Currents in Literacy

Ellin Keene Spends Two Days in Hood Project Schools

By Bob Sprague

In September, the Hood Children's Literacy Project sponsored two days of classroom workshops with Ellin Keene, co-author of the acclaimed Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop, in the Hardy and Thompson schools of Arlington, Massachusetts. Keene is also associate director of the Denver-based Public Education Business Coalition (PEBC), a non-profit agency that supports professional development in the Denver area schools. As a consultant, Keene brings into her classroom workshops fifteen years of experience conducting research on reading comprehension as a staff developer in the PEBC schools.

At the two Arlington schools, Keene worked her way through the school by grade level, helping to expand the literary visions of students - and teachers - by modeling various strategies for increasing student comprehension. The Hood Project funded substitutes to allow all teachers to gather and observe the demonstrations for their grade. Getting as close to the students as she could in each class, often with them surrounding her on the floor, Keene concentrated on encouraging the students to think more deeply while they read. She would then make asides to the observing teachers such as "Try to push to the next level; you'll never be disappointed. Kids say brilliant things."

In one of the fifth grades, the students listened and watched as Keene held up The Children We Remember, a book about the Holocaust by Chana Byers Abells that is dominated by large photos and little text. She encouraged students to draw inferences. "Think about what you know about," she said, "when people are being treated unfairly." A number of students offered opinions. Keene turned to a page that showed the faces of children before their Nazi captors killed them. "Inferences?" she kept pushing. The push paid off. "If you think hard," one fifth grader said, "the way the words and pictures go together, they make a rhythm, like music, a way that makes you hear sadness." You hear sadness. Keene's amazed expression told us how that idea struck her. "I never thought of that before," she said. To the eight teachers in the room this was the sort of breakthrough moment that any reading teacher would cherish.

Such moments came not only in individual reactions. Keene also tried to get the fifth graders to leap beyond their own thoughts. She asked all the students to turn to the person next to them and express an inference they gathered from the book. Then she asked them, "Tell me an inference your partner made, not one you made." Among the inferences was that all the pictures in the book are related to each other. Keene called them "picture cousins," and pointed the youngsters toward an understanding of how a book develops its theme.

Ellin Keene at the Hood Children's Liberacy Forum at Lesley University demonstrating her techniques with student volunteers.

Further, her work did not treat the Holocaust as an isolated event from a past none of the fifth graders had known. She tied it to the near present. "I come from the place where Columbine happened," she said, referring to the killings last April at a high school in Littleton, Colorado. Connecting to the present day brought the students into the story in a deeper manner. Keene commented later on her technique, "You need to build intimacy and trust with students....[This approach to reading] helps kids change the fabric and contour of the future."

Teachers at Thompson and Hardy marveled at the insights that they heard their students make under Keene's guidance. At other workshops, Keene used fiction and nonfiction picture books that were loaded with content and literary language to engage the children and encourage them to make connections and think deeply about the story that she read aloud.

Keene presented a variety of strategies to increase comprehension at different grade levels. They included questioning, monitoring comprehension, drawing inferences and synthesizing information. In each case, Keene showed teachers how to slow the process of reading and give children time to listen to and become aware of the voice inside their head that reacts to and makes meaning out of the text.

First graders asked probing questions, second graders were heard talking about what their "monitoring voices" were saying to them, third graders grappled with combining what they already know and what is in the text to create an inference, and fifth graders deftly caught on to the idea that a synthesis can change and evolve as the text unfolds.

Teachers watching these demonstrations at both schools vowed to continue to develop and refine how they teach reading comprehension. Many had already participated in a "Teacher Book Club" last year focusing on Keene's book, so it was a wonderful opportunity to see the strategies in action and have a collegial interchange with Keene.

Bob Sprague is the communication specialist for Arlington public schools and the town's webmaster. He was a journalist for twenty-two years.