PBS recently hosted A Chat with Marley Dias, creator of #1000BlackGirlBooks. Marley's efforts have led to the creation of 1000BlackGirlBooks Resource Guide which speaks directly to educators who are looking for text recommendations to broaden their classroom libraries and use of mentor texts. While Marley's work addresses the need for black female protagonists at the center of children and YA literature, a number of additional resources were shared to broaden the scope of representation and culturally relevant reading material.

I've used some of these resources in the past, but two new resources are helping me to rethink how I frame these discussions in future courses. For the past few years, my students at UW have been mostly white, upper-middle class, monolingual females interested in teaching in urban settings. All of our student teaching experiences take place in culturally and linguistically diverse schools, so they are very much motivated to develop understandings and practices to support culturally responsive teachers. There is a very high likelihood that while my future students may share similar demographic backgrounds, they may be less motivated to embrace these perspectives and have less opportunities to teach in diverse contexts. I plan to be more strategic and explicit in addressing the need to broaden representation, themes, and perspectives--within all classroom contexts. Using 'Mirrors & Windows' to frame this process seems like an encouraging route to take.
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In addition, I am interested in the following analysis activity for selecting anti-bias children's books. While these ideas are integrated throughout our discussions, I imagine that completing this type of analysis would help to connect the ideas and their importance to practice (much as I've seen happen with our picturebook analysis that addresses multimodal meaning-making).

Additional resources to draw from include:

• Booklists from the CCBC
• This ppt resource does a wonderful job of synthesizing and articulating the ideas I've been thinking about with clear examples to help students make connections to their current and future teaching contexts. ​​

Finally, I was most interested in attending this webinar because I've decided my Reading Resolution this year will focus on cultural representations in children's texts focusing on the range of middle elementary readers (with selections on both ends). Here is the list I've compiled so far:
1. Aminas Voice
2. Drita My Homegirl
3. Love
4. Looking Like Me
5. Last Stop on Market Street
6. Cinderelly
7. Amazing Grace
8. My Name is Maria Isabel
9. Claudette Colvin
10.  Ninth Ward
11. Another Brooklyn
12. The Skin I'm In

Lately, I've been 'on the hunt' for observation tools to share with my Coaching Practicum participants. Teachers often request for coaches to do informal observations to help them collect data about the goings-on in their classroom spaces. Within our program, we position coaching observations as:

• taking a descriptive tone to avoid judgment
• informing instructional decision-making to avoid evaluative stances
• focused on student evidence rather than teacher practice

Teacher practice comes into play as coaches partner with teachers to analyze student evidence and determine next instructional steps. This approach avoids a deficit perspective of 'fixing' teachers by beginning with student needs, interests, and strengths to drive the design and responsiveness of instructional planning. 
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This article, Two Heads Are Better Than One from Teaching Tolerance, shares strategies for coaches to partner with teachers as anti-bias allies. The toolkit provides resources to help coaches observe for equity. Some of these tools align well to our student-centered observations, while others take more of a management lens by focusing on what teachers say and do. While these may be less relevant to our purposes, they do offer opportunities for cycles where a teacher-centered goal has been selected. I also like to think about how the process of collecting evidence can be slightly shifted to also encompass student evidence that will help teachers to discern the impact of their instructional choices 'in the moment' as they elicit, interpret, and respond to student evidence. In fact, this is the mindset I take into my student teaching observations where teacher evidence is still necessary for guiding our reflections. In those cases, the observational notes must still be situated alongside student evidence in order to keep students at the center of our analysis and keep our discussions in context.

Books provide a venue for making sense of ourselves, our emotions, our experiences, our identities-- even from the youngest years. Sometimes simplicity can go far in helping to introduce complex concepts, feelings, and events to our students. I'll never forget when I first realized the power of this approach when teaching a Holocaust unit to my 7th graders. We read Rose Blanche, a heartbreaking story which approaches the topic in a similar plot to that of The Boy in Striped Pajamas. As one of our opening activities, this story helped to personalize the historical background we had explored and to frame the challenging conversations that would lead us into our longer-term reading of the memoir, The Cage.

It's not surprising that children's books would help students to explore social situations, interpersonal relationships, overarching human themes. However, lately I've been struck by the range of issues being addressed in picturebooks and the opportunities they provide for children to imagine themselves and their worlds in much more nuanced and flexible ways that mirror larger social trends. 

Here I'm keeping ongoing note of some of the recent texts I've been sharing with T.

This past week I had the chance to participate in the PBS For the Love of Lit webinar on NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. A few takeaways:

• Offering students the prospect of writing their own novels might seem daunting. But many teachers (and kiddos) attested to the power of the challenge in supporting students to claim their roles as not just writers--but authors. 

After reading Kelly Gallagher's Readicide a number of years ago, I've been hesitant about using post-it notes in the reading classroom. In his book, he describes the tedious interruptions to flow as disruptive to the reading experience. Of course he is speaking in extremes, but his words have stuck with me to the point where I've almost discarded sticky notes altogether...almost.

All this time I have been doing it wrong. So wrong. Wasting so many hours typing feedback on lesson plans that is sometimes read and applied and other times never acknowledged. Last year, I decided to address this issue by foregoing written comments to hold writing conferences instead. I thought that if I could talk directly with my students about a limited number of questions/concerns in the form of a writing conference, perhaps it would better support their understandings and ability to use that feedback to actually revise their lessons. Overall, this was a great improvement on use of time and student outcomes. Yet, I still talked myself into circles when working with a few students. No matter how many subtle or explicit attempts I made to explain a high-priority issue that needed to be addressed...my students remained baffled. 

This timely post from Eduotopia looks at assessing project-based learning and the dangers of relying on final projects alone. I've written about this topic previously and identified some strategies specific to assessing digital multimodal compositions. Emphasizing the process of design by looking closely at student thinking through embedded activities is at the core of this work, and really, important to writing instruction more broadly.

But I had never thought about characterizing assessment as play. 

One of the most powerful ideas from the article is repositioning the assessment process as participatory to enable student agency. Our recent work in assessing our Digital Salon projects in ELA Methods resonates well with this approach. However, I thought of the process as reflection-based rather than play-based. How does taking a play-based stance open up new opportunities?

Using "play" evokes.... creativity; multiple pathways to sense-making; collaborative innovations; unintended consequences; whole-child engagement; moments of 'flow'; an array of interpretations. Most importantly, it better captures the experience of learning through doing, in all of its iterations and patterns as opposed to the unidirectional nature of most lesson designs and assessments. This rings true to the experiences of teachers' play we're currently exploring in our upcoming LRA paper. A much-needed counterpoint to the over-reliance on assessment data that limits process and outcome in many K-12 classrooms.