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Welcome to Season 1, Episode 5 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.
Episode 5 Show notes
This episode is Part 2 of a two-part conversation Penny had recently with Kylene Beers.
You can listen to Part 1 here.
We hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kylene as much as I did. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. If you feel inspired to support this work, please visit booklovefoundation.org where you can donate money we will use to support teachers. You can also meet teachers there who have changed the story of reading for their students with the support of The Book Love Foundation.
– Penny
RESOURCES REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Notice and Note book club page on FB (started by Allison Jackson, a 3rd grade teacher)
Kylene s I am not an H Facebook post
Thank you for listening to the The Book Love Foundation Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a colleague or two.
★ Support this podcast ★
Thank you for listening to the The Book Love Foundation Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a colleague or two.
Creators and Guests
Host
Penny Kittle
Guest
Kylene Beers
What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?
Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.
Penny Kittle 0:00
The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.
Kylene Beers 0:16
I think it is that moment of the particular that informs so much of what we do. But every single day, we are bombarded with the mass and getting down to the particular is difficult. Perhaps that's what great conversations allow us to do.
Penny Kittle 0:41
Welcome back to the book. Love foundation Podcast. I'm Penny Kittle and I'm your host. Last time we shared the first part of my recent conversation with Kylene Beers, if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, please do. Kylene Beers, wise thinking will make anyone a better teacher. Kylene has reminded me of the importance of rich conversations in teaching where you eliminate distractions and listen to the thinking of another. Great conversations allow us to move from the mass of information to the particular as Kylene said, I've been fortunate to have these conversations each year at heinemann's Booth Bay literacy retreat, and now the Pacific Coast literacy retreat with Kylene and Bob Probst and Linda reef and Chris cretcher. But I've also had these conversations with colleagues from all over the world who gather to think with us. When teachers engage with each other and connect in meaningful ways our thinking improves, our teaching improves, and our students benefit. I hope this podcast will encourage you to engage in your own great conversations with colleagues. What can be more important than professional conversations in our ongoing development as teachers? Joining me is Kevin Carlson from the teacher learning sessions.
Moderator 2:06
If you missed the first part of Penny's conversation with Kylene, we will have a link to it in the show notes, and you can find it at teacher learning sessions.com/go/book. Love that is also where you can join our email list and receive a transcript of the show delivered to your inbox. We will share details about that later in the show. Now, part two of Penny's conversation with Kylene Beers.
Penny Kittle 2:32
So your newest reading nonfiction book has taken the world by storm as well. I think it's such a timely book because we are reading more nonfiction, and I celebrate that there's so much great nonfiction out there in classrooms, but how to read it you guys have pretty you know, just created another blueprint for teachers to work from.
Kylene Beers 2:53
Well, thank you. It was meant to be a compliment to notice and note. We thought it would probably just extend the thinking and notice and note, but as we began writing it, we realized it needed to have its own story. It needed its own space, and it needed to say some things that didn't need to be said in the book for literary texts. What was the most interesting thing of writing that book was we we again turned to teachers, and we asked them to tell us what types of nonfiction they read with their kids, and that bombarded us with information. So then we went back to teachers and asked them how often they have kids read nonfiction, and boy that that was surprising, but then we realized one day in a conversation between the two of us, maybe we would be smart to ask teachers to share with us the definition of nonfiction they give to their students. And that was eye opening. We had about again, around 30 504,000 teachers respond grades K through 12, and what we saw was that a teacher in first grade might tell students that nonfiction means not fake. And want kids to hold on to that little mnemonic of NF, nonfiction and NF, not fake. And 12th grade teachers would say the same. Or third grade teachers might say, nonfiction gives you information. And 11th grade teachers would say nonfiction gives you information. And as we looked at that over time, Bob and I are greatly influenced by a gradual release model, and we think that release takes place daily. It takes. Takes place across a unit. It takes place across a year. It takes place across elementary school. So what a first graders day in elementary school looks like should be different when compared to what a fifth grader's day should look like, and it certainly should take place over all 12 years of school, so we so saw no Release of Responsibility in focusing on all the nuances of nonfiction, and that that really stunned us, and it forced us to say, what's the problem that we face as a democracy, and we really think that one of the problems in our democracy sits in our willingness to accept what others tell us. And sometimes others are the writers in newspaper articles, and sometimes, more often than not, the others are the commentators on one of two television news shows, Fox News, or MSNBC or CNN, those two seem to split. Bob always reminds me there's a third news show. It's called Comedy Central. But you know, the research Penny is very clear that politicians in Washington admit that one of their major goals while they are in Washington is to get reelected. They feel that it's in the reelection that they get enough time to accomplish big issues. And so then, when you look at the research on how politicians in Washington uncover what their constituents want them to support, they actually do read the emails we send or the faxes we send, or the phone calls we make. And then when we go one step beyond that and look at the research around how we, the public, get information about critical issues, always about 85% of the public responds that their their information comes from the news source that they watch. And most Americans have said for decades that they don't change the channel when it comes to watching news, if you watch one station, you don't like the news from another station. So our concern is that public opinion is actually not very public. It is instead the parroted opinion of people on television, pundits on TV. So we wanted to examine that phenomena against the reality that maybe we're turning out kids after 12 years of school who have listened to us and do indeed believe that nonfiction means not fake, and it is what gives. And the word gives is critical. It is what gives you information. Now if something is given to you, you have very little responsibility. You just take it. Well, what we wanted to do was remind kids that you have tremendous responsibility. When you're reading nonfiction, when you're reading fiction, you're entering into the world of the author. And you know, if you decide you don't like flying brooms, well, okay, you just don't like flying brooms. But when you read nonfiction, that world enters your world, and you've got to decide, when does that world need to be challenged? When does it need to be accepted? When do you need to know more? We want kids to recognize that nonfiction is purported truth. The author purports to offer you something that is true, and you have a job, dear reader, you have a job. It's a critical job, and it's to decide if that truth actually rings true for you, and once we made that discovery on our own, then we realized that the reading nonfiction book had to do something that the literary book didn't do, which was develop a more critical stance. We talk about reading with an open mind and a Skeptic's eye, because we want kids to have that stance that lets them say maybe, and then again, maybe not. So I think that reading nonfiction eventually, you know, came to tell its own story, and I have to say it's a story we're really quite proud of.
Penny Kittle 9:59
Oh. It's so great. I think the gift to teachers across all different content areas has been pretty profound. With that book. You know, their ability to say, Wow, I need to think more about the stance of the piece of writing when I'm using it to teach something about history or something about science.
Kylene Beers 10:19
And we tried to make it something that all of those content area teachers would feel at home with. So every text that we discuss in that book, as well as every example that about 200 teachers helped us pull together, comes from a social studies class, a history class, a geography class, a science class, whether that's chemistry, biology, physical science, earth science, a math class, a language arts class, technical subjects classes, we wanted teachers to be able to say, Oh, there I am, and those are my kids, and that's a text we might read, yeah, and we also tried in that book to do something we didn't do in notice and note, which was offer sidebar modifications for elementary, middle and high school, especially when we were talking about the definition. You know, we really spent some time showing people what a better definition for nonfiction might be, and then how that definition changes from primary to upper elementary to middle and high school as we attach the developmental growth of a child over time, what we think that oftentimes teachers use the term developmentally appropriate and haven't really taken the time to say, What do I know about this child at this point in her development as a thinker, and that's what developmentally appropriate education requires that we do. We wanted to show how that spirals through, how one definition spirals through the years, culminating in a more sophisticated definition,
Penny Kittle 12:23
so smart. I'm always kind of odd listening to you, Kylene
Kylene Beers 12:29
well, I don't know why
Penny Kittle 12:30
I sit here with my pen in hand and my notebook going, wow. Yeah, exactly. Why didn't I think to say that? Oh, you're so smart. Do you have a story you'd like to close with? The story of a kid or a teacher you've worked with something inspiring to send our listeners off into their work week.
Kylene Beers 12:49
I think that the story that is in my head right now is one that I'm watching unfold on Facebook. People often ask me, if I have a blog site, I do. I don't use it because I can't remember the password, so which is why we see that I will not be writing the technology chapter in any of my books. So I tend to use my Facebook page as my blog site. And a couple of weeks ago, I really think it was about 10 days ago, I posted an anecdote, a true anecdote of me being in a cab in Baltimore, and as I was talking with the cab driver, as I always do. He eventually asked me what I do and and I told him that I get to work with teachers across the nation as we all try to figure out how to help kids become better readers. And he said, Well, maybe you can help me. He said, I have 12 grandchildren, and our ninth one is in third grade, and his teacher keeps telling him he's an H, as in the letter H. And he said, his mother doesn't know what that is, and my wife and I don't know what that is. Can you tell us what an h is and and should we be helping him become a different letter. Oh, my goodness. I assured this man that his grandson was not an H, that he might be a baseball player and he might be a jokester and he might be an adorable, smart, young third grader, but he was not an H, and I told him that the teacher had confused the level of a book with a label she had probably just in speaking shorthand, had applied to the child, and offered him some things he could do to help encourage a joy of reading and and to then, you know. Gently check to make sure this little fellow was indeed understanding what he was reading. And I ended it by saying, you know, let's remember that a kid is not an age that the level we may put to a book to help us understand something about syntactical complexity of that book should never be transferred to a vision of a child. And I posted that, and within about five days, it had over 3000 shares and about 400 comments from teachers who were willing to say, I've done that and I won't do that anymore. Or how do we all make sure we never put those limiting labels on children? And it began a conversation that now, if you go to my Facebook page, you'll see hundreds of photographs that I asked for of children holding up signs saying, I am not an H. I think that when teachers have the tools in front of them to help them think carefully about what they're doing and to make the choice that always best supports children. We do that, and that's what I think I love the most about teachers. They never stop looking at their own actions and making any changes they need so that it helps kids
Penny Kittle 16:40
you are so right. I love that about teachers. I love that about our profession, about leaders like you. You make such a difference, Kylene, all the things you do. Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Kylene Beers 16:54
Thank you for asking me penny. I love this.
Penny Kittle 17:00
We hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kylene as much as I did. Thank you for listening to this episode of the book Love foundation podcast. If you feel inspired to support this work, please visit booklovefoundation.org where you can donate money we will use to support teachers. You can also meet teachers there who have changed the story of reading for their students with the support of the book Love Foundation. Thank you very much for listening. I'm Penny Kittle.
Moderator 17:28
Thank you very much for listening today, and again, if you missed the first part of Penny's conversation with Kylene, please take the time to check it out. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us spread the word about the show, talk to your colleagues about it and share it in your online social network. Let people know that you like it and tell them why. If you're listening on iTunes, please subscribe and take a moment to leave a rating and a review. That is a great way for you to help support us, because it helps other teachers learn what the show is about. And again, if you would like a transcript of this show, go to teacher learning sessions.com/go/book. Love and join the email list there. If you're already on the email list, thank you. We leave you now we have scenes from our next episode. How can teachers lead in their schools?
Future Guest 1 18:21
I'm already thinking about how I can make reading and the love of books a part of our mentoring program that we have in our building.
Future Guest 2 18:28
Even though I am young, I enjoy creating opportunities for teachers to share with one another. I learned just as much from the people who are attending as they learn from my presentation, and I love that about teaching
Moderator 18:41
That's next time on the book Love foundation podcast. The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions.com connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other. You