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Stenhouse Newslinks
March 30, 2006

C O N T E N T S

1) Listening for fluency
2) Motivating black male teens to read
3) PD Corner: Got questions?
4) Visit Stenhouse at ASCD in Chicago

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1) Listening for fluency
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"We do not overburden ourselves with excessive notes that record 
students' fluent reading. Instead we have trained our ears to 
listen for fluent reading during reading conferences. We listen 
for automaticity as students decode print, noting miscues and 
their self-repairing strategies. We listen to see if students are 
reading meaningful phrases, noting when students understand what 
they are reading or are just sounding smooth. We observe students 
while they are writing and note spelling and composing strategies. 
Once we collect this information, we give students feedback, 
helping them monitor and set goals for their own growth."

--from the Introduction of the new book, Practical Fluency

Classroom teachers Max and Gayle Brand have synthesized research 
and recommendations on fluency and incorporated them into their 
teaching practices over the past twenty years. The result is their 
new book, Practical Fluency: Classroom Perspectives, Grades K-6.

Using a literacy workshop approach, Max and Gayle focus on key 
components of supporting fluency: demonstrating how to accomplish 
an activity; providing opportunities to engage in the activity; 
using real texts for real purposes; providing explicit feedback, 
guidance, and coaching; and providing time for reflection and 
goal-setting.

Practical Fluency is now available in print, and you can also 
review the entire text on-line:

http://www.stenhouse.com/0410.asp?r=n86

Practical Fluency: Classroom Perspectives, Grades K-6
Max Brand and Gayle Brand * 128 pp/paper * $15.00 * Available now
http://www.stenhouse.com/0410.asp?r=n86

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2) Motivating black male teens to read
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The March issue of Adolescent Literacy In Perspective (Ohio 
Resource Center) carries the theme "Boys and Reading" and features 
an article by Alfred Tatum that answers the question, "How can I 
motivate African American teenage boys to read?":

http://www.stenhouse.com/rdintatum.htm

Alfred Tatum is the author of Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent 
Males: Closing the Achievement Gap. Read Chapter 1 on-line here:

http://www.stenhouse.com/0393.asp?r=n86

In Perspective, published monthly during the school year, features 
classroom vignettes, student perspectives, and professional book 
suggestions. A sampling of recent themes includes Supporting 
Struggling Readers in Content-Area Learning, Vocabulary and Word 
Study, and Working Through Challenging Text. Both current and past 
issues are freely available here:

http://www.ohiorc.org/adlit/in_perspective.aspx

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3) PD Corner: Got questions?
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"Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate 
questions, you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you 
from learning whatever you want or need to know."

--Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, from Teaching as a 
Subversive Activity

Questioning skills are critical to learning in many areas, 
including reading comprehension, information literacy, social 
studies, and writing. Here are some Web resources that will help 
you create a "culture of questioning" in your classroom.

The on-line journal From Now On has several articles and resources 
on questioning. "Filling the Toolbox: Classroom Strategies to 
Engender Student Questioning" is a series of 15 ideas that can be 
tried in a variety of situations and subject areas:

http://www.fno.org/toolbox.html

"The Question Is the Answer" explores how questioning skills are 
essential to meaningful research projects in the information age:

http://www.fno.org/oct97/question.html
(Best viewed with your browser text size at the smallest setting.)

"A Questioning Toolkit" explores 17 types of questions, starting 
with "essential" questions and branching off to others such as 
hypothetical, probing, clarification, and provocative:

http://www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html

The University of Texas Learning Center has a handy list of model 
questions and keywords based on Bloom's Taxonomy:

http://www.utexas.edu/student/utlc/lrnres/handouts/1414.html

The Question Matrix (Weiderhold, 1993) can help students create 
their own questions about topics and encourage in-depth thinking:

http://sci.tamucc.edu/~eyoung/4382/question_matrix.html

"Questioning Techniques for Gifted Students" is a concise overview 
of why questioning is important for gifted students. It includes a 
range of question types and tools:

http://www.nexus.edu.au/teachstud/gat/painter.htm

The new book, Q Tasks: How to Empower Students to Ask Questions 
and Care About Answers, will help get students out of "answer 
mode," with 89 step-by-step tasks on curiosity, question types, 
building good questions, research quests, opinions, interviews, 
surveys, writing, study skills, and more. You can browse the 
entire text of this book for a limited time:

http://www.stenhouse.com/8197.asp?r=n86

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4) Visit Stenhouse at ASCD in Chicago
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Are you or a colleague attending the ASCD Annual Conference in 
Chicago? Be sure to schedule a visit to the Stenhouse exhibit 
(Booth #566) to browse and buy our books and videos. Our friends 
at the Responsive Classroom will also be exhibiting (Booth #1211). 
Exhibit hours are 9am-4pm Saturday & Sunday and 9am-3pm Monday.

And check out the following sessions by Stenhouse authors:

Sara Kajder
Differentiation in Reading: More Than Swapping Text
Session 2219 * 12:30-2:30pm Sunday

Heather Lattimer
Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Science 
Classroom
Session 2164 * 8:30-9:30am Sunday

Ken Goodman
Saving Our Schools: Saying No to NCLB
Session 2153 * 8:30-9:30am Sunday



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