Mills Teacher Scholars First School Site: Roosevelt Elementary School Five Years Later

 Five years ago Mills Teacher Scholars was encouraged to take its brand of teacher-led inquiryoff of the Mills campus and out into local schools. San Leandro Unified Roosevelt principal, Victoria Forrester, welcomed the pilot program to her campus.

Five years later 20 teachers—98% of her staff —are engaged in teacher-led inquiry to better understand student learning.  Victoria, also active on the Mills Teacher Scholars advisory board, credits the program with building broad-based teacher leadership among the teachers at Roosevelt, leadership that carries over from the Mills Teacher Scholars work to all the other aspects of Roosevelt’s efforts to improve learning outcomes for all students. Read more →

Reading Closely: What Does it Really Mean?

Marguerite Sheffer, a high school English teacher at Castlemont in Oakland Unified, knew she wanted her students to read “closely,” but she wasn’t sure exactly what that entailed. Frustrated with the mixed messages she was receiving from professional development resources about how to support students with close reading, she turned her uncertainty into a rigorous teacher inquiry project that helped clarify her ideas around this skill. In a series of three blog posts, she shares her insights from her year long inquiry with Mills Teacher Scholars. 

The new Common Core standards explicitly call out the skill of “close reading of a rigorous text.”

Depending on who you ask, though, “close reading” means reading multiple times, reading through multiple critical lenses, or reading for “layers” of meaning.  All agree that close reading is deep reading, but there is not one sure path to get students there.  It becomes even murkier when we turn to removing the scaffolds and empowering students to closely read on their own.

As a teacher, I had become frustrated because I was receiving different “close reading resources” that were so varied that they amounted to different cognitive demands on students–some were more teacher-directed, whereas others were open-ended and student-focused.

Through my inquiry work at Mills, I was able to turn my frustration into advocacy, and enter the debate on what close reading means and how best to teach it. Read more →

Getting Closer to Close Reading

In Part 2 of  a three part series on supporting students with close reading of complex text, Marguerite Sheffer describes how, through her inquiry work, she begins to better understand how to get students more actively engaged in close reading and original interpretation of complex text. 

 After realizing that text-dependent questions were leading to un-original, repetitive analysis from students, I knew I needed to try something different.  

Students Ask Their Own Questions

It was hard for me, but in Spring I let go of crafting beautiful questions for class discussions and seminars.

For the next unit, as I went through my inquiry, I was careful not to lead students towards any particular interpretation, or even towards a focus.  I wanted to see what happened when they were responsible, through collaboration, for developing original questions and claims about a “rigorous text.” Read more →