The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in, everybody. You are listening to the Authority Podcast here on the BE Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. If you are a regular listener or a new listener, it's a real pleasure to have you here for what should be a great episode. This episode is part of the National Literacy Month with RIF campaign, which is a partnership between the BE Podcast Network and Reading Is Fundamental to host numerous productive conversations across our network of podcasts.
about developing kids reading and literacy skills for life. We're talking about it with a number of different experts and practitioners, and really hoping to give you a lot of good ideas and strategies to really use around this really critical issue. My guest today is Jennifer McCarty Plucker.
She is the Director [00:01:00] of Learning and Development and a Literacy Consultant at Mackin Educational Resources in Burnsville, Minnesota. Good luck. Jen has spent more than 20 years in public education as an English teacher, reading specialist, speech coach. Teaching and Learning Specialist and as a District Administrator, her doctoral research focused on student engagement and motivation in literacy.
And she is the author of a book called Inspiring Lifelong Readers, Using Inquiry to Engage Learners in Grades 6 12. And it was a Forward Indies Book of the Year award winner in education. Jan, welcome to the show.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Really honored that you reached out and really excited for the conversation today.
Ross Romano: Yeah, let's let's start with the big idea which I like to do from time to time. What's the big idea behind this book?
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: So the big idea behind the book is thinking about truly our readers and the identity of our young [00:02:00] people when they're in front of us. And really thinking about how do we authentically engage our readers in the classroom and in turn create lifelong readers and readers really being broadly defined Readers being thinkers, collaborators, communicators, writers and readers of all kinds of texts and wanting students to really see themselves In all kinds of reading atmospheres that in, in whatever career that our young people go on to be in, we have to be readers, writers, thinkers, communicators.
And it looks different. It looks different if you're reading and writing code than if you are reading and writing as a historian, or if you are a journalist versus a scientist. And we, we want to. Turn kids on to that and really engage with them [00:03:00] at their level.
Ross Romano: Excellent. So when we're talking about what it looks like, you know, when we're developing readers if the goal Is basically to create readers who are competent, confident, and engaged. One of the things I'm wondering about is, to that engagement piece, what are the factors for engagement, right? If we look at a, if there's a pie of all the different things that make up engagement and reading, how much of that pie is made up by the competence and confidence pieces?
That certainly are foundational to students. What are some of the other factors that really are going to engage kids in being readers? in school, and then in wanting to maintain and sustain that engagement, right, toward lifelong reading.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: That's a big question, Ross. Yeah, so certainly, and in, My own endeavors to figure out how to get students intrinsically [00:04:00] engaged in what we were doing in my experience in a language arts classroom. I had to dive into the research behind motivation and engagement and Daniel Pink's book Drive that he published back in 2010 was.
really instrumental for me, because some of what he was talking about went against what my gut was telling me. I really did sort of rely on these Extrinsic triggers extrinsic rewards to get students to participate in class. And I was challenged by Alfie Cohn and punished by rewards and others to, to think differently about how We create conditions in our classrooms that give students agency to own their learning and develop their confidence, as you said and give them the competence necessary to be able to do hard [00:05:00] work.
It isn't engaging for us to make it easier. That actually. Decreases motivation for our students. We need them in a productive struggle. And so I really poured myself into challenging my own practices and trying what the science was telling me would work, even if it went against my own. What I thought was conventional wisdom and I did that by introducing a lot more choice into the classroom.
I did that by being quiet and giving students more voice and really allowing myself to listen first and then Follow and not assume that I know what students need to learn and looking for the opportunities for students to, to show me what they know, because when they're confident, then we can push a little bit further and get students into that productive [00:06:00] struggle and they'll persist more because they have the self efficacy to do so. (ad here)
Ross Romano: You know, yeah, in a sense and, you know, the language here is typical, and it's coming from the, you know, marketing materials around the book and the way it's presented to describe what the goals are around readership, right? But The challenge a lot of times is to have each of those states of being for students happen kind of in the reverse order, right?
Engaged, confident, and then competent. And how do we get confidence and engagement to proceed whatever that eventual level of competence is. And that's a little more sustainable. And that's, you know, the, there's a growth potential behind that versus having confidence in our interests be results of how skilled we feel like that. And I [00:07:00] think a lot of that will be addressed in this conversation and just in the, in creating the environments. around literacy engagement. But to contextualize that I referenced in the title or subtitle using inquiry to engage learners.
So you have an inquiry approach. How does that work, you know, for our listeners who either are or are not familiar with inquiry based approach? Yeah. And,
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: So I'll give an example of my. Teaching pre inquiry and then my teaching post at when I was implementing in implementing the inquiry model. So I was a pretty traditional language arts teacher. I taught English the way it had been taught to me. We did a novel unit. We would read a book like Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
We would read Night by Elie Wiesel and we would study [00:08:00] that And of course, build background knowledge so that students could comprehend what was happening in the text, and then we would be done with reading it, and we would do some sort of assessment, sometimes a multiple choice test. And then move into a writing piece, and often that was analyzing the text, a kind of a literary analysis.
And then we might do a grammar unit, and I might sprinkle in vocabulary. I also taught speech, so we would do a speech unit. And I don't think it was bad. I think that we I worked really hard with my colleagues to have engaging classrooms and a lot of group work and we were pushing students.
But the engagement level was not where it needed to be. And I think a lot of students struggled with that because they didn't see themselves as an English major when they left high school. And so to put themselves into that [00:09:00] context and feel like it was relevant to them understandably, that was challenging.
Well, fast forward to implementing inquiry and full disclosure, I had to go through my own inquiry and my own professional development, being a part of a group of teachers who were willing to try this approach to read the research behind it, implement it in really uncomfortable ways because it wasn't what we were used to.
And then we moved into let's stop teaching. all of these communication skills in isolation and let's instead braid them together. We can do a six week unit where students are reading, writing, talking, collaborating their way through some kind of essential question that means something to them. I mean, if we were to ask the question, how does literature and art and music promote [00:10:00] positive social change in our society?
Now you have a question kids care about, and we have a plethora of texts that we can use, and we can even include the classics. We can bring in how texts from the Harlem Renaissance were used for, to promote social change. And, but there's also so many current texts. pieces of art, literature included, that students can interrogate.
And when we do that, we Save ourselves some time because we're not isolating all of the skills. We introduce multiple perspectives for students and when we choose one text and everybody has to read that one text there's missing perspectives there and this provides an opportunity for students to hear lots of different perspectives and it gives a much richer [00:11:00] experience for our students and we want them to have that experience when they come in.
I mean all the time, but for sure when they walk across that stage at graduation and that is our everybody's collective goal birth through grade 12. And it gives students an opportunity to not have to master a skill right at, in that moment, but they have opportunities to, to try and revise and think.
And it is then at that staircase of complexity and ultimately that ladder to. To competency and my own experience was I was floored by results. Students produced so much more and so much better when they were in the driver's seat of their own learning than when I was deciding every, for them, every step of the way.
Ross Romano: And you've certainly started on this idea and I think there's probably even more as far as like, what are [00:12:00] the. Outcomes. And what does that mean as far as what students will then be able to do in the future, right? When you are promoting the inclusion of diverse texts challenging the idea of.
Assigned reading that's universal and everybody has to read the same thing. And because that's the traditional way we structure it, right? Everybody reads the same book. That's what our discussion is about in class. That's what you write a paper about or do an exam on. And it's, based not exclusively around the skills and other, you know, composite competencies around reading and then maybe even creating or what you do with that reading, but it's, [00:13:00] you know, comprehension and are we all, do we all read the same thing?
And I think it may not, necessarily be obvious, not only to some educators, although I'm sure there's many educators for whom this may seem a little strange, but as part of this series, I also expect that we probably have a lot of listeners who might be parents or might be coming from other perspectives and might be Trying to wrap their heads around
And why does this work?
Right and what is and I think connecting it to what? Really are the objectives and the practicality in a real world relevance of that in somebody's ideal scenario They may think well this book is The best and everybody should read this and, you know, [00:14:00] whatever. And maybe there still are certain books that are you know, more universally part of the curriculum, but that having diversity of text is not Bye.
Bye. only necessarily about them having relevance, you know, cultural experiential relevance to students and them having an opportunity to choose things that they can relate to better or more representative. But, you know, That's, that is part of it. But also when we think about, well, really what we want to do is make sure they're engaged in reading because the more engaged they are, the more they're developing their skills, the more they're seeing reading as a beneficial thing to them.
And then, you know, the, so that I like to call it, like, we want them to be able to do this so that they can then do this. You kind of speak to that a little bit more that, you know, That extrapolates beyond okay. This is what's happening in the classroom right now. These are some of the things that may be a little [00:15:00] challenging or they require some redesign of the way we go about teaching and learning.
Right. But the longterm benefits are, you know, clearly make it worthwhile to do that.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Yeah, so, there's a lot packed into that. In terms of the shared reading, that idea of whole class reading, I. I am still a proponent of having some shared experiences because when a small group of us all read the same text, we're going to get, the reader brings so much to the text and that's an incredibly important piece of The comprehending and the reading experience is what the reader brings to the table.
And for all of us listening that are a part of a book club, we know that the conversation makes that experience even more rich because some people pick out different things and they react [00:16:00] in different ways. So there is definite benefit to a shared experience in reading. When we were making the transformation, my colleagues and I, we really sat down and looked at all of our assigned reading that we had been doing in a 10th grade English classroom.
There were about six or seven novels that students were reading, and we just said, how might we Approach this differently and we ended up choosing two that we felt would be really good shared reading experiences where we knew that was going to be helpful for them because of what they were going to be studying in social studies or because it.
Elie Wiesel's book is just something that, that really kids can get a lot out of, but it's complex and it's dense and it's going to take us longer when we require every student to read it because not every student can read it independently. [00:17:00] So we made really intentional decisions about that. And then with the other units, we decided with each unit, were we going to have students read a book independently or in a book club or a seminar group?
And again, we're very intentional about it. It is important for students to talk to each other. And if they were reading an independent reading book, we still had opportunities for students to collaborate with one another under that, the umbrella of the overarching question so that they were hearing about other books, hearing about other texts, hearing about other perspectives in order to grow their understanding of that concept.
But the reality is we have the luxury in language arts that I have studied. most of the state standards. And with the exception of Shakespeare being referenced, it is very rare for there to be a book [00:18:00] title or an author legislated in the standards. What is legislated is that students can read at high levels and comprehend at high levels, cite textual evidence be able to track theme that they can understand the development of a character, that they understand task, audience, purpose.
And what I found is that we, There is a growing desire for parents to be involved in their kids education. We know that when there's a family student partnership, that can have great gains for our students and achievement. So it's great if parents want to be involved. Well, if there's choice in reading it actually frees us as educators to not have to engage in, in book censorship and book challenges and, you know, all of those arenas that I didn't want to be in.[00:19:00]
I wanted here are the book club choices. Take it home. Parents, here are the options. Here are the summaries. Here's the common sense review. Have a conversation with your kid about what they're reading and ask them about it while they're reading the book. That's a great thing. And so it, it gave us, it, it really did open up the opportunities for us to focus on the standards, which, unfortunately, in many cases, ELA environments that I'm in we forget that the standards are what we are aiming for, and instead we might look at a curriculum that has been purchased by the district and think that the way in which that's been presented by a publisher is That's what we're responsible for.
It is if it's aligned with the standards, but it's our responsibility as professionals to be looking and aligning to standards and making sure that students are competent [00:20:00] and that they're showing the competencies on those standards.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And it's well to help others who may be going about or want to go about a similar process of really thinking, you know, with intentionality around what is the shared, you know, required reading and what's not. What are some of the factors that you could say? Is it length, right? Is it important, the themes and the content?
I could see how, for example, I don't, I seem to remember, you know, in high school when we read The Grapes of Wrath, that being a pretty lengthy unit, And if I decided after a couple of chapters, I really hate this book and I knew this is what we're doing for the next month, I would be kind of, you know, become disengaged, right?
And think, man, I have to work through this entire long book and this is just not for me. And in most cases, as we would [00:21:00] consider as adults that's a, that's an acceptable decision to make to say, yeah, I read a little bit of this and it wasn't the thing for me and I want to try something different.
Right. And, you know, and there's certain things that we might say, this is so important because of X, Y, Z, that we want to read it. There's others where we might say, okay, everybody's going to read these things that are, You know, a little bit shorter, you get through it, and then we kind of reflect on what did you like about it, what did you not like, etc.
But I'm curious about some of those, you know, what are some of the decision making factors that might guide an approach that others are thinking about and re how, well, I'll stop there and go through that and then I'll ask the follow up,
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: So, in my own personal experience, we sat down and really looked at each novel and talked about What were we doing with that novel? Were students engaged in the [00:22:00] past? I mean, we had collectively years and years of experience to say, if kids, is this a book that kids seem to over and over respond to?
We did consider length. We did consider readability. We really thought a lot about if it is a difficult text, what are the supports that we have in place for students who are unable to read it independently, yet. And that guided our decision when I've worked with other teams of English teachers, we've had similar conversations where they're deciding to redesign their year.
And we start with the questions of which books are you most excited about using and which ones are students really responding to? And, I remember being with a group of teachers and they were like, The Outsiders is the book that, that's what kids look forward to. They talk about it when they come in because their friends talked about it.
It's super engaging. In my head, I'm like, Oh, there's so many other great [00:23:00] books. I mean, it's fine. But like, if that's what is engaging students. That's what you want to keep as a whole class read as you're journeying into this? Great! That is totally fine. So I do think it, it is about the conversations that are had with a team of teachers because we know that collaboration, collective efficacy, is incredibly important for students.
Success that's what's more important than the book that's chosen is the work that's being done by the professionals to think through the intentionality of their decision making.
Ross Romano: you know, and then I guess following up on that once the structure for choice is you know, is implemented, what do the discussions look like with students around the choices they're making, the reasons behind those choices, you know, what the benefits are of having those [00:24:00] choices and what it leads to, because of course literacy is then the foundation for information literacy, news literacy, media literacy, right, understanding sources and content, and that it's really important to introduce to students in our schools and, you know, diverse learners, the accessibility of texts that represent their experience, right?
And that they're not feeling isolated from everything that's available to them. But also understanding that, okay, next time you might want to choose something different for this reason, right? Because reading is also meant to expand and broaden our world, or to give us access to different perspectives, but, you know, going back to, there's intentionality behind that.
It's not just this is what we've always done, or this is the dominant perspective, so everybody's just going to read that. And if you're not, you know, represented in that, you never access anything [00:25:00] different. But having real intentionality behind understanding the perspective. But, you know, how are students then who maybe this, they're at a certain grade level, and this is the first time this is introduced to them, right?
Being You know, kind of onboarded onto that and having dialogue around, okay, here's how you're making your choices. Here's why. And yeah go from there.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Yeah, I think for us we made sure to for every unit to be inquiry and to have that overarching question. So we were not doing a night unit anymore. We were doing a unit where we were going to interrogate Elie Wiesel's quote where he said that the opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifferent. What did he mean by that?
And is that, do we believe that to be true today? He said it during World War II. Do we believe that today? They're in relationship to that. Do we believe that to be true today? And then we still had a rich text [00:26:00] set that went with that anchor text of Knight. So while everybody's reading Knight, we're going to work through this together.
There's value in a shared experience. This is something that we're all going to be talking about. We also are going to be looking at TED Talks and poetry and art and satirical cartoons. And in some cases, we even introduced opportunities for students to do some independent reading along that theme at the same time that we're reading.
night. We don't stop that independent engaged reading just because we're reading a whole class novel. We just might split our time the time that we're devoting to independent reading versus the time that we're devoting to that shared experience. And our expectations in terms of how much students are reading independently is going to change, of course, because we're asking them to read this other text together with us.
But a [00:27:00] lot of that was being done during a shared time. In the book, I talk about the importance of a workshop framework and a really nice, tight structure for the, for me, 50 minutes in the class period, so that students can engage in inquiry. They need time to do that in small group or independently.
So I talk about it. Stealing that from our elementary colleagues and having a start together time. That's our shared time at the beginning of the class period before students move into guided practice or whether it's collaborative or independent. And then we come together at the end to share.
So there's some accountability and some assessment collection to inform our decisions around how the next day is going to go. But a lot of times the whole class reading is taking place during that shared time and that might mean that we're listening to part of the book or. [00:28:00] I'm reading it out loud or we're doing some partner reading with that so that there's some shared literacy lifting, especially with Knight because it was a challenging text.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And so I would like to talk about the environment the learning environment and creating the ideal conditions for literacy engagement. And there's the physical and then and then the, you know, the classroom culture, the social emotional components. What does a, the ideal physical environment look like to you?
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: So, for me, when I and a big part of the book was my discovery in my doctoral work of A large group of students in our ninth grade group that were reading far below grade level. I happen to have taught in a high performing high school. We often are in new U. [00:29:00] S. Report for top schools. I joke that my family can't afford to live in the attendance boundaries, so to live outside and open, enroll our kids.
But because of that, the, you know, on nationally national percentile tests, the students that in our school were often in the 70th and above in their percentiles. Well, too many of our students were in like the. First to the 25th percentile. And when your peers are so much further ahead it makes it that much more challenging.
So as I was doing that research and discovering these students, we decided we need to create an intervention program for ninth graders. We need to give them a double dose of literacy. So we were researching what is that going to look like? [00:30:00] And in a tour that I did of some different classrooms I wanted for students to walk into this classroom feeling like they were walking in.
Into the cozy reading nook of a coffee shop. There's so many beautiful ones in Minneapolis and I'm like, I want that. I want that for these kids because reading's hard and the only way we get better at reading is by reading. And I wanted them to be able to, to get the bookshelves, the cozy corners of the bookshelves. Classroom. And so, we did. We transformed the classroom to be filled with books. Classroom libraries are incredibly important, not just for our elementary students, but through grade 12. Kids need to be in proximity to books. And then In proximity to books they want to read, [00:31:00] so we did work with the company that I, I work for now to help us know what are the great books that are out there.
When I've read of Mice and Men 22 times, I don't know what's been published. I'm not following that but. The company that I partnered with happened to have teachers on staff and librarians on staff who know and they were able to give us a list of those tried and true great books that students can be immersed in that are going to help them become readers.
So that was important to me. I also share the story in the book about it was Labor Day weekend and I didn't have my room set up yet and we had just replaced the carpeting. So my entire classroom library was in boxes and I was going to go in on Labor Day, but it was really beautiful here. And in the land of 10, 000 lakes, it's like, I'm not doing it.
I'm not giving up my day at [00:32:00] the lake. to go set up my classroom. So I had students help me unpack the boxes. I felt bad, like it's like manual labor and I'm having kids unpack the boxes and put the books away. This was day one. It was the best community building activity I could have ever done because they were a showing me what they know and don't know about how you might group books together.
They were showing me what they did and didn't know about genre. They were creating their own book browsing baskets. I heard one girl say, let's put the love and war ones together. Maybe the boys and girls will mingle together and I'll find a homecoming date. So it was this really great opportunity.
Plus it created ownership in the classroom. Students took care of the books more. Did I go back and rearrange and reorganize when they weren't looking? Of course.
But they were engaged with that. They also told me how my posters were super cheesy and [00:33:00] why do you have that hanging in the classroom? Like, you're right.
That is cheesy that I spent my own money on, but no, we're not going to hang that up. And they help me just be too cluttered so that our kids can think clearly. But there also needs to be space for anchor charts in the secondary classroom so that what we're learning is on visible display and students can anchor their thinking to it and be able to refer to it. As far as the emotional climate I it's really important that we know our kids.
And that we take time to know our students and I tell an embarrassing story in the book about in my haste to get books in the hands of students right away, I was taking the lead from what students the previous year had loved to read. And I was putting that on students. This new year, and it wasn't [00:34:00] what they were necessarily looking for.
So I had a student who I had chosen the books because he reminded me so much of a student I had the previous year. I went to that student's notebook, found all the books that he had read, put a stack on, Devon's desk and he was like, I don't know why you think I want to read about basketball or drugs or gangs and I was like, Oh, I totally, that would totally be read that I was stereotyping the student when I really was just making an assumption that he was like someone because he reminded me of a student and I had to humble myself and apologize.
And I was so grateful to him. I told him what courage he had to call out his teacher on that. And then we had a conversation and the next day I gave him a whole new set of books and he was off and running and thankfully he forgave me for my misstep. But we can't I don't want to underestimate how [00:35:00] important it is that we develop those relationships with our students.
Ross Romano: Yeah, so you referenced, I mean, you referenced the community building activity around, you know, just setting up the classroom and while a lot of this learning is and also may seem independent, particularly when we're talking about, you know, students not always necessarily reading the same things and all of that There still is a community of readers, writers, thinkers, collaborators.
How does building that community benefit their learning and achievement?
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: It's critical. I, um, we started the year with an inquiry unit on what does it mean To be a part of a community and really examining what does community mean? What are the different communities that students are involved in their own lives? And what [00:36:00] are the characteristics?
That allow a community to thrive. What do we do when there's conflict in a community? And we were reading texts, we were writing about that again, reading, writing, thinking our way through that. And then we talked about what does it mean to be a community in our classroom? And ultimately, I really wanted students to feel like if I'm gone, my community misses out.
Because they don't have my contributions today. And while students of course are going to be absent for a variety of reasons, I didn't want students to be absent from my class because they don't like English. They just don't want to be there. And I had plenty of those before where students just, Like they're in school, but they just don't happen to be in my class and I, we didn't want that.
And we were able to create these opportunities for students where they, they wanted to be [00:37:00] there. And I saw the results when. After a year of this paradigm shift, we wanted students to read over the summers. So we let go of books from our classroom library. We checked them out to the students and then invited them to a summer books and barbecue to bring books back and swap them back out.
And and we had about half of our kids that came for it. They came for the community, but they also came for the books. And they came for the Barbecue and the kickball tournament. But there was that sense of community. And I had coached speech for years and I knew what community felt like in co curriculars.
I'm the parent of a dancer and an athlete, and I know the community that my, my own children have when they're involved in those activities. And my. Thinking or approaches, why not in the classroom? [00:38:00] Why not have that kind of, of community? And so we were committed to that.
Ross Romano: Yeah. Is there something about the way that the class periods are structured that can support, like, the conditions for, curiosity for independence for students as they're going about their learning and if so how does that work?
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Yeah. So I mentioned that the workshop framework was the structure that we found was the missing link, actually. When we started inquiry, I was scared. First of all, I thought that inquiry meant chaos and free for all and kids doing whatever they wanted. And fortunately, I learned quickly that no, there is intentionality and structure and a lot of teacher collaboration and prep that goes into successful inquiry.[00:39:00]
And so, certainly as we're planning our units, their structure around our units and thinking about the, again, for us, the structure of the classroom was, or the class period was about 10 minutes for our start together. That's the shared learning whole group instruction. And that forced me to really think about what's most important for the mini lesson today, because I'm only getting.
10 minutes whole group with students. Then we're going to move into this guided practice. And I do need to give Chris Tavani the credit for this because I read her book. So what do they really know when I was struggling? And I was like, Yes! This is the answer. I need more structure because kids need rhythm and routine.
If I'm going to put them in the driver's seat, they need to know the rules in the same way we need to know the rules on the highway. And kids [00:40:00] aren't, my students weren't used to being necessarily put in the driver's seat. They were very used to tell me what I need to do to get the A, give me an example, let me get it done so I can turn my attention to something I really care we needed that structure.
During guided practice, that was about 25 minutes of the 50 minute period, maybe a little more, and that was Individualized in some ways. So students might get choice in what they're doing during that time period. And I'm busy during that time period. I'm meeting one on one with students, conferring.
I might be meeting in small groups with students. I might be observing. students. I'm not at my computer. I'm not grading things. I'm not an email. I mean, this was a shift to in that I'm on my feet the whole 50 minutes because I'm [00:41:00] Observing and I'm gathering data and and doing the real teaching that happens in the moment when it's needed, you know, that responsive instruction, and then holding sacred at least five minutes at the end of the hour for the teacher.
what we called SHARE. So start together, guided practice, end together. And the SHARE, what might be a whip around? What is a discovery that you made today? It might be an exit slip. What's a question that you have that is a burning question for you? It might be a quick assessment, it might be two students sharing what they discovered during guided practice that I observed, and I'm going to let them teach the students versus me teaching it because we know it's more powerful when it comes from your peers.
And that, that structure honestly was [00:42:00] the only way. Yeah, that we could make inquiry work in the classroom, and it became just such a powerful way for more responsive teaching and learning and because of that five minute share, it was really hard for students to waste. And when I was first making the switch before I had fully figured out inquiry, I would just take a class period and redesign it.
It's we're working on a research paper, and I've got the library today. Old gen, it's work time and I would walk around in whac a mole. How come you're not working? Are you having trouble finding an article? Why are you guys talking? Can you not be throwing paper? And it was just this whac a mole all hour.
If instead, we go down to the library, I pull everybody together in a large group for 10 minutes. 10 minutes and I give them a mini lesson [00:43:00] on the best databases that are going to help them with their research. And we do the shared learning. And then I say, when we share at the end, you are expected to give this, and this on your exit card, or you're going to turn and talk and share this, and this, or we're going to do a whip around.
And then they go work, they're more motivated because they have direction, they've got a focus, and they know they're being held accountable at the end of the hour. So that structure was a lifesaver for us.
Ross Romano: Yeah. And Jen, as we are coming to the end of this conversation to sort of, Highlight one, one final thing. It could be something that you've already talked about. It could be something that we haven't. Is there one tip or technique that more schools should try when we're thinking about this goal?
Inspiring lifelong readers, right? That's the title of the book. That's what it's really all about. If we were just to highlight [00:44:00] that one thing that You know, anybody could do if they make a plan for it, what would you highlight? Excellent.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: So I'm, if I can only pick one, we have to give our young people time to read during the school day. It is not cheating as secondary teachers to give reading time in. all of our classrooms. I think sometimes we feel like, nope, I need to assign the reading, have them do that outside of class so I can use all of my minutes for teaching.
Well, if we don't value reading during the class period, Our students don't think we value reading and we can do a lot while they're reading. We can confer with them. We can listen to them read. We can talk to one on one about what they're reading. We can have them annotate the text so that we can see inside their brains while they're [00:45:00] reading.
That was one shift that I worked with a social studies teacher on. Instead of giving end of the week reading check quizzes, just collect their sticky notes. And have them sticking out their thinking while they're reading, and maybe you could have them, like, put it in themes and find themes. If you still want to give the reading check quiz, go ahead.
You're going to engage kids in actually reading and thinking about their reading if you give them time to read, and if you let them. them write down what they're thinking and let them embrace their questions. You know, they don't have to have it all figured out. That's how we're going to get our students to think at high levels about their reading.
And and then I do have to add that if we're going to give them time to read, we also have to give them engaging things to read. And if there can be choice in that. Even if it's from the social studies chapter, give them a part that's required, but there's a lot of extra [00:46:00] stuff in there that. is ancillary to make the textbook thick.
Give them some choice in what they're going to read for the rest of the chapter, and that will give them agency and that will engage them.
Ross Romano: Well, that, yeah, that's a great one. I'm glad we had a chance to touch on that, giving students more time to read in school. Instead of just making that an at home thing is a great opportunity to try. So Test that out, go back, think about some of the things we discussed here more broadly. If you want to learn more, certainly read the book.
The book is inspiring lifelong readers. It's available from Solution Tree or wherever you get your books. We'll put the links below. To make that easy if you want to find it on Amazon from another bookstore directly from SolutionTree. You can also learn more at jenniferplucker. com. We'll put the link there below.
You can learn more about Jennifer's work. Anything else listeners should check out?
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Nope. Keep listening to Ross's [00:47:00] podcasts. I've been learning a lot. So we thank you for all the work that you're doing and putting out there as well.
Ross Romano: Wonderful. Yes, please do. If you haven't already, subscribe to The Authority. We have more interviews coming up around this Topic of Literacy and Reading. So we'll be covering that throughout the month of September and really into the fall. You also can hear more about that from our other shows. Go to bpodcast.
network. You'll learn about all of our other podcasts there as well. If you're interested in more literacy, education, leadership, teaching and learning, parenting, there's a variety of other topics that we cover here and across the network. And also if you're interested in more that this mission around creating readers.
You can also head over to rif. org to learn more about Reading is Fundamental. You can make a donation. You can learn about the resources they have available there too. So, there's a lot there for you. We will continue to put those [00:48:00] links there so it's easy to find it. But please, yeah, check in with us, stay engaged, and let's continue this dialogue.
Jen, thanks so much for being here.
Jennifer McCarty Plucker: Thank you.