these complaints and say that I’m just a disgruntled teacher who wants to accept students’ abilities as just being what they are and not push them to achieve more. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 

As I wrote back in June of 2021, when WPCTE read Dr. Gholdi Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius for book club, “I’m trying to reframe my thinking slightly to instead consider how to leverage students’ diverse experiences of this past school year to cultivate genius.” Cultivating genius does not mean holding children to arbitrary “grade level” standards and framing their current levels as “deficient” if they don’t meet that arbitrary standard. Neither, however, does it mean that students should not be challenged. 

This year, some of the work I’ve done to engage students in meaningful ways that have allowed them to leverage their diverse experiences include:

• Code-switching lessons that require students to read in dialect and reflect on their home languages and dialects and the privileges they enjoy or don’t enjoy as a result 
• Free-writes on high-engagement topics such as their perceptions of entrenched wealth in society, their opinions about the impact of nature on their lives, etc. 
• Class discussions that connect difficult rich readings like Their Eyes were Watching God, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible and A Raisin in the Sun–to name a few–to their own lives, experiences, and values
• Poetry lessons that challenge students to define, reexamine, and redefine what qualifies something as a poem, considering American Sign Language, concrete poems, spoken-word poems, and ars poeticas as examples

When it comes to how parents see students' progress, I don’t spend a lot of time talking to them about the “grade level” at which their child reads. Of course, if I notice their child is struggling with the coursework, I point it out; they generally already know. But what I have tried to do this year, and what I will continue to do, is to talk to parents specifically about how their child is doing socially (yes, even in eleventh grade; and, yes, even at a cyber school); how their child is handling the workload and stress of the school year; how enthusiastic their child is about their coursework; how engaged their child is in class discussions; and what they and their child might need from me to facilitate student learning. 

I hope that this kind of dialogue is more fruitful than a conversation “correcting” parents’ perceptions of their child’s “grade level performance” might be.