changing directions?

So I’ve been feeling stuck because for the last week or so, I’ve been feeling that my question is too broad. I’m really trying to tackle improving male literacy from a lot of angles: partner reading, writing parallel stories to the ones being read, and reading more graphic novels. To add on to this, I’ve been collecting data in the classroom, as well as in a special after-school program that began this January.
I remember what Sue said about following the questions that arise in the data we collect, and not being afraid to revise and rethink so that our research flows in several cycles. One student in my study, Donte, an extremely low reader who may have ADHD, stands out for me as I look over my blog. In the December and January postings alone, his name comes up 25 times. Why am I so fascinated with him? Well for one thing, he’s my target audience so to speak- a reader who was so reluctant at the beginning of the year, I literally saw him once pretending to read with the book upside down. He was one of my inspirations for investigating male literacy in the first place.
I think I’m also focusing on him because my intervention strategies are working especially well with him. He really latches on to graphic novels, he is a much more engaged and competent reader when he is partner reading. And he loves to write about his reading, except that his writing doesn’t take the form of a parallel story, it is instead short synopses of what he reads so that he can remember parts of the story better (this was his own, self-created modification, which was so interesting because it’s so appropriate for his needs as a reader).
One of the problems with being so focused on Donte is that I worry about having enough breadth in my study. Also, because how he gets to and from school is variable, he has only been able to come to one comic book club meeting (the after-school club I created). So I may be able to study him only in the classroom context. I think it makes sense to continue collecting data in both the classroom and after school context, and to collect (more general) data from the 15 boys who come to comic book club, and more specific, case study data from Donte and perhaps one other boy who shows up a lot in my journal.
Another thing with Donte is some of the work I’ve collected from him makes me want to start a new cycle of research around a slightly different topic. Ok, so now that Donte is a much more enthusiastic reader, thanks in some at least small part to the interventions I tried, how do I boost the quality of his thoughts as he reads? He and his partner reader had been re-reading guided reading books with the focus of asking questions as they read to further their comprehension. He came up with many questions, as far as I can see they break down into two categories: questions that challenge how realistic the story is and questions about character choices. Sometimes the choices reveal misconceptions about the story or about characters in the story, other times they show Donte trying to contextualize or understand details of the story. Sometimes he speculates answers to his questions, other times not. So far he’s only used this strategy with fantasy fiction books, I wonder how his questions will change when he applies this strategy to graphic novels, historical fiction, informational texts, and other genres? I wonder which types of questions leverage more inquiry on his part, which in turn deepens comprehension?
It feels like I’m switching directions midstream here, but I think I’m following what interests and excites me. The journey that Donte has been on this year is fascinating. He’s already changed so much. He’s so much more curious, he reads for 40 minutes straight and then takes books to the bathroom during our break. At the beginning of the year I couldn’t even get him to read for 5 minutes. I want to see how much further he can go. I want to see besides what excites him, what enriches him as a reader? I have a hunch it’s questions about what he reads. So I think I’m going to go with it. A colleague lent me this book: Make Just One Change: Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions. I think I’m going to use it to investigate how I should teach questioning to Donte. I want to track his progress by collecting all the questions he asks for each progressive book we read. I would like to analyze what types of questions he asks and do they change over time? Do they change according to genre, or some other factor? How do the types of questions he asks correlate with his comprehension of the text?
I think it’s the right thing to investigate this because it excites me, but at the same time, I don’t want to completely give up on my earlier questions about improving male literacy via partner reading, writing parallel stories, and graphic novels. I think this topic is important, it’s just not as exciting to me because I feel like I already know that those strategies are going to improve my boys’ enthusiasm for reading which will in turn improve their competency as readers.
So here’s the million dollar question: Can I keep investigating both questions or should I completely shift my focus onto my question about questions? Or should I start incorporating data collection about questions into my after-school comic book club so that I have a broader base of data?

notes on donte

So I know it's been awhile since I updated, so many interesting things have happened, especially in comic book club, but with the end of the quarter, grades due, professional development responsibilities, etc. I never seem to have the time. But I wanted to get this down before I forgot. During a read aloud today I noticed that Donte had brought his comic book club binder to the rug (many of the boys have actually turned their binders into carry alls for homework, writing, notes, etc.). He was scribbling furiously as I read. At the end of the read aloud I asked Donte what he was writing about. He said he was writing about the things that John Henry had been doing. When I asked why, he said it was so that he could remember the story. This validates my theory that Donte latched on to writing short synopses of what he read as a self-modification. I think this link between reading, writing, and comprehension is clear. What I wonder about is how to replicate this organic and individualized process by which Donte self-modified his reading approach to improve his comprehension. Nobody likes being forced to take notes...

One other note I just wanted to put on record to give background about Donte...This morning I asked Donte why he was absent and he told me that he didn't have shoes yesterday. Then he showed me his new shoes. I'm not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was noteworthy just to give context about him.

conference with Donte

And then...there was a lot of snow and all after school activities were canceled. So no comic book club to report of this week. But I did have a really interesting conference with Donte today during guided reading.

We were reading a non-fiction text about insects. Here is the excerpt of the text Donte was reading when we had the conference:

"Insects live everywhere. There are insects, like flies and cockroaches, in houses."

Donte: What are houses?
Me: (confused) Houses are where you live. Insects live there too.
Donte: (rereads page) Oh!
Me: What?
Donte: I forgot this was about insects.
Me: What do you mean?
Donte: I knew it was houses but I forgot it was where they live.
Me: I'm sorry, I still don't understand.
Donte: I thought they were talking about what type of insects.
Me: So did you think houses was a type of insect?
Donte: (nods)

What struck me about this conference was why constantly writing about what he reads (remember the infinite post-its?) might be such a critical strategy for Donte. I'm still not completely sure that my explanation of what was confusing him was the actual issue, or if Donte just nodded to nod. But what is clear is that keeping topics straight in his head can be challenging for him. Also, the sentence structure of that excerpt is weird, with the clause in the middle of the sentence like that. So he might also get tripped up by new sentence structures.

Thoughts before our 2nd Comic Book Club

I was slightly disappointed by the turnout to the club last week. Not so much in the total number (10 kids), but that Donte and Deavion didn't show up. In general the students who showed up were higher performing, already enthusiastic readers. I think Donte, Deavion, Jaymon, and David will come today because they've seen other boys carrying around their decorated (and very suave I might add) comic book club binders.

Another thing that I'm excited to see is how many boys have been keeping up with their reading logs and diary entries. I know Alex has, he's always really enthusiastic to show me his updated reading log everyday :-) Zeke just came into my room to tell me that he finished his comic book assignments. I think one thing I definitely want to do for this session is allow them to share their reading logs and diary entries, and really hype up (and maybe reward) kids who did a good job on their own.

I also think that going with Lunch Lady as the first books we read was a good choice because it's just such an engaging, captivating book-regardless of reading level. Donte was in a trance yesterday, reading the first Lunch Lady by himself on the window sill. He finished the whole thing yesterday! I have had a few suggestions about follow up books that might take us to a deeper place: Coraline, or the graphic novel of Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun by Timothy Canada (which I think they'd get a lot of, have many personal connections, and would probably learn a lot).

I also want to model for them what writing in your diary might look like, and how you can respond to your reading in a diary entry.

Here's what I'm thinking for our agenda today:
-Sharing the Week (at the rug sitting in a circle, we share diary entries, reading logs, and major events of the week.
-Game (charades)
-Reading (the next 1/3 of Lunch Lady with a mini-lesson on taking notes about secondary characters)
-Writing (Brainstorming secondary characters)
-Diary writing (should this go in the beginning?)

Update on Independent Reading

I continue to love independent reading! I just love watching how the kids disperse and connect to reading in their own personal ways. Some like Shimya and Briyonna like to write what they're thinking on their book nooks. Others like Kayla, Anjahna, and Davontae like to read books together. I'm often surprised by the combinations of students who end up reading together. Others like Deavion and Donte have been re-reading their guided reading books, and after I conferenced with them, they're working on asking deep questions about the book. Reviewing what they've written about their guided reading book, "Mouse Soup", I don't see the depth to their questions and their thoughts as I would like. Helping students develop deeper questions to their reading is definitely a good next step.

First Day of Comic Book Club

So, Friday the 13th (of January) was our inaugural comic book club meeting. I chose Fridays because there would be no conflict with other after school activities, but what I hadn't anticipated was the level of exhaustion I had after a very full week of school. We started out by decorating their binders' with magazine cut-outs. I am very pleased with the organization of the binders. It's split into 4 sections: writing, notes, diary, and .... After we finished decorating, we filled in the first page of the diary section as a way of community building. Then we read the first 20 pages of Lunch Lady, which the kids really enjoyed. Reading a graphic novel as a whole group posed specific difficulties given the heavy emphasis on pictures. We talked about what we were seeing and what the images made us think about but I felt bad altering the pace of their reading. Then we went back to our seats to begin brainstorming the main character of their own graphic novels that they'll be creating over the next few months. One of the things we talked about was how you needed to make your character simple enough so that you can replicate the illustration over and over, but also include a unique or distinguishing feature (big glasses, spiky hair, etc.) so that the reader can easily identify the character.

One of the observations that I remember standing out for me was how Cortez, a very introverted 6th grade boy, opened up over the course of the 2 hours.I often see him before school walking around with his nose in a book, and I rarely see him socializing with other students. Friday was no different, as Cortez chose to sit away from the main group of boys. His enthusiasm grew as the session progressed, and by the time we got to the writing portion, he was talking and exchanging ideas with Alex. He was so excited to create his own main character of a graphic novel: "Oh my gosh, this is so cool!" Enthusiasm for when we read Lunch Lady was pretty high, and it was even higher for the writing portion. I think there's something very thrilling about the act of creation. I wish we had done a better job sharing their main characters, but there'll be time for that next week I suppose.

Students who showed up: Cortez, Javan, Jaquez, Alex, Rashad, Tyshaun, Zeke, Terran,

I'm Back!!

Oh blog, it's been a month since I last spoke to you (and whoever's reading this in the internet etherworld). School's been out for 3 weeks, so I don't have to feel guilty about this!

It looks like this New Year is going to bring drastic changes to school life. I found out that my principal is strongly considering departmentalizing 4th grade, which means no more teaching literacy for me! If this actually happens I will be sad because even though I find teaching reading to be the hardest subject, that challenge has made all of my discoveries and breakthroughs so rewarding.

But it's not the end of the world because at least this change is occurring at the same time as my research is shifting gears from taking data solely from classroom instruction/worktime, to taking data from afterschool instruction/worktime. My Comic Book Club launches this week. I've paired down the list to 18 participants (4/5th graders only), of which I expect about 15 participants to actually show up for inaugural meeting this Friday. Stay tuned...