Episode 4: Deep Reading Strategies: Building Blocks to Text-Dependent Writing

Jonathan: Welcome to the Literacy Geek Show. We're your hosts, Jonathan LeMaster.

Lee: And Lee Ramsey.

Jonathan: The goal of our Literacy Geek Show is to inspire educators and spark great conversations that help students meet and exceed reading and writing standards.

Lee: Join us as we geek out about how our journey to revolutionize literacy instruction. Today we are geeking out about how the explicit teaching of deep reading strategies can help students successfully respond to text-dependent writing tasks. That's a mouthful.

Jonathan: It is a mouth.

This is our third show about text-dependent tasks and analysis.

And as we brainstorm, we keep thinking that there might be one or two more to go. We wanted to start off by talking about the most fun thing in the world. We should have a dance like we do for tech,

Oh, yeah.

Lee: Right. I mean, yeah, it's standard time. We should be pumped.

The more Jonathan and I talk about and think about the skill and the standard we believe it's so important for us to get all on the same page from the administration to the principal to the teacher implementing this in the classroom, we need to be on the same page and the standard could be the glue.

What do you think, Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Last show, we identified six standards that were connected to text-dependent writing. And when we switched our lens to reading and said, okay, well, what are the prerequisites to writing about a text? Well, you have to dig into the text, right? You have to be able to understand it.

Yeah. And, do something with it once you've read it. And in our analysis of the standards, we found three of the nine reading standards that are dedicated to using sources. Isn't that amazing? So it's almost a third of all standards and then a third of just the reading standards. It's impressive. So R1, we're back to R1 again, the reading one is citing textual evidence.

R2 is about determining central ideas. You have to dig into the text to understand what this text is about. What, is the author saying? And then R8 is about tracing an author's argument, over their texts. And so you have three different standards that are talking about dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper.

And that's the whole goal. I think deep reading is the goal, that we have for our kids when we assign a reading, we want them to understand it at a deep level.

Lee: Where does deep reading come from? I was always a little confused. There is reading comprehension and then there's deep reading comprehension…

Jonathan: yeah.

It's interesting that the term deep reading, it's also sometimes synonymous with close reading. And I think there's a difference between active reading. So there's active reading that you imagine a kid that's interested in the reading and then you have, and maybe doing something with the text, right?

Maybe using a highlighter or something. Then you have deep. Or close reading what that refers to is a student's ability to go beyond the simple comprehension of the text. Oh, this is about volcanoes or oh, this is about, school uniforms. It requires students to go past that and then start looking at how is the text structured.

What kinds of arguments are being made here? What is the author up to? Who is this author? I was just in a class the other day observing a teacher, and students were stuck with some questions that the teacher was asking, and it wasn't that they didn't understand the text.

They understood it. They didn't have a deep understanding of the text through the author. Had they known some things about the author before those questions were asked, they could have answered them, but she was asking them to have some information that they just did not have at that moment. Deep reading and close reading require students to do just as it suggests, to go beyond.

So there's also another term, surface comprehension. This idea that I understand what it says, but then what is the author doing? And I think it's a great question, a great distinction.

Lee: In the last episode, I know we were talking about it and it dawned on me from our conversation how important understanding the author is to this work. In building out our application I left the author out and you're like, no, no, it needs to have an author.

And it really wasn't until we've been here 14 years and I know we each kind of do our part, but it was an understanding of. Oh, You need to understand the author, what they stand for, what they do, and then what are they trying to do here, in this text, right?

Jonathan: Yeah. In the show, I said that I didn't feel comfortable assigning texts that didn't have an author because when you cite something when you incorporate someone else's ideas, it's best practice to put a name to it. And if it doesn't have a name, that's just basic, right?

If you can't name where this comes from, that's challenging. That's difficult. So I want my kids to have that name because then, someone who's reading my writing where I've referenced something that someone said, They can go look at that someone and they can say, okay, who is this person?

What's this person's position? Why did, Jonathan, the writer include this person, right? It's just so interesting. There are a lot of facets to deep reading or close reading to your question. There's a lot of different conversations. I think the biggest takeaway from our conversation today is helping kids get past the surface comprehension and looking deeper at what's going on in the text.

And if you know more about the text, you can speak about it in sophisticated ways. If you don't know enough about the text or you don't know how the text is built or what the writer is up to, it's really difficult to write anything profound or, significant about what the writer is doing. So that's the difference.

Lee: Okay.

Jonathan: What's interesting about this conversation is how one develops the skill of deep reading comprehension. What do we do? And I'll have to tell you that I didn't have a lot of strategy in college and it was a hardship for me. And when I was in my master's program, and I think some stories is coming up that we're going to be able to share.

And I think we'll connect with our listeners, we're going to connect to their experiences, but I discovered while I was at San Diego State University, getting my master's degree in rhetoric and writing my professors read differently than I ever read and and differently than I had seen other people read.

And I kind of, not in a weird way, but I looked over their shoulder from time to time when our master's classes were very small, like seven, eight kids, students. And so it was a very intimate setting. We were always gathered around a table reading and I would look over their shoulder or over their forearm and I'd see their pencil doing very specific things.

And I would ask, what are you doing? I understood what active reading was and I feel I want to do that. But they were very intentional about what they were marking. And they told me that they were categorizing information with symbols. They were categorizing information with symbols and tracing what writers were doing with arrows and other, other symbols.

And I thought, this is fascinating. So that's consistent. You would do this with everything you read. It's like, yes. So long story short, over time I adopted that process and called it marking a text. And that became kind of a central piece to the critical reading book that I wrote. And then also became a central piece for Literacy TA, one of our cross-content, deep-reading strategy platforms for all content areas that schools can go to and teach kids how to read deeply across all content areas.

Lee: It seems like there's another set of questions that the reader should be asking, and this is a strategy that helps make sure that they're top of the list and they're important for them to answer as they go through the text. Right?

Jonathan: Right. Yeah, it's important to note that for this show, there are so many different deep reading strategies that a teacher can employ, and students can master, for our show today, we're going to be focusing on marking a text. because it's, it's something you pick up Right?

Works effectively. It's going to engage kids in authentic conversations, and all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil and you're off and running. So it's really simple. The application is easy to pick up and you can start it. Another teaching story real quickly, a teacher learned about it while I was training and she implemented the very next period and had great success.

I went and observed her and was blown away by how well it adapted and how she could just roll it out. And the kids loved it and had great conversations. It's very practical.

Lee: I love it. And we think this skill when implemented in the classroom helps address the skill gap or the opportunity gap that that happens. And we know that this happens traditionally around third grade when the student is transitioning from learning to read to understanding what they're reading about.

And it's such a big transition and the focus traditionally has been on content. Well, they know how to read well, right? And now we need to teach them the 50 states in the U S we're starting to go into facts and understanding things. And I think that was a big shift in college career readiness it's back to skills and the importance of teaching skills.

And what we've seen from the research support and understanding what's happening in the classroom is the support for learning how to read and are deep reading comprehension strategies really don't exist or very little at every grade level. They become less and less and it just focused on the content.

And, when Jonathan and I reflect on what happened, I know when I was in the classroom or when I was going through high school, it was just memorizing facts, and the multiple choice tests were, make sure you read it and you remembered some of those facts to get a good grade.

And, I think back to this, this transition, I feel like we're still in this transition. Which is weird. It feels weird. I feel like we've been talking about this for 14 years since we started this company. Do you think we're making progress on this transition from content to skill?

Jonathan: You know, when I got into education, people said change is slow and maybe that's a universal fact that change is slow, but we're talking about and I've heard education talked about as s museum or it's like a barge trying to turn a barge.

Change is slow, but it doesn't necessarily need to be slow. If that makes sense, what we do know is that last year in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP report came out and I was quite surprised because we have put a lot of money, schools and districts have put a lot of money into supporting their students, supporting their reading and the report came back, stating that scores have plateaued, they're stagnant and in 8th grade they've dropped.

So we see a decline in our eighth graders not progressing forward and most grade levels. You mentioned third grade, that shift from 3 to 12, there is almost zero growth in reading and that is shocking and troubling and we need to be aware of that and attuned to that because that should be a guiding light.

Of course, it's one report. And of course, it's coming from national reading assessments. But it's something that we should be aware of because it's telling us that what we're doing might, or might not be working. And so we need to change what we're doing. And you hinted at it just a minute ago.

It's like the assigning of things or gaining content, of course, is important. But what if we just tweaked it a little bit and said, you're still going to get the content? But you're going to read for it and not just read it to answer questions, but read it to understand it and dig into it a little bit so that you get that content.

But you also get those reading strategies as well. Because I think that's the tweak that needs to be made of assigning versus assigning with purpose. Jeff Zwiers in his book about academic conversations, talks about this idea of pseudo-communication. He argues in his book that and see how I'm doing my text, see how my text evidence.

Lee: I know I love it. Yeah, it makes sense.

Jonathan: He argues in his book that students are engaged in unmeaningful exchanges with language where they're not using language effectively, and they're not engaging authentically. And when reading that argument about pseudo-communication, where teachers are assigning communication, but they're just, what Zwiers calls, playing the game of school.

They're just checking a box because that's what they think will get them the A in class. That's not what teachers intend. That's when we assign a conversation to our kids, some collaborative work, and we intend for them to embrace it. We intend for them to engage in the conversation the way we imagined it when we wrote the lesson.

And I think the same thing is true with reading. There's this idea of pseudo-reading. We're assigning reading and you could ask any teacher. Yes, we read. Yes, we read. And it's like, okay. How are you reading? How are you reading that text? Perhaps it's that tweak of purpose-driven reading that can make a difference when they are diving into a text with certain questions that they're asking.

They're using a certain analytical lens, like marking a text, if you will, to break the text down. And that might gain us a little bit of traction going forward, because now students are beyond, they're engaged in work that's beyond just completing a task or finding an answer.

Lee: Yeah, I think the brain wants to do the easiest thing. So whatever is the easiest, right? So if we can quickly and easily, is it faster to like, you know, take the multiple choice and come up with the, you know, get rid of the two that probably aren't aren't a match you 50 50. And then you kind of read through the text and you know, you can almost do that a little quicker than really, really understanding what the text.

It's about what the author is trying to do, right? It's so much, the brain wants to do the easy thing. And I think that's the challenge, right? You have kids in the classroom and their brain wants to do the easy thing. So how do we get them out of that? Right? How do you trick them?

I guess that's kind of the words I've heard you say?

Jonathan: you got to trick them. You have to trick them. And there's real consequences to this. So we're talking about the CCRs and we're talking about getting kids to develop prerequisite skills to meet the standards and a prerequisite skill is close reading or deep reading strategies.

What was your experience like in college? What was your experience like when you were in classes that were reading-heavy? and required you to do something with that reading. What was that like for you coming out of school, having a lot of tasks assigned to you, but maybe not a lot of deliberate practice where you're, you're mastering skills?

What was that like for you through college?

Lee: yeah, I completely struggled. I would get D's and F's on most of my papers. I would turn in, where I had to read something and, and talk about it authentically and in a smart way. And in looking back, I didn't have those skills. I was in a philosophy class and the instructor was amazing.

Probably one of my favorite classes. He come in as a different philosopher each day, and then he would argue what that philosopher believed. He's like, you'll never know what I believe, but I'm going to come in each day and play the philosopher, which is back to your credibility of understanding who that person is.

And then he would present his ideas about it. Right? And then we would have to write some argument and, and use these philosophers

Jonathan: Mm hmm. Mm

Lee: at it. There was an ethics class I had and we needed to have a paper written at the end.

I failed that and I wasn't very good. I was decent at reading and understanding it, but not at that deep comprehension level. And these types of questions you talk about, never really happened in my brain, so I wasn't taught how to be able to talk about what I read intelligently. So it was a challenge.

Lasted all the way through college. I remember you had to take a writing exit exam here at San Diego State University and in the end, I took it twice. I had finished all of my classes. And I had failed, I think, for the second time, and I had to extend my semester one more semester, uh, and couldn't graduate at that point, just because I hadn't passed it.

I sat down with some tutors, went through, you know, what I was doing. learn the essence of what they were looking for and it seemed like a five paragraph essay when we talk kind of the essence of what they were looking for with very kind of specific things. So I had to kind of learn how to write that.

And I was able to get my score up one point and was able to pass. So yeah, that was kind of my story. How about you? How, was your experience in college?

Jonathan: I was terrified. I loved my high school experience, but going into college?

If it wasn't for sheer grit, determination, and perseverance, I don't think I would have succeeded. I stumbled my way through lots of classes and dropped ones that were above my head. And. You know, ironically, I became an English teacher.

That was not necessarily my strength, but it was a passion of mine. I really enjoyed the English classroom. I enjoyed the conversations, but I certainly wasn't equipped to read the ways my professors expected me to read. And from our conversations, things that come up is I wasn't taught.

How to think about a text. I felt like I could read right and I took a multiple choice test and it's like, look at my score. I can read, but it never measured how I thought about the text and how I understood what authors do and authors make very specific decisions throughout their writing.

It just doesn't happen just by chance. It doesn't happen that way. And even textbooks, you know, someone challenged me years and years ago and said, you can't close read a textbook. And I'm like, let's do it. Maybe I'm wrong. Let's take a look. And we broke it down. And sure enough, even though textbooks are dry, There are specific moves that those writers are making in that textbook that you can analyze and distill. And here is the trick of all tricks. If you teach a student how to look at what an author does in a textbook, the textbook is no longer boring because the brain is active and looking at how all the information is constructed from compare and contrast to cause and effect.

And now the kid's like, I actually like reading my textbook. It's really interesting. What? And it's because you're going beyond just what it's saying and looking at how it's constructed.

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: And I think that's all of what college is, is that analysis? Deep analysis of everything that you do, and it's the same with texts.

They want you to dive in deep and diving in deep is not being able to say, what is the topic? That's not deep enough.

Lee: Yeah, boring is kind of it just hit me. Boring means there's nothing happening in the brain,

Jonathan: right?

Lee: right? But as soon as your brain's lit up and asks questions, it's not boring, right? The boredom isn't there, right? So how.

Jonathan: the task is hard, your brain is, your brain will engage in it if it knows. The steps to break something down or to get to the next place, right? It will do it.

Lee: Yeah, I wouldn't call college boring, right? Like that would, no, there's nothing about it. It was challenging.

Jonathan: challenging. Yeah

Lee: It wasn't boring

Jonathan: Right.

Lee: That's interesting.

Jonathan: So one of the things that we like to do with the show is we want to give our listeners something right away that they can take back. And that's something that we pride ourselves on. We want to make sure that you, whatever we're talking about, you get excited about it, that we have some ability to show you what it is or so you give it to you so you can try it.

So that's something we like to do. We're going to go ahead and I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you Marking a Text system. And while I'm doing this, some of the things we've been talking about will start to become a little bit clearer. And then if you do something like this and see where you can tweak what you're currently doing or adapt something or maybe make a little change here or there to see if it can make a difference with what you're you're currently doing. All right, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

You're looking at here the Marking a Text system, and there are three marks that we recommend, but you can always add more. Just, Be careful with the brain because if you give the brain too much to Do at once, it also will start to shut down.

So at the top are numbering paragraphs. We don't consider that a mark necessarily. It's just you want to write those paragraph numbers down. The kids need to learn paragraphing and When the paragraph numbers are written down, it makes it very easy for kids to talk about information in each paragraph. In paragraph four, the author does this.

In paragraph six, this is what's happening. In paragraph one, the author claims that. It's very easy to reference these, um, moments in the text, these moves, these shifts, these decisions when you have a paragraph number. And then we have our three marks. We have our circle, we have our bracket, and we have our underline.

Now what's nice about this is they're very easy to use and they're universal. What that means is you could circle anything you need kids to circle. You can bracket information, you can underline, and that information can change based on the prompt. And what's important for us at Literacy Geeks is that you provide a prompt before any reading.

So if you have some questions at the end that you want kids to know, synthesize those make them into a prompt, and give it to them before they read. If you're reading a chapter in fiction, give a prompt for that chapter. Yes, for just that chapter, because you want your kids to read that chapter in a very specific way.

If you're going to read a section of a textbook, is there a review question you can use to move it forward to the front and use that as the prompt? And if you can give them a prompt, Then they can create what we call a marking key. The marking key would have these underlines, the brackets, the circles, and then what are they underlining?

What are they bracketing? What are they circling? So they would create this key.

Lee: Where do you usually show the key?

Jonathan: The key ends up being at the top of the page. Now, I know in a textbook or a novel, that's difficult to do.

But I also say that if you're, if you're reading something deeply, it's really important to make a copy of it. So if you need to make two copies of two pages of a textbook or two pages of a novel, it's really important to just do that and have them ready for the students and then that way they can touch the text.

Otherwise, if it's an article, you can just make a copy and I put the key at the top of the article and I'll show you here so you can see the key at the top. There's the circle, the underline. And remember, I said some of these, some of these symbols, um, are flexible. You can add new ones. In this particular case, students are not to bracket anything, but students are to draw arrows to make connections.

So you have circling key terms. These, in a very simple way, they're words that are essential to the author's either main idea or central claim. There are words or phrases that if you were to tell someone about this person's ideas, you must include these words. So food staples, economic crisis.

They're not cool words. They're not fancy words. They're not words you don't know. They're words that you have to have if you were to summarize this person's ideas accurately. What's cool about that is with your arrows, you can draw arrows from those words like this is how this word is related.

So in paragraph four, see how easy that is. Food insecurity is related to economic crisis. Because when we have economic crises, there's also what follows food insecurity.

Lee: mm,

Jonathan: Those two words are very important or phrases are important to have together. So for this, we want our kids to make connections from words to paragraphs, and I'll show you another page here.

In this case, we're drawing arrows from line to line, but a couple of things I want you to see here one is there's not a ton of circling and there's not a ton of underlining and that might be the case when you first start a strategy like this, but eventually, students will be more judicious they're gonna be more careful with what they're circling and underlining and They're gonna get to what is essential and what is not and this Lee is why this strategy is so powerful I'm gonna give it. to you right now Number one, I just said something really important.

Kids have to make decisions about what is important and what is not. So they automatically analyze and evaluate everything. And they have to say, okay, categorize. Is this something I should circle something I should underline or something I should bracket? Right? So that's important. The brain is fully engaged because now they're having to make decisions about what they are marking.

And the second piece, and this is perhaps the most important, is you have kids talk about their markings, and it sounds like this. Turn to a neighbor, turn to your elbow partner, get your A partner, get your B partner. What did you circle and why? La la la la la la la la la. In paragraph two, I circled economic crisis.

In paragraph four, I circled food insecurity. Why did you circle that? I circled food insecurity because it was mentioned a couple of times. Great. I circled economic crisis because it was mentioned in the first paragraph along with food staples and food staples. And they're having a conversation about a text.

And all you ask them to do is talk about what they circled.

Lee: Yeah, right. It's getting there, getting their brain active, and then so interesting in looking for the key terms, right? And the key terms and, and think of how many, I know one of the things we talk about from a deep comprehension standpoint is really, you have to read it a few times, multiple times.

10 20 30 times. And as you do this, right? So how many times do you have to? You might have to read this half a dozen times to be able to do this well, right? And it's, it is not something that it's probably going to be very quick unless you're maybe pretty skilled at it. Maybe it starts to become easier and easier.

Jonathan: Yeah.

And, and to your point about rereading, you know, we always talk about reading from left to right cause that's how we read, right? We were going to read from the left side of the page to the right side of the page and then from top to bottom. But, with deep reading, you also read from the bottom to the top.

What I mean by that is as you mark things, you go back up and re-look at a paragraph and say, wait, I thought that idea was talked about. Oh, interest. Oh, so that's what that's talking about. Look at meat-laden diets. With this idea of meat-laden diets, you have to pause and say, What is a meat-laden diet? And then in paragraph four above it, it says meat intake.

Huh. Well, I know that meat is expensive. Uh oh. Food insecurity. Ah. Economic crisis. So this idea that because we have meat-laden diets and that we have, we eat so much meat, food security comes in partly because of how we, what we eat, and the cost of that behavior. Isn't that interesting? And you start connecting these things all because you did the heavy lifting in the beginning and said, what are the words I need to know?

What is, what is the argument being made? I'm going to underline that. Yeah. And then again, you could bracket evidence, uh, and it's, it's quite, quite universal, very easy to use. If you don't use a prompt, you can still have a key. You could just give them the key. You can say, here's the key that we're going to be using today.

You don't have to have a prompt, but I'll, I'll, I'll get on my soapbox real quickly about prompts. If we're only assigning prompts when kids write. They're never getting enough practice reading a prompt and breaking it down. Because if we assign writing five times a year, they're practicing prompts five times.

But if we assign 20 articles a year, then they're practicing prompt reading prompts 20 times a year. And kids are going to be better practicing 20 times than they are five. And that's just really important to

Lee: So how many, how many times a week would you practice a prompt in your classroom?

Jonathan: Uh, it's almost every two weeks, there's going to be a new prompt and a new article if you break that down, it's about 18 to 20. experiences in a year, um, that they're going to have this, this close reading, deep reading experience. Sometimes you could do it faster. Like with poems, it would be every other day.

So there'd be a prompt in a poem every other day, um, depending on your class, depending on your subject matter. But it does help the kids give them a prompt because it gives them, you know, have you ever read something? And then your teacher says, Oh, and we're going to, you're going to do this with it.

And it's like, great. I didn't even think of that while I was reading.

Lee: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not even Part of their thought process. Yeah, it's

Jonathan: frustrate them.

Lee: and it makes sense. I mean, you know, all of the stems from, you know, text-dependent writing. Uh, and so one of the hardest parts that they're going to have to do is understand those prompts and those prompts when I've seen them, man, those state tests are hard.

That's just one of those other skills to practice, right? To make sure when they're going through and understand what they're supposed to do. They are like building a list of questions and they need to start asking as they start to read, right? To be able to understand and get ready to write.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely.

So we've taken this journey together. What are some ways that Literacy Geeks supports the thinking about a text? the marking a text strategy. What are some things that we have done? Because I know this has been a journey for both of us to ensure that students who read with us are being supported.

Teachers who use our platforms have the resources and the know-how to deliver great instruction. So what are some things that we're doing that can help?

Lee: When we started 14 years ago, it was kind of the center of our main strategy on LiteracyTA.com. And we built multiple scaffolds and supports and lots of different ways to implement them. You know, marking a text in the classroom. We have teacher how-to videos and, you know, every time we would go out and we do training, um, and we'd get feedback and we kept iterating over and over and over again on this.

This 1 skill alone. And I know that. You know, the teacher toolkit on Literacy TA is a great way. If you're still not sure how to get started, go to LiteracyTA.com. You can get the toolkit. Um, that's one way to get started or send us an email. We love to help any of the teachers out there as well. Um, I know we, we then boiled all of that into, Quindew, which is our middle school reading program.

And from there, we adapted marking a text as a question. So instead of taking a multiple-choice question, we wanted them to highlight a sentence that usually is what it is. And so it's still different, you know, so I think, you know, some of our materials and the way we talk about it, the essence of what you just talked about as a strategy, um, is a little different, but it is, we still, um, it helped us significantly because we could.

We could make sure there weren't just four questions to choose from. There are hundreds of sentences that they have to select. And so it increased the probability that they know how to find this information. So, um, I know those are a few. What are your thoughts on some of the other things we've implemented for helping teachers with Marking a Text..

Jonathan: Well, I think the transferability of it is amazing. So if you're teaching students how to underline something on paper, and then you move over to our online programs, whether it be elementary, middle, or high, they're used to going into a text and making decisions about what am I looking at?

What am I going to mark? How much am I going to mark that's all part of it. It's practice that's important. And although there are components to the marking a text strategy that goes beyond our question type. It's cool to expect a kid, as you said, hundreds of sentences to be able to identify something in a text and say, this is where it happens.

And then, of course, if you're using marking a text in the classroom, they're going to feel confident because that's what you're asking them to do in this whole text.

Pinpoint for me. And I think it comes all the way down to elementary school strategies where teachers will say, take your index finger and point to the topic sentence in, the fourth paragraph and the kids point to it and the teacher walks around and the teacher says, don't move a finger, keep your finger on there.

And the teacher walks around to see, did they get it. Did they not get it? I mean, what a great formative assessment. To see if they're understanding a, what topic sentences and B, can you locate paragraph four? And then can you locate the topic sentence in paragraph four? That's a lot of thinking. It's a lot of thinking going on.

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's really cool.

Lee: Yeah. Yeah, that is,

Jonathan: Yeah. All right. So we're going to switch over to our techie segments or let's get techies. I kind of have the same move every time

Lee: I know. Right. We need to be like,

Jonathan: you got into it last time.

Lee: yeah,

Jonathan: This is all right. Leave, share some of your thoughts about low tech, and high tech. What do we do with this?

Lee: this one's interesting. This seems like very low tech. When we've chatted about this, I think there's something magical about pen and paper. And having the article and so that is really the center of this and I'm chief tech geek and I love pen and paper. I've got graph paper sitting next to me and one of my favorite things, it really connects the ideas is when I take that pin and it hits the paper.

And so I am with you. I understand where you come from on this strategy And so I think, uh, from a technology standpoint, really, this, this is the most important is a pen and I know it's pencil is what you usually recommend. The article and the pencil from there, you know, is probably quite similar to last week, the number one thing I think from a technology standpoint is that document camera again, where you're up there, you're showing it on the big screen and you're starting to.

You know, think and talk and you see where the pencil is going and your thought process about it. And then maybe the key term you would circle. Um, I so important. I think that's probably one of the best ways to harness technology in the classroom. Uh, and I know you, you've even, uh, you've talked about implementing this, uh, using Google Docs.

And I think that works too. You're still very similar. I do think getting thoughts on the paper, I still think pen and paper is the best, but, you can do that through technology as well. Sharing the article with your students, making sure that they get their own copy.

And then they can go, you know, do these similar marks. Some of them are a little more difficult. You kind of have to change how you do it. Your color, use a color code, or the symbols a little bit different. But at the end of the day, it's the same thing. You're highlighting a few words, right?

Or sentence and connecting ideas are probably a little more difficult, right? Um, but it definitely can be done. Yeah. Did you have a guide on that? I think we had a guide on that on LiteracyTA, right? That kind of showed how to do that electronically.

Jonathan: Yeah. We'll go ahead and we'll put a couple of different resources in our Geek Gazette, that you guys can look at and just keep learning, which is, which is amazing. There are two thoughts here. And we talked about document cameras, the last show we talked about document cameras too. You know, sometimes you go into these classrooms and the document camera is ancient.

So I just wanted to take just a quick moment to talk about strategy. How do you get a new document camera? Some of us don't want to even go there because it's like my document camera is terrible. It zooms and focuses and then gets out of focus all the time, or it's all dark and kids don't like it.

They don't see it. And where it projects a teeny little square. If you want new equipment and education, you've got to hustle. You have to figure it out. There's a couple of things you could do. You can make a donation or you could ask families for donations and explain how their kids are going to benefit from having this, learning tool, you go to your principal and ask.

You can make a justification for your EL coordinator and say that my students need modeling. I need to be able to walk them through a text, and I need the best equipment possible to document cameras. When I started teaching, we were nearly, I want to say $2,000 dollars. For one and now they're about a $150 and you can get them even cheaper than that.

And then, the quality is great. Um, so not that.

I recommend it cause, we love our teachers. We care so much. We don't want you to spend your own money, but you can always go buy one. Uh, don't let the bad tech in your room. Keep you from great teaching. I guess that's the

Lee: Yeah. Keep up.

Jonathan: got to fight to get it.

Lee: Yeah. What about Donors Choose or some of those? Have you seen teachers have success there?

Jonathan: Absolutely. Yeah. DonorsChoose is a great place. My wife who's an elementary school teacher completely outfitted her whole classroom with DonorsChoose. It was over a couple of years and they run some great specials. They do pricing match specials where different sponsors like HP will say any money you bring in will pay the same amount.

And so if you raise 200, you just have 400. So there's lots of incentives for DonorsChoose. It's a great opportunity for you guys to find the funds to buy some of the equipment that you need. And I'll tell you, a document camera is, is essential when we're talking about teaching kids how to, attack a text and engage, in deep reading comprehension.

Lee: That's awesome.

Jonathan: All right. So later this week, we're going to go ahead and post a couple of great resources on Geek Gazette. So please follow up and look for those opportunities. And next week, we're going to dive into how to select high-interest texts. Because as we were talking about this before the show we've got to go back another step now.

We just keep taking one step back and saying,

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: texts we are bringing in, that's important because not all texts lend themselves well to deep reading strategies or deep reading practice. So it's important to know what the text has to offer and is it a viable text to use to teach a certain strategy?

So I'm excited about that conversation. Thanks for geeking out with us.

Lee: You're the geekiest.

Jonathan: Oh, Lee, you're the geekiest. Come

Lee: No. No, no, no. You are way more geekier than I am.

Jonathan: you know, that's just not true. You are the geek master.