The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 262

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 262 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll learn three fresh strategies for getting students engaged with texts. 

So much of the work we do in school involves reading and interacting with texts: books, stories, articles, poems, and textbooks make up a huge part of how we get information into students’ heads. This is especially true in English language arts classes, where literature has always been a staple of course content. 

And sometimes, in some classes, with some students… it can get pretty boring. Pretty dry. Your students might not be too terribly excited about the work they are required to do with texts. 

That’s a problem my guests today want to solve. Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber are both high school English teachers who have spent the last decade working online to build community with other English teachers through social media chats and on their blog, muchadoaboutteaching.com. Through that work, they’ve learned that many ELA  teachers struggle to plan lessons that really engage their students. So they began curating lessons to meet that need. Earlier this year, they put these lessons into a book, 100% Engagement: 33 Lessons to Promote Participation, Beat Boredom, and Deepen Learning in the ELA Classroom.

In today’s episode, they’ll share three of the lesson ideas from the book. All three are fun, low-tech, and get students out of their seats and engaging actively with course material. If you and your students work with texts, I bet you’re going to want to try at least one of them in your classroom. 

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Solution Tree for sponsoring this episode. If you follow the show, you know the value in learning from other educators. That’s the basis of Solution Tree’s work. They match schools with experts who help them implement professional development for teachers and administrators and bring out the very best in students. What makes Solution Tree different is that their experts are real educators who have been in your shoes and have faced the same types of challenges your school may face. From building professional learning communities to improving student intervention strategies, Solution Tree has helped schools nationwide see real, sustained results in student achievement, teacher satisfaction, and overall school culture. See the kind of results they can help a school or district like yours achieve at solutiontree.com/cultofpedagogy.

Support also comes from Listenwise, providing short, high-quality, age-appropriate podcasts for grades 2-12. Save time with pre-made lessons and build students’ background knowledge and academic vocabulary. Keep students on grade-level with scaffolding and differentiation. Listenwise now offers the Writing Assessor, a new tool that provides instant, actionable feedback to help students become more confident and capable communicators. The Writing Assessor generates English Language Proficiency levels and identifies strengths and growth areas, saving teachers time and giving every student the valuable feedback they need to improve. Start a free trial today at listenwise.com.

Now here’s my conversation with Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber about three strategies that get students engaged with texts.

GONZALEZ: Hey guys, welcome. 

SZTABNIK: Hey, Jenn. 

BARBER: Hi. Thanks for having us. 

GONZALEZ: We are, we have Susan and Brian. I would like us to start by just having you tell us a little bit about what you do in education. So Susan Barber, let’s start with you. 

BARBER: Great. Hi. I’m Susan Barber, and I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I teach for Atlanta Public Schools, specifically Midtown High School, formerly Grady High School. That’s how most people would know it, which is Atlanta’s oldest public high school. Started as an all-boys school — 

GONZALEZ: Oh wow. 

BARBER: — in the late 1800s and has just gone through a lot of changes, and it’s a fun place to teach. Lots of history, lots of tradition in Atlanta. So I am in my eighth year there, and I was in the suburbs of Atlanta before then. So I teach all AP lit, which is interesting at this public high school in Atlanta. We just have, it’s just a part of the ethos of this school. We have a large AP program that serves a lot of kids in our district, and it’s great. We have a wide variety of kids in that program. And so that’s what I teach. I have also, in the past, worked for College Board, currently work for College Board on the test development committee, have been really heavily involved in NCTE on their secondary steering committee and have written with Brian for about a decade now. So that’s a little bit about me. 

GONZALEZ: Awesome. Thank you so much, and it’s great to meet you. 

BARBER: Yeah, you too. 

GONZALEZ: Brian I have known. We go back a long, long time. So first of all, Brian, tell us, for people that are not familiar with the work that you do, who you are in the world of education and what your work is. 

SZTABNIK: I’m a high school English teacher, so I teach mostly the upper levels. The past few years, it’s been 11th and 12th grade. Like Susan, I’m an AP teacher. I’m at Miller Place High School, which is on Long Island. I’m about an hour and 10 minutes outside of New York City, so a very traditional public school, about a third to half the senior class takes AP lit, the class that I teach. And the other thing I love to do at Miller Place is just be involved where students are at their most passionate. So I’m a basketball coach there as well. I also run a chess club. We met today and had 30 kids in the room, so that was so cool to see. And I do an athlete mentoring program where we go down to the elementary schools and mentor fifth graders about drugs and alcohol, good sportsmanship, and bullying. So just putting kids in situations where they can shine outside the classroom is such a great experience. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Fantastic. And the two of you, I asked you about this before we started this recording, how you met and did you work together. And so you met online, just like Brian and I did. So tell me just a little bit about how you all came together to write this book, “100% Engagement,” and then let’s talk about the book itself. 

SZTABNIK: I think we have to go back a decade, and not to give you a year by year history but Susan and I are kindred spirits. So about 10 years ago, I was on Twitter and I realized there was no Twitter chat for AP teachers, and I started an AP lit chat that used to meet on Sunday nights. And Susan was one of the first people to join and that first week, I think we had three AP lit teachers. And from there it kind of just grew and we just had a great community, and I think one thing that sustains Susan and I outside the classroom is we love creating a sense of community with teachers, and especially a course like AP where often teachers are the only one in their building that might teach that class. Knowing there’s other teachers out there that are maybe having the same frustrations or trying to grapple with the same problems. So of course Twitter was that great platform where people would get together. You’d have 10 questions and a chat would transpire in an hour. And from there a friendship just bloomed where then we started developing websites and developing Facebook groups and just incorporating teachers into the experience of trying to figure out how we can engage kids. And one of the things that both Susan and I do is we spend parts of our summer traveling the country doing workshops for teachers through the College Board. So the blessing of that is we’ve each been to places like San Diego, Las Vegas, Kentucky, and one of the things that we kept hearing year after year is the thing that happens in the classroom is engagement. Teachers were really struggling with that. The flip side was when kids go home, how do we handle AI?

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: But the engagement thing was something that I think spoke to both of us because one of the things we’ve tried to do year after year in the classroom is just develop really dynamic lessons that take literature and open those possibilities with students. 

GONZALEZ: So this book, it’s called “100% Engagement: 33 Lessons to Promote Participation, Beat Boredom, and Deepen Learning in the ELA Classroom.” So we’re going to be talking about specifically lessons that are for English language arts teachers. So I’m assuming that you kept hearing these things from teachers, that they were wanting more engagement. And so how did the two of you curate these lessons? Are these lessons that the two of you have taught yourselves or that you’ve picked up from these visits around the classroom or around the country? 

BARBER: Yeah. These are lessons that Brian and I use in our classroom. And one thing that we noticed working with teachers is we would share our lessons, whether we were doing a session, speaking somewhere, or even online we were sharing our lessons. And people just were like, this is really great and do you have more, do you have more? And so we started, when we started thinking about this book and we batted around several different formats and ideas, but we kept coming back to, like, teachers really just want practical ideas that have already been tested in the classroom that they can use just, you know, boots on the ground, Monday morning, what can I pull out and use in the classroom? And so we wanted to give them several lesson templates that were engaging our students. And then, you know, they can use this template too in their classroom, and we have in each chapter variations for the lessons, so maybe you need to scaffold it more, maybe you need to adjust it for language learners, all different kinds of adjustment. So we offer a template, a little bit of a backstory, how it came to be in our classroom, a template of the lesson, how the materials you would use and then all of the variations for it. And we just started categorizing, like here are lessons around teaching poetry, here’s lessons around teaching short stories, here’s lessons around teaching novels, and then lessons around teaching writing. And so once we got that, those categories and we started grouping our lessons in, and then the book just came to be. 

GONZALEZ: Sounds like it wrote itself after a while. 

BARBER: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: I think we looked at some of those lessons in, especially in our introduction, came up with our 10 core beliefs. And one of the things that we were reflective about was what gets everyone involved in these lessons. How do you actually get 100% participation, 100% engagement? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: And some of the things we realized is it’s not that, those common ideas, that the teacher is the disseminator of information. We are trying to create the conditions where students can learn on their own or learn collectively. So a lot of it was about getting kids out of their seat, getting them to collaborate. The teacher is setting up those conditions, but ultimately it’s on the student to take the onus of learning. And what gets them involved in a lesson besides just here’s a worksheet. Fill it out and put it on my desk at the end of the period. And we saw a lot of commonalities, and we came up with 10 core beliefs. And you could see that evident throughout the 33 lessons in the book. 

GONZALEZ: Could we review those 10 core beliefs really quickly? 

BARBER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Are they fast enough that we could? Let’s hear what those are. 

BARBER: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: So myth No. 1, learning is passive, and then our core belief is learning occurs when students are actively involved using multiple modalities in creative ways. 

BARBER: So the second core belief we have is that students see meaning and value in work that they complete. So again, they’re active in the learning, not sitting and receiving from us. 

GONZALEZ: Mhmm, mhmm. 

SZTABNIK: Myth: Questions are direct and closed. Core belief: Questions are open and inviting to all. 

BARBER: Another myth that students fear putting themselves out there, and our core belief is that students are connected to something bigger than themselves when they are connected to something bigger than themselves, that they feel safe taking those risks and putting themselves out there. 

SZTABNIK: I love this one. Lessons are repetitive, rote, stale, and often taken from a curriculum guide. Our core belief is lessons are wonderfully dynamic, drawing inspiration from beyond the walls of the classroom. 

BARBER: Another myth, the teacher tells the students what to think about literature, and our core belief is literature speaks to students about themselves. 

GONZALEZ: It really should, yes. Yeah. 

BARBER: And it does. A lot of times we as teachers just have to get out of the way. And that’s the hard part because we’re the English majors. We like telling what the literature says to us. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: But, you know, that’s not really —

GONZALEZ: But I don’t think anybody ever wrote a poem or a story or a novel with the idea that it was going to just be a worksheet or a lecture. 

BARBER: Right. 

GONZALEZ: It was supposed to speak to people about themselves, yeah. 

SZTABNIK: And I think one of the things we tried to do to make this book approachable is we did two things. No. 1, we shared the inspiration of the lesson. So one night I was watching “Top Chef” and there was a quick fire challenge, and I was trying to think about how I could turn that excitement, anticipation, frenzy into a classroom lesson. And so I give the story behind it so it’s narrative-based to begin. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: But then each chapter also moves to a concrete lesson plan that if an administrator was to come in and actually see the write-up and some learning standards attached to it, procedures, objectives. So we tried to meet both ends, both the familiar of the narrative-based and the formal of observation-based. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Did we cover all of the core beliefs, or we could, we could move on from those? Or if there’s, they were out of order —

SZTABNIK: I think we gave enough to get a good feel for it. 

GONZALEZ: That’s totally fine. 

BARBER: Let me give one more. Can I give one more? 

GONZALEZ: Okay. Absolutely. 

BARBER: I’m always the “one more” gal. So one of the myths is that learning occurs in isolation, and one of our core beliefs is learning through collaboration is really an essential part of the classroom, especially coming out of the pandemic where students were completely in isolation and learning in isolation. I think if there’s anything that that taught us it’s how important this academic learning community is. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

BARBER: And we learn from each other, like hearing each other’s perspectives, questioning each other, pushing back on each other. We learn so much better in community than in isolation. And so that’s something that we really value, and a lot of our activities are going to be in groups, at least for part of the time. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: And students working together. 

GONZALEZ: I love that. When I saw my own kids move back into the classroom after COVID, I was so disappointed that their teachers weren’t doing more to, they were in high school at this point, weren’t doing more to get them talking to each other, and I thought, was is the point of us even being in person —

BARBER: Right. 

GONZALEZ: — if we’re not going to be interacting with the other people? 

BARBER: Right. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: Yep. 

GONZALEZ: So that’s fantastic. One question also about this book. Is there a, if a person’s listening and they teach fourth grade, is that going to be too young for some of these activities? Is it more ideal for high school? 

SZTABNIK: I think we give templates that work with high school literature, but I think the adaptability of each lesson is, and this is part of our how to make it fit multiple grade levels —

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: — is that you can take that framework and adapt it to your student needs. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: So even to use that example from before, quick fire challenge — 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: — it’s literally raiding your junk drawer, finding things that you can bring into the classroom and setting a timer and having students create something that reflects the literature that they’re reading. 

GONZALEZ: Interesting. 

SZTABNIK: And that’s something that I think can work as low as early elementary all the way up through 12th grade. 

GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah. 

BARBER: And yeah. One of the lessons we’re talking about tonight is specifically poem puzzles, cutting up poems, putting them together, constructing them. But truly, that could work in a fourth grade classroom, and that could work in a college level classroom. 

GONZALEZ: That’s exactly what I was about to say. I think sometimes the great ideas stop in 12th grade, and then you get into college and it’s like yeah, we’re just going to sit here and lecture, and that’s it. 

BARBER: Right. 

GONZALEZ: And it’s just like, no. College students need to have engaging activities too. 

BARBER: Right, right. 

GONZALEZ: And they would probably bring so much interesting stuff to those. 

BARBER: And let’s just extend it on out for teacher professional development too. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: Let me just put that out into the universe. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SZTABNIK: I think that was one of our fears, especially going into the book is Susan and I are AP lit teachers. I think that’s our audience group. We wanted to make this book approachable to all, and I think that’s why the variations are so important, because occasionally we’ll talk about second language learners or middle school teachers. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: How these lessons can be adapted to suit any classroom, not just an AP classroom. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. If you’re ready, let’s go ahead and get into the first one. 

BARBER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: We’re going to be talking about three. We’re just sampling, basically, three activities from your, the 33 in the book. And so this one is cutting up poetry. Is that what it’s called? 

BARBER: Yeah. 

GONZALEZ: And we’re going to get this from Susan. 

BARBER: Yeah, great. So this is actually Lesson 1 in the book, and it is poetry, even though I would argue this could be used with certain prose passages as well. So basically I take a poem and make a puzzle out of it. This is always my Day 1 lesson because on Day 1, I want my students doing what we’re going to be doing all year in class. I don’t want to be going over the rules in the syllabus. I want them to have a taste of what the class is going to be like. So I do this lesson. And I’ve used several poems in the past, but typically I use “Good Bones” By Maggie Smith. And what this lesson does is so you take a poem. I remove key words and phrases from the poem, and then when my students come in, those key words and phrases are on the bright box at the front of the room. And for roll call, I’m like, answer, pick one of these words and phrases. And so that’s how they answer roll on the first day, saying one of these phrases. So now the words, some of the words and phrases from the poem, it’s already in their mouth and they’re already speaking it and hearing other people speak it, and we play around with some of those words and phrases and like whisper it, and change the infection of it, and change the tone of it, so again, these words and phrases that are important in the text. They’re rolling around in their mind and they’re starting to maybe think about thematic ideas connected to them. So then I give students a copy of the poem, “Good Bones” in this case. And those words and phrases are removed from that poem. So it’ll be just like a standard piece of 8×11 paper with a poem printed on it, and chunks missing from the poem where those words and phrases are. And then I’ve taken those words and phrases and cut them up and they’re in a little baggie that go to each group of students, and students work together in groups of four to put this poem puzzle together. So the words and phrases that they have been saying and playing around with, taken out of the poem, now they’re going to sit down and actually put them together, piece them together, in this, on this sheet of paper that has been removed. So what’s happening here is it’s forcing the students to do a close reading of the poem. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

BARBER: Because they’re having to consider, oh, does this make sense if it goes here? Well, this is a capital letter, so it may not go in the middle of those sentences, or this is a comma here, that may not fit right there. And so students are already thinking about, they’re reading closely thinking about this poem analytically, and having really good discussion about this poem. I like to say it’s a teacher trick. Like, if I would have passed out this poem and say, “I want you to do a close reading of this poem,” their eyes would be glazed over. Now I’ve tricked them. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: They’re already doing this and they’re working together, they’re talking together, they’re having fun and enjoy it, and they put it together. And so this can be done and adapted in several different ways. Maybe instead of a puzzle where words and phrases are removed, maybe a poem in couplets. I think about Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance,” that whole poem is written in couplets. And so I cut each of those lines out. I pull the first line of the couplet, group those together. The second line of the couplets, group those together. Then I have students work to figure out what the couplets are and what order they go in. Again, you could scaffold this in any way you would need to. So maybe you need to give the first line of each stanza. However you would need to scaffold it. We have suggestions for that in the book. So students, after they put this poem together, now they’re primed for discussion, and the lesson can go a few different ways from here. Maybe we’re going to annotate. Maybe we’re just going to do a whole class discussion based on conversations that I’ve heard around the room when students were assembling the poem. I like to use a lot of poems that have motion poems, or poems that have been put to video. I like to use those a lot and show the motion poem. And you can just Google “motion poems.” Tons out there. Show the motion poem, and then ask the students, “Okay, when you read this poem, is that how you interpreted it?” And a lot of times students are like, “No, that’s not, no, they got this wrong.” And I love that because that signals to me we’ve read the poem, we’ve discussed it, and now they’ve built their own interpretation of it, and they’re able to defend it against someone else’s. So that’s a huge win for me. So I love this lesson. It’s hands on, discussion-oriented, just highly engaging. 

GONZALEZ: Oh, I love it. It sounds, I can picture everything you’re saying, and anything that sort of primes them before they sort of are just delivered this straight-up thing as it is —

BARBER: Yep. 

GONZALEZ: It’s, yeah. That sounds excellent. Is there anything else you wanted to add about that before we move onto the next one? 

BARBER: Oh my goodness. I could talk so much, but I think you get the idea of it. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BARBER: I want to let Brian talk some. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So the second activity we’re going to talk about is the inferential timeline. Brian? 

SZTABNIK: All right. So this is a lesson that I love because it uses everyday supplies, so you don’t need anything fancy. It is easy to pull off, and best of all, the students are doing most of the work. 

GONZALEZ: Perfect. 

SZTABNIK: So I’ll give you the backstory on it, and it all started a while ago because this is when Common Core first came out. And my district hired a consultant to come in and explain to everyone what it meant when it said that we’re all now teachers of reading and writing. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: And I’ll cut it short by saying that PD did not go well. There was a lot of pushback, a lot of grumbling. And the next day, an assistant principal came to my classroom and said, “Can you help me figure out how to explain this and how to do this in other disciplines?” And at the time, I was teaching “Catcher in the Rye” in my English 12 class. And I invited her back the next day and came up with an idea literally that night. I called it the inferential timeline because students had to read two to three chapters the night before for homework. And so when they came in the next day, I think it was Chapter 15, 16, and 17. I assigned each student a few pages, I’m saying three to four, so nothing grand. And what students had to do is they had to come up to the front of the room because as they were entering the room, I was giving them an index card with page numbers on it. So students had to come up to the front of the room and grab a blank index card. On that index card, all they had to write was the most important thing to happen on those three to four pages. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: What I was really asking them was to summarize the plot — 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

SZTABNIK: — and boil it down to one or two sentences. So this is all about decision-making and cutting out the extraneous details and just focusing on what’s really important. And often it’s either character development or increasing conflict or maybe a symbol finally emerges. And what I did was put blue painter’s tape across the entire back wall of the classroom, and that was our timeline. So after students read those three to four pages, they wrote down their most important thing in one to two sentences. They had to tape it chronologically on the back wall. And in a class of 22, that might have taken 10 to 12 minutes. And then once we had the timeline established, students now had to go back to that wall. And the only caveat was they could not take their own index card. They had to take someone else’s. So it’s going to introduce some new knowledge, and the subtle thing about this was it was collaborative without it actually being collaborative physically. It was collaborative mentally, and here’s why. They had to look at their classmate’s index card. They had to determine what happened, and on a new index card, they had to make an inference about why that event was so important in the grand scheme of those three chapters. So here’s where we’re getting to the higher level thinking of we can understand the factual or the plot, now we need to draw conclusions. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

SZTABNIK: And it could have been it foreshadowed something later on, it could have been the symbol is symbolic because it represents a larger idea. It could be deepening that understanding of conflict because we see new forces of anger emerging and there were repressed feelings that are finally coming to the forefront. And students that had to write those inferences, and this was now the challenge to do it in about three to four sentences and be expansive about it. And then rehang everything back on the timeline. So when we’re done, we have this blue piece of tape that spans the back wall. We’ve got everything that happens over the course of three chapters, but now we also have a deep understanding of how it’s progressing. So the period ends with us doing a gallery walk, and students are taking notes about all the other inferences. And the coolest part about it was when you did your factual index card, now you could see what someone else thought about its importance, and it may not have been exactly the same way you wanted to word it, it might have been better, they might have missed something, and we close the period just by having a class discussion about what we observed about what students noticed, how they worded it, what we’ve learned about these three chapters beyond just the factual but about where this is all going in terms of “Catcher in the Rye.” So things that I love about this, I said No. 1, it’s super cheap. All you need is blue painter’s tape, which I have in my basement, and a stack of index cards. No. 2, every single time I’ve done this lesson, and I’ve asked students to come up and grab an index card, every student’s done it. Every student has done, hung that index card on the back wall. 

GONZALEZ: Wow. 

SZTABNIK: So when we talk about 100 percent participation —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: — this is so easy to get because no one wants to be that kid that just sits there and doesn’t hang something on the back wall. So there are variations in quality. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: But I get everyone into the text. I get everyone reading that chapter, not just once for homework, not just twice when they’re looking for the factual. We’re going into the text three different times over the course of a day and a half. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: And then No. 3, it’s that collaborative aspect. You are working with people in the classroom, but it’s on a very intellectual or mental level. You’re not sitting in proximity to this person. The collaboration, I guess, is on that back wall. So variations. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SZTABNIK: I did this with “Catcher in the Rye.” You could do this with, I think, any text. We did instructional rounds one year at my school and all these different teachers from different subjects came in, and a social studies teacher said, “Oh my God. I’m stealing this idea, and I’m doing a World War II timeline, and we’re going to have all the major events and battles of World War II, but then the inferences below it.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: So in terms of getting engagement that way, I did very little. I told them what pages they were assigned. I told them what they had to do. But the rest of the onus was on them. 

GONZALEZ: Very interesting. Okay, I have a question, because you were talking about the collaboration. In between the time that they write their first thing, put it up, and then they get the other, their other card, and then they start — is it, is the room silent? Are they allowed to talk to each other? 

SZTABNIK: Well, the first time I did this and the assistant principal came in —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: — she said it was like church in there because they were so silent. And I think it was partly her present, but there is some downtime built in there. So students are going to put those index cards up at their own speed on their own time. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: So the first person to do it is going to have some downtime, but that’s when you work the little tricks. 

GONZALEZ: Okay.

SZTABNIK: And you see what they wrote, and you give them some feedback. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: And you monitor the room a little bit. So there’s going to be some downtime, but it’s not idle time because as one card starts to move, then all of a sudden as people see other people get up, it’s the domino effect. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SZTABNIK: So the downtime is minimal, but it’s there. 

GONZALEZ: Is there, and it’s funny because I wasn’t even thinking of it so much as downtime as much as, are they consulting with each other? Are they saying, “This is what I want to put. Does that sound right?” Or looking at what one person wrote, and saying, “Okay, I get how we’re supposed to do this now.” Is it like that kind of, I’m thinking more of a low buzz. 

SZTABNIK: I think they’re curious about —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: — who’s going to get their card. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: Of course, you have to get someone else’s card when you make the inference. Who’s going to get their card? What they’re going to say about it, and then also, what card are you going to get because you can’t pick your own. You’re picking something further down the timeline. So I think that’s the great unveil at the end is part of the gallery walk. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: Is looking through both levels of it. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

SZTABNIK: What happened over the span of the chapters, but then what meaning as a class can we make of it, and seeing how people worded it. And of course they should have read it the night before for homework, which most do, and now’s their chance to really have a deeper understanding beyond just the superficial “I read it for an assignment.” Now we’re diving deep into the text. 

GONZALEZ: So my other question is built off of what you just said. What do we do with the kids that didn’t do the reading? Do they just sort of squeak by because they’re like, oh, I can read these three pages right now and figure it out? 

SZTABNIK: I think this lesson typically for me occurs at a great time where we’re halfway through a book. So at that point, they knew who Holden Caulfield was, and even if they hadn’t read, I think if they read three pages, they can get a sense of what’s going on there, what seems to be important, and can put something on the index card. Their partner, they blow them away with their inferences because they’re also not just looking at the index card, they’re going back into the text as well to re-read those pages, and they may add something that is on a much higher level but that should have all the inferences. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: We’re taking this not just to the factual but to the inferential. 

GONZALEZ: Right. Do you, would you do this activity more than once in a novel, or is this pretty much just a one shot? 

SZTABNIK: I’m a big fan of doing things once and hopefully only once, and for me that’s the creative challenge of not trying to repeat the same thing twice. 

GONZALEZ: got it, got it. 

SZTABNIK: Taking these same situations, like how do I get kids into a text, how do I get them to understand a text on a deeper level —

GONZALEZ: Right. 

SZTABNIK: — just manipulating the ways you go about it. 

GONZALEZ: got it. 

SZTABNIK: And I think that’s kind of what the book is all about is the art of close reading but through different genres, different texts, different activities. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Hey there, this is Jenn interrupting for just a second to ask you a question: How often do your students make errors in spelling, mechanics, or usage, even though they’ve been taught the rules for years? When teachers see these mistakes come up in student work, many are tempted to “get back to basics” and teach everyone the concepts again, but that’s not a good use of your time, and it forces too many students to sit through instruction they simply don’t need.

What’s more effective is to teach these conventions in the context of meaningful writing, giving each student the exact instruction they need. But that kind of precise differentiation takes a lot of time. I’ve created a collection of products that I think provide a great solution to this problem. I call them Grammar Gap Fillers.  A Grammar Gap Filler is a small, powerful package of materials that teach a single spelling, grammar, or usage rule. Gap Fillers are designed to let students review just the skills they need, on their own, and then get back to writing.

When you notice a student making a particular error, simply assign that student the right Gap Filler and you’re done.

Each Gap Filler includes:

There are 24 Gap Fillers, covering everything from the difference between your and you’re, subject-verb agreement, run-ons and comma splices, and possessive vs. plural nouns. To explore all the Grammar Gap Fillers, head over to cultofpedagogy.com/grammar.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Activity No. 3 is text rendering, and Susan, you are going to be in charge of telling us about that. 

BARBER: Yeah. So again, this is a really simple lesson to execute. And just a little bit of background, I really had trouble, have trouble, every year getting students to narrow their focus when they’re making meaning from the text. Like, they just talk in these really big and general ideas, and I would be, like, well, where did, where did this come from, and they’re like, you know, it’s just there. And I’m like, we, it has to come from someplace specific in the text. And my default of teaching is not really giving prescriptive questions. I’m more of a, what do you notice, why do you think it’s important, kind of teacher. But this would often frustrate students when I tried to get them to tie it back to something specific. So I knew I had to find some way to, some activity to get them to take the big ideas to the small. So I first heard about text rendering from a friend and started looking into it, and it really is just a way to deconstruct a text and make it much smaller. So what you’re going to do is just choose a really small section of the text and then have students break that down further and further. For example, if we’re reading a novel, we’re about to start “Frankenstein” in my class, great time of year to start “Frankenstein.” And so I might choose one paragraph, and I, there are multiple variations, but probably in my class, because I’ve not done any text rendering before, this is how it would work. I would give every student a copy of this paragraph, and then I would tell students, I want you to pick out in this paragraph, and this would be what I would consider the crucial paragraph either for characterization purposes or thematic develop purposes. So here’s this paragraph. You put a bracket around the sentence. What do you think the most important sentence is in this paragraph? And then I would have students turn and talk with each other about that. I think this is really interesting, and we talk a lot in class about how texts become living documents in our hands because we’re all bringing different experiences and different perspectives as readers to the text. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: So we’re all going to notice different things in a text and connect with different things, and it’s really important to affirm students and to just lean in to what you’re noticing. Like, there’s not one specific way into the path. So students will probably choose in their groups — my students sit in groups of four. They may choose a couple of different sentences, each student around the table, and I think that’s really interesting for them to share with each other. This is why I chose this sentence. This is why I think it’s the most important sentence. And then the next step, they’re going to narrow it to the, to the clause or phrase within that sentence that they think is the most important. Again, conversation. At this point, we might even write that clause or phrase on a sticky note, put it outside in the wall, walk around, look at each other’s. I do like them sitting at their tables and talking about why they chose this specific phrase or clause. And then I would have students narrow to one word. Now, what do you think the most important word is in that phrase or clause? So it’s just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. At that point, we would probably put all of the words up on the board, start categorizing them and seeing what we can pull from this paragraph. Again, these are going to be the larger, thematic ideas or character development points that they have already been talking about in general ideas but now it’s rooted specifically to a text. So it really helps students think about how can I be more specific in analyzing at a word and phrase level. Words and phrases also, they really are important in us building our interpretation of a text. So this is just a great way to get students to read at a really close level. Another variation that I think is really easy to do is concentric circles, so maybe, I might, let’s say I’m going to give students a sentence maybe. So I’ve talked about an example with a paragraph earlier. Now I’m going to pull out one sentence that I’m thinking. And I’ll just have students on their paper, maybe in their writer’s notebook, just draw three circles within each other. The first circle, thinking about this sentence, what do you think the thematic idea of this sentence is? Write it in that first circle. The second circle, what’s a personal connection or an image you have with this? And then the third, the inner circle. What is the key word from this? So again, just giving opportunity to students to read really closely and have discussion about that. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Those all sound, all three of them sound like really fun activities, and I know they’re just, these are just three out of 33. 

BARBER: We have 35. 

GONZALEZ: Thirty-five, okay. I’m looking at an older copy. 

BARBER: And I love, it’s at 35, 33, sorry. I guess two of ours didn’t make it, right? Yeah, so 33. I mean, that can really, Brian and I, and not every day is going to be — some days are just, we read and write. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: That is the work of the English classroom. Not every day is going to be like this Instagram or TikTok lesson. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BARBER: But Brian and I really strive for once a week, we’re going to do some really highly engaging lessons. So we want to, like, there’s just a balance between that. 

GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah. 

BARBER: And so 33, you do one of these a week, that takes you across the school year. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, it does. So the book is called “100% Engagement.” This is Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber. And if somebody wanted to find you online, where would be the best place to go for each of you? 

SZTABNIK: I’d say two places. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: We have the website where we blog on a almost weekly basis, which is Much Ado About Teaching. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SZTABNIK: But we are full-time teachers so usually a Sunday night a post goes out, but there may be times when we miss one. But then the other thing is with this book, we wanted to create a sense of community, and that’s something that’s really important to Susan and I. So we have a Facebook, 100% Engagement, for teachers that want to share how they’re implementing these lessons and what variations they’re coming up with, and highlighting student work. And I think one of the things that’s coming out of this is, this is not a technology-heavy based sort of lessons. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: It’s painter’s tape and index cards. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

SZTABNIK: It’s the text in front of you. It’s cutting up poems. So I think a big inspiration for this book was a lot of teachers felt that encroachment of technology into the classroom, and students were so easily distracted by it. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SZTABNIK: This is returning text to the forefront. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Oh, I love it. You said the blog is called Much Ado About Teaching? 

SZTABNIK: It’s the longest name there is. We should have made it shorter, but —

BARBER: And here we are. 

GONZALEZ: So I will make sure that people have links to both of those, to the Facebook group and to the website and to the book. 

BARBER: Great. 

GONZALEZ: And yeah, thank you so much for sharing these three ideas, and there’s lots more in the book. So I appreciate you coming on and explaining those three. 

BARBER: Yes. Thanks for having us. 

SZTABNIK: Thank you, Jenn. 

To read a full transcript of this interview, see photos of these strategies in action, and get links to purchase 100% Engagement, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 262. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.