Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach, section 1

Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach by Vicki Vinton is the 2017 #cyberPD summer book pick. You can find out more information about #cyberpd here. Throughout July I’ll be blogging my reflections on this reading with the purpose of clarifying my understandings and thinking through how my new learning will influence my teaching practices in my classroom.

What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making (2012) by Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton significantly shifted the way I teach readers. “To Make a Prairie,” Vicki Vinton’s blog regularly stops me in my tracks and makes me reconsider my reading instruction. (Check out the recent post, “If We Want Children to Think.) So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Vicki’s newest book, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach had me madly underlining and starring, talking back to the book, and opening up my unit plans to revise. And yet, here I am.

Challenging Assumptions

Right off the bat, in the introduction, Vicki starts challenging assumptions. Is what we’re currently experiencing in education yet another pendulum swing? Or is it, as she posits, a change more akin to the move from hand-cranked Victrola to color TV that her grandmother experienced in her lifetime? As a teacher working in a school district that has flung itself with full force into every innovative practice of the past ten years--Personalized Learning, Flexible Seating, Spaces, and Schedules, Maker Spaces, Design Thinking,1:1, PBL, Expeditionary Learning, Flipped Classrooms--Grandma’s experience fits better as an analogy for my experience than the idea of a simple pendulum swing.

Beliefs Confirmed

The first section of Dynamic Teaching reminded me of some of the positives that have emerged from that period of intense change in my district, chiefly that classrooms in my district’s neighborhood public schools are expected to be student-centered. (Half of our elementaries are charter schools or magnet schools and they have a variety of approaches.) In Dynamic Teaching I hear the tenets of student-centered classrooms:

• Authentic, critical, and creative problem solving
• Responsiveness to the student’s interaction with the text
• Building students’ agency as thinkers and learners
• Giving students opportunities to wrestle with problems/productive struggle
• Using strategies to reduce stress and build a positive emotional environment
• Choice, exploration, discovery
• Timely, responsive, and ongoing feedback
• Dylan William, “The thing that really matters in feedback is the relationship between the student and the teacher.”

Favorite Quote:

“Language actually creates realities and invites identities.” What If instead of answering students’ questions, “...teachers expressed uncertainty in response to students’ questions and then asked how they might figure something out? That language sends a very different message about who students are and what they're capable of doing.” It builds efficacy. “Rather than explicitly showing students how to do a strategy or skill, we're implicitly modeling how to be something. Specifically, we’re modeling the dispositions and habits of mind of complex thinkers, readers, and learners who are comfortable with uncertainty and know that stumbling is simply a part of the process.”(53) In addition to Peter Johnston, both Tom Newkirk and Ron Ritchhart suggest that this is the most important modeling we do, the most important stance we can take: that of an authentic learner.