Revisiting the Sticky Note for Assessing Reading Comprehension

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.

Now in the context of working with instructional coaches, however, I've returned to their potential in generating evidence of the invisible work students are engaged in as readers. In particular, I'm thinking about an activity from Jennifer Serravallo's Teaching Reading in Small Groups as an introduction to reading comprehension strategies/skills that preservice teachers might be able to tackle in their placements. As I think about shifting our methods activities into the K-12 classroom, I'm wondering how we might orchestrate this experience in the least disruptive manner- both to student reading engagement and to the Cooperating Teacher's classroom space. I could also see this exercise as useful for rehearsal in leading Reader's Workshop lessons much as we do with Writer's Workshop, however, doing so would be decontextualized from looking at actual student work. One other thought to consider is how this exercise might look as integrated within a focal project. It might be possible to require preservice teachers to design and analyze a range of assessments instead or in addition to the more usual design of collecting evidence from their CT. I wonder if this might even be more valuable to explore the dimensions of the larger scale performance assessments within a smaller frame?

Whether or not I'm able to move this into the classroom, I am still interested in modeling and workshopping the practice in our methods space. Chris Van Allsburg seems like the perfect author for modeling the process, especially as so many of his books leave the reader to infer what actually happened in the end. I'm thinking of The Widow's Broom or The Sweetest Fig as two books I might try this with first. And, here are the excerpted steps from Serravallo:

(1) Stop & Jot: Activate Prior Knowledge
Serravallo asks students to look at the front cover of a book and "jot what you know about how stories like this tend to go" (p. 45). This would also work well for making predictions, something we already do within our Picturebook Analysis activities.
(2) Stop & Jot: Visualizing
Next, she stops students at a particular page and asks them to describe the scene using all of their senses.
(3) Stop & Jot: Synthesizing
After finishing the book, she asks students how a character has changed from the beginning to the end of the book. I could also see this working well for identifying main idea.
(4) Stop & Jot: Inferential Reasoning
Finally, she asks students what the study is about. Here she is looking for a response that moves beyond summary. For older students, this might also be a place to discuss theme.

This quick process generates a sample of evidence that can they be sorted and provide authentic examples for teachers to analyze as they refine their own understandings about what reading comprehension skills look like at a given level and how they can use such evidence-always in conjunction with other evidence- to group students accordingly. The simplicity of it fits so well with everything we've been working on in our instructional coaching program and in preparation for performance assessments. Most importantly, I see this as an opportunity to continue growing my new vision for methods to help teacher candidates 'see' and 'do' to deepen and contextualize their understandings.