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Donovan, Recording Books Groups as an Alternative to Assessment
Recording Book Groups: An Alternative to More Testing
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One section of the whiteboard in my junior high reading classroom was a calendar. The horizontal and vertical black Expo lines were slanted because I didn’t use a yardstick ruler, and much of the lines were faint because the marker was dry. (Markers are always dry when you need them.) I began every eight-week quarter by mapping our plans onto this calendar. First, I plotted the school events: institute days, assemblies, fire drills, and, of course, testing. And then, I planned the upcoming reading unit. On one particular cold February afternoon, I began the process with a blue Expo. I blocked out six days in February for Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing; five days for Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners (ACCESS) testing; and four days for state testing in March. The calendar squares that remained open were scarce and scattered throughout February and March, which made unit planning nearly impossible, and the loss of routine combined with the constant talk of testing was bound to create an atmosphere of disorientation and apprehension. The once-blank, slightly slanted calendar that began in anticipation of reading possibilities became a lackluster-blue “testing” display sprawling across our days and weeks. So as I planned the next reading unit, I refused to add another test to our calendar.
Testing Culture
Tests are one way that teachers hold students accountable for what they know, specifically in “objective tests” such as multiple choice or matching tests. However, education author Alfie Kohn (2014) writes, “[Multiple choice tests are] meant to trick students who understand the concepts into picking the wrong answer, and they don’t allow kids to generate, or even explain, their responses” (n.p.). Further, Starr Sackstein (2016) writes in “Overcoming the Pressure to Test” that a testing culture actually teaches students to view the test as the purpose of learning. When we assess student reading, we want to know what students know and can do, and test designer Roger Farr (1992) ultimately concludes, there is no way to “build a multiple-choice question that allows students to show what they can do with what they know” (p. 26). Indeed, tests may do more harm than good in nurturing a healthy reading life in our students. If reading is to offer windows into the world and affirm our lives with mirrors (Bishop, 1990), the stress and anxiety of reading tests can actually undermine such experiences by creating negative associations. Kohn (1999) writes that tests have the potential to alter students’ goals and the way they approach learning. In other words, assessments should not be used to compel reading or assignment completion but rather help teachers figure out who needs support and what aspects of their instruction have been effective. Essentially, teachers should want to know how students are making sense of things. For that to happen, teachers have to be able to observe, watch, and listen as students make meaning, which is difficult to do in an independent, “objective” test.
Teachers must plan for opportunities to observe reading-in-action. Frank Smith (1988) writes, “A teacher who cannot tell without a test whether a student is learning should not be in the classroom” (p. 26). I think many teachers would agree with Smith because we do, in fact, know a lot about our students from what Yetta Goodman (2002) calls our kidwatching. Still, the culture of accountability in schools makes it difficult for observational and conversational data to “count” in assessment realms as they defy the neat, quantifiable data that fits into points-based learning management systems. But in looking at that February-March calendar on my whiteboard, I wanted to pilot a form of assessment that would require no formal test. I wanted to see if there was a way I could translate observational data from my kid watching and listening into data that could help me be a better teacher for my students while making visible to colleagues, administrators, and parents what I knew about the readers in my classroom. Of course, I also needed to develop a plan that could be scattered across the random calendar boxes in a meaningful way.
Reading-in-Action
I began by stating several experience-based goals to work with standards-based objectives. I wanted to plan experiences that would do the following:
1. nurture a positive association with reading; 2. create multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate making meaning; 3. organize the classroom to observe and listen to students making meaning from texts (kidwatching); 4. support students in analyzing their meaning-making process with me so that they could be part of the assessment process instead of having testing done to them; and 5. allow the data from kidwatching and self-assessment to inform instruction.
In order to achieve these goals, I needed to have all students engaged in the act of reading and meaning-making during class time so that I could observe reading-in-action. I decided on book groups. Many teachers avoid book groups because they can be difficult to manage and assess. First, there is the issue of selecting books and organizing the groups. Then, there is the question of how to make sure every student does the reading. And then, in a class of twenty-five students (or more) with five or more groups going on at once, how can one teacher assess which students are understanding the text and how students are navigating the speaking and listening skills needed to make a book discussion effective? I understand why some teachers revert to quizzes and tests to assess progress toward standards rather than facilitating book groups. However, I offer below a process of facilitating book groups that gives readers agency and teachers a frontrow seat to every book group discussion.
Selecting Books
To support reader-identity formation, students need to have agency in choosing books, but for book groups, teachers need access to multiple copies of books. I started with the school book closet. On unstable shelving units rested long forgotten, dusty copies of The Prince and the Pauper (Twain, 1882), The Call of the Wild (London, 1903), and The Pigman (Zindel, 1968/2005), among others. I filled a box with five copies of everything, hoping I could entice students to look past the faded book covers. Next, I went to our school library and scanned the shelves for books that had at least three copies. I figured group sizes could be flexible, and that if I needed one more copy of a book, I could likely find it at my local library. I found Rain Reign (Martin, 2014), Everything, Everything (Yoon, 2015), and Broken Memory (Combres, 2011), among others. Once I gathered all the book sets I could, I displayed book piles across the classroom, and when class began, I book-talked what I knew and read Amazon summaries of what I did not. I showed them the cover, the type face, available white space, and length. I talked about subjects, form, and genre. Then, students had five minutes to browse in a silent gallery walk. They wrote on a sticky notes their top three books, and then the beautiful chaos began of students organizing themselves into groups that balanced their preferences for books, topics, and group members. As each group formed, a group leader wrote the group and book title on the whiteboard. After about ten minutes, the groups were formed, and five minutes after that, students were sprawled across the classroom -- some in desks and some on carpet—reading, getting acquainted with their books. We were already making progress toward goal #1, nurture a positive association with reading. The next day, we plotted three meeting dates on our calendar, and groups divided the page numbers for each meeting. One thing was for certain, the students would have something to read when they finished their testing modules.
Preparing for Discussion
We spent the class time we had in February and March reading our books. I handed out sticky notes and asked students to note unfamiliar or powerful words, identify setting shifts, ask
questions, write phrases that moved their hearts, and indicate passages they wanted to discuss with group members. I modeled my own process of doing this with the book I was reading at the time.
And I kidwatched. Where did they want to sit or lay when they read? How did they use the sticky notes? How often were they turning pages? What did their faces look like as they read? And I listened. Tell me what’s going on. Tell me about the setting. Tell me about the characters. Would you be friends with your main character? Why/why not? And I taught. By watching and listening, I was able to personalize questions that would help me understand the students as a person and as a reader. I found how a conflict they read about connected to their own lives. They showed me passages, read a page or two out loud, and talked through their meaning-making process. During this time, I read alongside students pointing them to context clues if I noted a miscue or asking a probing question to deepen reading. Sometimes I invited students to Google information to clarify misreading or extend comprehension. Essentially, I was modeling readerly conversation that I hoped to see in their book groups as a way of practicing. I documented my kidwatching in a notebook –one page per student. If anyone asked me about the student’s progress, I had a page of data to share.
Reading Meetings
The day before our first reading meeting, class met for just twenty-minutes because we had a shortened bell schedule due to testing. We spent that time organizing our sticky notes for discussion and confirming everyone was ready. Students also decided they wanted to bring a snack for their group. We put a green circle around the next day on our calendar with a smiley face –something to look forward to after a day of testing. When students met in groups, I gave them a discussion guide (see below) that balanced reader response and standards-based analysis. Because students had marked words and passages with sticky notes, their conversations were supported by text evidence quite naturally. The group leader moved students through these five standards-based topics:
1. First, talk about anything you wish from your sticky notes. The part you most want to discuss. (This elicited conversations about language, connotation, setting, characters, and themes with text evidence as support.) 2. Write four sentences that capture the first half of your book. Negotiate this together. (This showed students’ comprehension skills and ability to consider sequence while making meaning of the cause and effect plot elements. Students had to use text evidence to support their claims and collaborate toward consensus.) 3. Discuss words you noted and talk about what they mean in-context, then how those words related to the book’s subjects, characters, and/or themes. (In this part, I was looking for discussion about the impact of context on language use and encouraging them to look for patterns.) 4. Identify supporting characters and talk about why the author included them in the story. (I wanted to hear students talk about character interaction and how character interaction propels the plot.) 5. Identify subjects the book is exploring and talk about the themes or the author’s message he/she is trying to communicate to readers at this point in the book’s plot. (Finally, in this thread of the discussion, I was looking to hear readers analyze how a theme developed over the course of the text.)
Half a dozen books groups going on at once means that the teacher will not be able to assess all the objectives of the discussion for every student; however, technology offers a great solution. Most Chromebooks and even cell phones have a recording feature, so I selected one student from each group to record the book group meeting and then share it with me following the discussion. Knowing the groups were being recorded allowed me to observe book group discussions from a distance so as not to impede authentic talk. After our first meeting, I was anxious to assess students’ progress. I watched and listened to the recordings and made notes about reading comprehension, literary analysis, and discussion skills. I learned a lot about how students’ understanding of the text was impacted by the discussion, including the rereading of passages, the clarifying of meaning, and even adjusting misinterpretations. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Assessment Governing Board, 2013) defines reading as follows: 1) understanding written texts; 2) developing and interpreting meaning; and 3) using meaning as appropriate to type of text, purpose, and situation (p. iv). When teachers and administrators are rethinking assessment and evaluation in their schools, this definition has deep implications because it conceptualizes reading as using the meaning that is constructed. The students were using their sticky notes, their independent reading experience, and the discussion itself to make and adjust meaning. Thus, the book group recordings uncovered how students used the meaning they constructed from reading. This is higher order thinking at its best and a way of reading that cannot be measured in a high stakes test. Below are two excerpts from one discussion that reveal “idea units” in the reading of Broken Memory (Combres, 2011).
Making Meaning: Three Boys Read and Discuss Broken Memory
Broken Memory: A Story of Rwanda (2011) by Elizabeth Combres is a short historical novel about the healing of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The story begins with the main character, Emma. At the age of five, Emma was hiding behind a chair while her mother was being beaten. In her mother’s final breaths, she tells Emma, “You must not die, Emma!” Emma wanders out of her town, and an old Hutu woman takes her in, hides her, and cares for her during years of nightmares and flashbacks. Eight years later, when Rwanda’s establishes Gacaca courts to allow victims to face the perpetrators, Emma’s nightmares worsen. She befriends Ndoli, a torture victim who is re-traumatized with each year’s commemoration of the genocide, and together they begin to heal. Below is a transcript of a twenty-minute discussion about the first half of Broken Memory among Joseph, Darren, and Alex (pseudonyms) as they follow the above discussion guide to negotiate together 1) summary and sequence and 2) meaning of words.
1. Negotiating Summary and Sequence
Joseph: First, we have to write four sentences that summarize the first half of the book. Alex: Life is hard, especially when you’re a little kid. Joseph: No, we’re not going to do anything about the theme yet. Just summarize. The first part of the book is during the war. Emma witnesses the death of her mom.
Alex: No, she doesn’t. Joseph: Did she hear the death? Alex: Yes. Joseph: Then, she witnessed it. Darren: No. No. She covered her ears. She saw her mom’s dead body. Joseph: She heard the men shout. She heard her mom’s suffering. Darren: Okay, so we can say Emma “heard” her mom die. Okay, second sentence. She ran away to a nearby village. Alex: You know what’s funny? Emma’s name is “normal,” but the other characters like Ndoli are… Joseph: Then, Emma finds an old lady. Muk. Mukcris. Let me see. (Looking into the text.) Where does it say? Okay, so Emma finds Mukecuru and lives with her. Darren: Till the war’s over. Joseph: Also, Mukchris (sic) is a Hutu. Alex: No, she’s the other one. Joseph: No, Emma’s a Tutsi. Alex: Oh, yeah. Joseph: And right now the war is between the Hutus and Tutsis. Darren: What’s the third most important thing? Um, Emma discovered the boy, Ndoli. Alex: Wait, shouldn’t we write about how her mother said what she wanted before she died? Darren: Yeah, keep on living. Joseph: Right. Let’s add that here. Mom told Emma not to die. Darren: What’s the last sentence? Emma found a Tutsi who also went through the war? Joseph: Yea, he was tortured for information. He got his head beat in. Alex: That is what you call a superman. He got hit by a machete and still survived.
2. Negotiating Meaning of Words
Darren: How about “silhouette”? Alex: How about “torrential”? Joseph: Silhouette is like a shadow. Darren: Rwanda. Let’s talk about that word. Alex: So how do we spell. S-i-l-o. What page? Joseph. Page 67. Alex: What does it mean? Joseph: It means like a shadow or a figure. No, wait, it's a person. You can’t really see any of the features. Darren: “I came around the bend in a cloud of brown dust with a hazy pink silhouette…” Joseph: So you can’t see them, but you can see their figure and maybe the color of their skin. Alex: So the shadow? Joseph: Not shadow. It’s actually the person. Alex: I don’t get it. Why do they wear the pink? Joseph: It said something about the prisoners that they wore a shade of pink. Alex: Who has another word? I have like two more, but I don’t understand them at all.
Kidwatching: Assessment that Informs Instruction
What did I learn about Alex, Joseph, and Darren as readers from their video and transcript? I watched as the boys were going to the text to re-read passages and puzzle out what was happening in the story. Did Emma see her mother die? Can you witness something if you hear it but don’t see it? And what does it mean to survive as Emma had, as Ndoli had? The boys were engaging in deep questions about humanity. As a group, they spent quite a bit of time on just one word from the novel: silhouette. They were grappling with meaning and had questions that I thought needed a broader understanding of Rwanda, so in our next class, I met with Alex, Joseph, and Darren about how the word “silhouette” actually illuminates an important theme of the book as it relates to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma. I pointed to how the word “shadow” came up in their discussion. We discussed how Ndoli and Emma, because of their trauma, were moving about their lives as shadows. The past, the Rwandan genocide, was also like a shadow hovering, even haunting the country as it tried to heal. We discussed the Rwandan Gacaca courts, which was another word they brought up in the transcript, and I invited them to do further inquiry into the purpose of the courts through a Google search. They discovered that the prisoners wore pink and that the court proceeding were held outdoors, which led to a discussion about why. Finally, we reflected on the next steps for the book group, which was to monitor time better so that each person could guide the discussion toward a passage of their choosing and to interrupt less. I developed some sentences stems using direct address to be sure they were acknowledging each person’s suggestion such as I would like to discuss “torrential,” what would you like to discuss, Darren? The recordings functioned as both a summative assessment where I could assess student learning at one point in time but also a formative assessment that I drew on in our reading conferences the next meeting. Audio files of students’ discussions are artifacts of evidence, evidence of thinking and making meaning that is difficult to capture in a written assignment or test. And over time, multiple recordings serve as evidence of growth. After a few book discussions, students could compare their first discussion to their most recent and reflect on the increasing sophistication of their analysis and discussion skills.
Conclusion
After three book group meetings and MAP, ACCESS, and state testing, it was time to erase the slanted Expo lines and all remnants of lackluster-blue testing to begin planning for April. As I erased each box, I reflected on the rich literary and very human discussion students facilitated in the past weeks, a stark contrast to the many silent hours answering multiple choice questions on computers. I recognized that the recording devices were a bit of an intrusion and big brother-ish. Students, however, knew their discussions were being recorded and that it was an alternative to another form of assessment, and for some, the presence of the recording device helped focus the discussion. As I added school events to the calendar, I marked “Open House” and imagined setting up stations for parents to watch and listen to their children discussing books.
Dr. Sarah Donovan is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. She may be reached at sarah.j.donovan@okstate.edu
References
Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix-xi. Farr, R. (1992). Putting it all together: Solving the reading assessment puzzle. The Reading Teacher, 46(1), 26. Goodman, Y. & Owocki, G. (2002). Kidwatching: Documenting children’s literacy development. New York, NY: Heinemann. Kohn, A. (1999). Punished by rewards. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Kohn, A. (2014). Why the best teachers don’t give tests. Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/no-tests/ National Assessment Governing Board. (2013). Reading framework for the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Sackstein, S. (2016). Overcoming the pressure to test. Education Week. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/work_in_progress/2016/01/overcoming_the_pressure_o _test.html Smith, F. (1988). Insult to intelligence: The bureaucratic invasion of our classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Young Adult Literature Cited
Combres, E. (2011). Broken memory. Toronto, ON: Groundwood Books. London. J. (1903). The call of the wild. New York, NY: Mcmillan. Martin. A. (2014). Rain reign. New York, NY: Feiwel and Friends. Twain, M. (1882). The prince and the pauper. London: Chatto & Windus. Yoon, N. (2015). Everything, everything. New York, NY: Ember. Zindel, P. (1968/2005). The pigman. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
