Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, Issue #32, July 1, 2004. © by CJEAP and the author(s).

by Wayne Serebrin with Melissa Ryz, University of Manitoba

I am surprised my thinking could have changed in such a short period of time. Now that I have been through this literacy inquiry from start to finish, I can see all the holes, all the wrong turns, all the missed connections. Not that my self-reflection is entirely pessimistic - I simply feel a little wiser from having had the chance to actually live in the skin of a language arts teacher. I appreciate the benefit of being able to reflect in depth on this teaching experience - to look back on the progress of my thinking as I tried to figure out where Bradley and I were and where we wanted to be. As I make my way down the road to becoming a teacher, this reflection will be an interesting reference point for me. Although, I know that the realizations and questions I have now may seem quaint or odd come next term.

At our first meeting the time flew by. Bradley seemed so excited from the very beginning - like he was about to bounce up out of his seat - which he did, occasionally. That's why the poem he shared with me (about being unable to sit still) was so appropriate. Actually, we were both caught up in the excitement of sharing what we brought and learning about each other's interests.

After Bradley read his poem and book, we shared our collages, and then he rushed on to his writer's notebook. He flipped through all the pages, talking a-mile-a-minute about his interests and observations and questions. His love of learning was obvious and delightful to see! What excites me most is his curiosity. He showed me the list of questions he wrote after his class visit to the stone quarry. These questions led us into a discussion of rocks, minerals, gems and mining. I plan to look for some non-fiction about rocks, stones, stone masons, gold mining, Stonehenge, and whatever other connecting topics I can find.

He also expressed a keen interest in fiction writing. We spoke briefly about writing an encounter with a magical stone. I'll see if I can pick up some literature that will feed this interest too.

Stones and rocks, through a child's eyes, could be a fascinating inquiry focus for our literacy study. Obviously Bradley's interest in a topic motivates his learning…and he's interested in so many different things! Interest is so much more powerful a motivator than I first would have thought.

Bradley admitted to having trouble sitting still - his mind raced from one thing to the next and his body followed suit. I think the speed with which he lives his life made its way into his reading. I noticed that he was consistently oblivious to the natural pauses in the texts - he sailed right through commas and periods - and he would rather skip over a word that was giving him trouble than slow down long enough to figure it out. I think his impressive comprehension of the story was dependent on this momentum and proved its success as a strategy. On Friday I wondered if I should have encouraged him to slow down a little to focus more on particular words that gave him trouble, but since then I have decided to limit my interruptions to moments when his understanding is threatened by a miscue.

We did experiment with a couple of reading strategies during Bradley's reading of The Wolseley Elm. On one page I got him to focus on the particular word he was having trouble with instead of letting him skip over it so quickly. We talked about what he normally does when he comes to something he doesn't know and he named a lot of different strategies, including breaking the word apart and sounding out the parts. So, he is aware of these other strategies. I wonder how he decides which strategies to use and when.

In the margins of this excerpt, I wrote that Melissa's consideration of whether to intervene or not when Bradley raced through punctuation and skipped over problematic words was based on her theoretical understanding of reading as a meaning-making process. The evidence of this was in her decision to intervene only if Bradley's "miscues" (instances when readers' observed responses differ from their expected responses; Goodman, 1996) compromised his understanding of the text. I noted too that by talking with Bradley about his reading strategies, she enabled him to theorize - make his thinking processes explicit. Finally, I suggested that by continuing to closely observe Bradley as a reader, reading different texts for different purposes over the next few weeks, she might very well find patterns in Bradley's reading strategy use that would answer some of her professional inquiry questions and perhaps generate new ones.

Given the focus of this first session, Melissa was not the only teacher candidate to make reading process observations or to ask inquiry questions about them. Being a kidwatcher myself in the context of teacher candidates' learning, I created a reading case study invitation for our next class that invited teacher candidates to revisit some of the reading process issues we had explored in first-year - now that they had a more urgent "need to know".

This first week, Andrea, her colleague in the other cohort, also responded to Melissa's reflection. She thanked Melissa for her insights and her specific and detailed observations, and agreed with Melissa's suggestion that the two of them would look for opportunities for Bradley to encourage a more reluctant reader in the group to "turn onto the joy of books". Even in her few appreciative words to Melissa, Andrea too kept the focus on the big picture of what literacy is for, as she touched on ideas of relationship and community.

I arrived at Elmfield with a pile of books for our second session together. I'd checked out every possible children's book that connected in some way to magic rocks, rocks, stones, etc. But, when we met in Bradley's classroom this week (instead of the library where we had been last week), I was immediately struck by all of the rock books, rock samples, rock posters, rock everything that greeted me from every corner of the room! What I thought was Bradley's burning, personal desire to know everything he could about rocks, was actually a whole class inquiry. He hadn't told me that he was already pursuing his questions as part of a class study connected to the Manitoba Grade 4 Science Curriculum. As this realization was washing over me, I quickly decided that it didn't really matter; we could focus on other literacy possibilities. I had gathered a selection of beautiful fiction stories about rocks, including Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, which Bradley chose for us to read together - each of us reading a page at a time.

The book was a little difficult for Bradley as he encountered a lot of new and/or unfamiliar vocabulary. When I encouraged him to use some of the different strategies he knew, he was able to figure out what many of the words meant based on context clues. When he had difficulty with a particular page, I would ask him to summarize what had just happened on the previous page and then I would ask him to predict what might happen next.

I have now observed Bradley consistently using a range of reading strategies to help him decode and understand the book. He breaks words into manageable chunks, uses phonics knowledge, skips words, and repeats sentences to gain momentum and contextual information. His strategies work for him because he always has a good understanding of what he has read, even when it seems he's miscued or omitted an important word.

Bradley and I discussed many aspects of the story while we were reading. We talked about how we thought the characters felt at different points in the story. Bradley seemed to understand the concept of irony, though I didn't name it for him. Thinking about it again now, I really should have.

For an experienced teacher, let alone a beginner, in any given teaching moment there is so much to attend to - multiple, often fleeting and disconnected observations, and any number of possible responses and instructional decisions - but there is no freeze-frame button. Theory, however, provides a way to systematically organize this seeming blur of impressions and potential actions into a more coherent interpretation. A teacher's theory empowers her to make connections among observations and to establish patterns from which to respond and make thoughtful teaching decisions. Because of her theoretical understanding of the reading process, Melissa was in a position to reflect-in-action (Schön, 1982) on Bradley's reading and to suggest larger text-based strategies (summarizing and predicting) when he became "bogged down" in new or unfamiliar vocabulary. This theoretical knowledge enabled her to resist teaching practices she had experienced in her own schooling and observed in her first-year practicum that stressed accurate, word-for-word reading. She also believed in inviting Bradley into new intellectual conversations - in this particular reflection, exploring the concept of irony. As Melissa had opportunities to unify theory and practice by talking and writing about connections she noticed, and by testing out her theory, she momentarily "fixed" her messy, under-construction understandings, knowledge and beliefs. This allowed her, in turn, to build self-confidence in what she knew and the teaching actions she might take.

Rethinking Arising Out of Tensions Between Theory and Practice

Reflecting further on her second school visit, Melissa wrote:

After we read Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, I asked Bradley to start brainstorming ideas for his own story about a magic rock. There - that's what I would change if I could do it differently. I basically said, "Go forth and write about that which I consider worthy." I don't even know how it happened. What if that was not the connection he made to the story? What if he really wanted to write about donkeys as a consequence of reading this book? I'll never know because I was utterly focused on the rock thing! It's embarrassing.

Thankfully, Bradley is a confident, diplomatic boy. He pursued his own connection anyway, in spite of my unintentional prescription. The way he did so reveals a lot about him. He started sketching some of the ideas for a story, and began naturally with a large, round boulder in the middle of the page. Then, as he discovered Goku - the character that would eventually occupy centre stage in his story - he became more and more eager to bring him into focus. After spending considerable time sketching Goku's motorcycle and castle, he erased the rock altogether. Bradley composed aspects of the story aloud while he was drawing and I took notes. Later, when he took control of the pencil himself, he wrote - seemingly out of nowhere - "and Goku saw the rock was gone and he couldn't believe it." As no rock had been mentioned in his story (and he had already erased the rock he had drawn), there was no rock to disappear. It's obvious that Bradley was simply trying to appease me by putting a small piece of what he thought I wanted to hear into his story. This taught me a lot about Bradley. He tries his hardest to please other people. Thankfully he was assertive enough to go off in his own direction even when he felt compelled to complete the task I had set.

What I learned from this experience is that every word out of a teacher's mouth is important. I cannot be blasé about it - what I say has a real effect on the children I teach. This isn't a stunning revelation, I know. But the realization that I unknowingly had this effect on Bradley because I didn't consciously monitor my language use stunned me nonetheless. I have to be more sensitive about giving children honest space if I want them to write creatively, instead of boxing them in right from the beginning.

I'm going to change gears here and write a little about what was addressed in class this week - some children's propensity to violence in story writing. The only time so far that Bradley has brought any violence into his story was during our second visit, when we had just begun to talk about the possible places the action of his story might go. When the library in his story was magically transformed into a castle, he imagined a guard trying to protect the castle with violent force. It's tricky though, because it's accurate - probably what a guard would do when faced with a trespasser. Bradley got it exactly right. In addition, in medieval literature (and Bradley's story - with its concoction of magic, castles, and a guard - is thematically in this vein) sword fights and knight and dragon battles occur with frequency. It's a staple of the genre. Medieval literature isn't the only place where violence is used to heighten the drama - Shakespeare is full of violence and murder and gruesome deaths. Is violence okay in the classroom when it has a literary connection? But is it not okay when it has a pop culture connection? Why is this? Who decides? It sure is a pickle.

During the next couple of sessions, Bradley worked on his story. As he wrote, we discussed the ideas as they developed and I found myself continually asking him questions about the relationships between characters, the motivations each character had to keep the book from each other, and most especially, his understanding of the inherent importance of this book. His answer was consistently, "because it's Goku's. He wrote it." The fact that Goku wrote it was reason enough to go to the ends of the earth if he had to, to get it back. I think this reasoning reveals a lot about Bradley's feelings about writing and the incredible importance of owning one's writing.

The discussion also revealed a potential for a future lesson. At times, I became confused with the plot line of the story, and wondered if it was simply because Bradley had not yet ordered his ideas into a logical sequence. I decided to work with him on that.

I think the work we did on revision was really valuable, but my weekly reflections show that I may have turned this into too big of a focus for Bradley. In my future classroom, when I have the scope of an entire year to work with children, I would never ask a child to revise and edit his work as early in the game as I asked of Bradley. However, I think the time factor influenced my decision to push the process up a bit. We worked on writing with a reader in mind; organising ideas logically; condensing small sentences into a single, coherent sentence; and inserting dialogue markers to help keep the ideas clear. I don't think I would eliminate these lessons if I was to do it again, but for Bradley's sake I think I would have given some of them much less time. I did worry about burning out his love of writing. My writing lessons were well intentioned, but perhaps a bit over the top.

Of course, in spite of my misgivings and stuttered attempts at teaching competence, Bradley showed continuous enthusiasm. When his interest in our revision and editing lessons began to wane, I knew I had taken things too far. That's when we changed gears a little bit, left the Goku story unfinished for the moment, and started sewing a quilt for his teddy bear (the idea for this new inquiry direction had grown out of a conversation we'd had the week before). Bradley loved learning to sew, loved the idea of making something for his bear, and looked forward to writing a good night poem for Snowball - the beginning of a bedtime ritual (I'm sure he also loved the break from revising and editing his story). Whatever the reason, our shift to the teddy bear project was a huge hit. Now I only wish we had started it sooner - we could have read some great stories, had a teddy bear picnic…. As it turned out, the writing that came out of this change of focus was beautiful. I think it's an example of wonderfully personal and relevant writing.

We quickly went over the mechanical necessities for making a quilt - making sure our square patches were symmetrical, threading the needle, planning the design, and sewing the squares together. Next, we began to think about the place to put the poem once we had written it. We talked about putting one word in each square.

Bradley began to tell me what Snowball was thinking about, tucked under his new quilt. Instead of telling me, I suggested he write down what he was about to say. Just like that, Bradley had the first stanza for his poem. "So, you can imagine what Snowball would do if he were alive?" I asked. He wrote a second stanza. The logical next question following from his second stanza was: "If he were part of our literacy inquiry study what would he want to learn?" Bradley answered this question with 3 sentences, and immediately commented that it was beginning to look more like another story than a poem. It was a good observation because although his language sounded poetic, the way the words were arranged on the page was decidedly prose-like. I suggested he could do two things to turn this story back into a poem. He could separate his ideas into lines and stanzas; but this could happen later, after he had his ideas down (after our Goku story writing, this made even more sense to me than it did before the project began). I helped him trim the fat from his sentences. He kept only the most important words or ideas. The last stanza emerged when I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to add before Snowball fell asleep. I had a picture of sheep in my head, but Bradley came up with the image of counting stars, following from Snowball's learning to add. He wrote the last line and…"ta-da" - a poem:

I love this poem. It's so deeply personal, so childlike and sweet and spontaneous. The form was invented on the spot just through back-and-forth questions and answers. For my first attempt at guiding a child in poetry writing, I think it went well. I'm glad, because before this session, doing something like this seemed so completely elusive. This time I think I also did a better job of letting Bradley determine the direction his writing would take.

…In spite of my many self-criticisms, I am quite proud of the work the two of us did together. I think the teaching inquiry process I went through, as a teacher-learner, was valuable. I also think the literacy inquiry we did together led Bradley to a lot of practical writing strategies he will use in his future writing. We did a lot of work on revision - organizing the big ideas so that they make sense and compressing many small sentences into one or two juicy ones. We composed a poem just by asking and answering questions. We made literary connections to objects, ideas and experiences that are deeply personal. And, Bradley learned to use dialogue markers to separate speech from narrative.

Even though the rock study didn't go anywhere, I think I did a good job of offering Bradley a "gazillion" possibilities for where he could have taken it. This is an aspect of my teaching in which I now have confidence - the ability to not only see the possibilities, but to present opportunities to follow them up.

I like how I made a very good story. It took a while to do and it's like an adventure. You would get excited! There's good language in it and we got words from a thesaurus. We wanted it to be cool and awesome. We brainstormed and thought a lot of the ideas ourselves and we also read parts from some other books.

I also like how I made a poem for my teddy and I have descriptive words in it. I wrote it from questions.

Short, K., Harste, J., with Burke, C. (1996). Creating classrooms for authors and Inquirers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Short, K. (1999). The search for "balance" in a literature-rich curriculum. In Theory into Practice, 38(3), 130-137.

Steig, W. (1969). Sylvester and the magic pebble. New York: Windmill.

Vasquez, V. & Egawa, K. (Eds.). (October, 2002). Everyday texts/everyday literacies. School Talk, 8(1), 1-6. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.