Question and Answer with Sandra Bornstein

In 2010, Sandra Bornstein’s teaching career took her to India and on a journey that few get to travel. In the fall of 2010, she began the transformative experience of living and teaching at a highly respected international K-12 boarding school in Bangalore, India. Sandra has chronicled her experiences in a memoir titled May This Be the Best Year of Your Life and shares the following insights with us about her experiences both as a teacher and a writer. 

Teaching

What was the most notable difference about students in India from students in the United States?

For years, the students in my fifth grade Indian class had been taught to regurgitate facts. They had experienced few opportunities to analyze and synthesize information like American children. Almost everything followed a certain formula. Even English was taught using a long list of grammar rules. Daily writing prompts were not part of the Cambridge curriculum. I decided to add writing prompts to my lesson plans.

One day I told the class that they had a “free write.” The concept of a “free write” is a basic part of an American writing curriculum.  I was totally surprised when most of the class raised their hands after I gave the simple instructions. None had ever been given the opportunity to write without any specific directions. They were used to being told “what to do.” They struggled with the concept of coming up with their own ideas even though each had created a personal list of possible topics.

You noted in your book that your classroom in India contained only a few books.  How did you address this teaching challenge?

When I interviewed for teaching positions in January 2010, I was only provided a quick tour of the classrooms and general facilities. I did not notice the lack of books or materials.

During the teacher orientation in August, I observed the minimal number of resources. If I had encountered this situation in the US, I would have shared items from my private collection or purchased new items.

In India, I had almost no options to supplement my classroom. The school was located far away from a bookstore and there were no teachers’ stores. I did not have a car. I was frustrated by the limitations.

On the weekends, I occasionally visited bookstores to purchase books. I created a reading corner in the back of the classroom and encouraged students to borrow the books. I started a reading challenge that promoted the meager selection of library books and our growing classroom library.

Several times a week, I volunteered my time to teach an ESL class for emergent learners. One of my biggest challenges was locating multiple copies of easy readers that jived with the 5th grade curriculum. Oftentimes I had to arrange for Xerox copies to be made since there was only one book. I would have to plan well in advance. It took several days for the copy room to complete a larger order.

The Internet speed on my computer resembled an old fashion dial up system. It took too much time to download most materials from the Internet. Moreover, the primary school printer was frequently broken.

None of the primary classrooms were provided any overhead projectors. Since the classroom was long and narrow, it was difficult for the kids in the back of the room to see the white board. My numerous requests for an overhead projector were left unanswered.

Despite the lack of materials, I tried to engage my students by modeling a passion for learning and reading.

What aspect of teaching in a foreign country presented the greatest obstacle for you?  How did you handle this challenge?

Most of the Indian teachers were never exposed to some of these philosophies I learned in the US  and therefore did not see the relevance of things like setting the tone of the class during the first few days of class by creating a community of learners who understood the value of cooperation and respect. They seemed to want to start teaching as soon as possible as if they were in a hurry to complete the curriculum.

What advice would you offer someone who wanted to teach in India?

I would recommend that prospective international teachers be flexible since it is likely that they will encounter the unexpected. Living abroad is totally different than life in America. Becoming overly frazzled by unforeseen obstacles can inhibit one’s ability to enjoy a wonderful international teaching adventure. After all, some of the most engaging teaching experiences are a result of the unpredictable classroom moments you encounter along the way.

Writing

What do you hope readers will learn from reading your memoir?

There are multiple messages that I am sharing with my readers. The most prevalent lesson pertains to individual choices. People tend to be most comfortable living within their established comfort zone and rarely make daring decisions. Stepping outside a self-imposed boundary oftentimes creates unnecessary anxiety and irrational fear.

What did writing this book reveal to you about your writing process?

Writing is a process that requires unfettered dedication and a willingness to accept criticism. Without dedication it is not possible to handle the multiple rounds of revision and editing. Each time I read my manuscript, I fine-tuned my writing. Whenever any of my editors or prepublication readers read my story, I needed to decide whether I agreed with his/her editing comments and recommendations. Being able to look objectively at the constructive criticism was a challenge at times. I needed to take a step back and see if I could see my words from a different perspective. After going through multiple rounds of editing and revisions, I became committed to perfecting my voice and style.

How long did it take you to write this book?  

Due to the process and time involved with revising and editing, it took almost two years to complete the book.  

How did you decide which details to include and which to leave out?

Initially I included almost everything. I was not paying attention to word count or page numbers. After the developmental edit, I had a better grasp of my main threads. I cut out parts that were not necessary and in some instances added information that made my story clearer. I included more dialogue, streamlined events, and revised the narrative so that it supported my key points and all of the lessons that I learned. 

What is your best advice for aspiring writers?

Do not procrastinate. Decide what you want to write about and don’t delay anymore. Establish a daily time to write and adhere to the schedule as much as possible.

Learn more about Sandra’s book, May This Be the Best Year of Your Life at www.sandrabornstein.com. 

Just the Right Words

I love Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse.  Lilly is one of the richest picture book characters that I know and I am always excited by the depth of understanding that students arrive at when challenged to consider her as a character.  But getting them to this point always takes a bit of nudging because when they start to think about Lilly’s behavior and feelings, they want to use words like “nice” and “happy” to describe her.  I explain to children that “nice” and “happy” just don’t seem to really capture who Lilly is and I push them to think of more specific words that help them to unpeel the layers that compose Lilly’s character. 

When forced to reconsider their ideas at the beginning of the story, they think to call her “enthusiastic” and “excited.” Those are words that do capture Lilly’s essence when she stands on line for the buses even though she doesn’t ride one and the way that she asks for her own set of deluxe picture encyclopedias. As they move to the middle of the story and Lilly gets her movie star sun glasses and fancy purple purse and wants to share them with the class, they arrive at words like “hyperactive” and “impatient” and “diva-like.” They want to call her “anxious” and we get the opportunity to talk about the difference between “anxious” and “eager.” They decide that she is eager. 

When the students see Lilly stick the nasty picture of Mr. Slinger into his bookbag, their jaws drop and they call her “mean” and “disrespectful.” They begin to consider whether she really means this or if she is just being “impulsive.”  The discussion is animated and rich with ideas as well as precise vocabulary. 

In her article, “Advancing Our Students Language and Literacy” that appeared in American Educator in winter 2010-2011, Marilyn Jager Adams wrote, “Words are not just words.  They are the nexus—the interface—between communication and thought.  When we read, it is through words that we build, refine, and modify our knowledge.  What makes vocabulary valuable and important is not the words themselves so much as the understandings they afford.” (p. 8)    As children gaze through the lens of behavior and feelings at Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, words act as this conduit to meaning-making that Adams hints at in her article,  making me understand the shift toward academic vocabulary in the Common Core. New words means new ideas.  

Thinking Intermissions

Every now and then you read a tidbit here or there that resonates.  Last spring, I read Brain Rules (amazon affiliate link) by John Medina and was particularly struck by the case that he makes for exercise.  He points out that “from an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as twelve miles per day.  The brain still craves that experience…” (p.2) After reading the chapter in this book dedicated to exercise, I really began to think about the amount of time we ask children to sit and started to question the harm in quiet, seated children.  I wondered how learning could be different if we invited children to move more often?

Throughout the course of the school year, I have experimented with having students move about the classroom. While the transitions don’t always meet my expectations, the learning outcomes have been impressive. 

Back in 2009, I wrote a blog titled Not-So-Teachable Moments where I reflected on lengthy read alouds, noticing that in spite of my most animated efforts, some children can’t help but drift off when a books exceed their stamina level for sitting or paying attention.  That experience has stuck with me and I’ve since tried to keep my read alouds focused, always cognizant of the how long it takes to read a book. 

One of my favorite books to read is Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes, but if you know this title, you know it’s a little on the long side especially if you want to stop to talk about any number of the teaching opportunities it presents.  This week, while working with a group of third graders thinking about Lilly’s behavior and feelings, I noticed that in spite of being very interested in the story, they were getting a little restless.  John Medina’s words echoed in my head and halfway through the story, I invited them to stand up and join me for a “thinking intermission.” 

I explained to the children that what we needed was a few moments to walk and contemplate our ideas about this story.  The rule was that they had to walk quietly (they had plenty of opportunity to talk and share ideas during the read aloud) about the room thinking about Lilly and their ideas about her character.  When they returned, I asked about their new thinking and was astonished at how many of them came up with poignant new words to describe her behavior and feelings.  The exercise boost their brain power, just like John Medina promised!

In reflecting on this experience, I am forced to think hard about the beliefs and traditions that prevail in education.  I am thinking that “sit still and think” is not the most efficient and effective way to foster new ideas and it makes me wonder, what else do we do that we should be doing differently? 

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear, 2008. Print.

Understanding Bias

Yesterday as I meandered the paths of the Bayard Cutting Arboretum with my husband and my eleven year old son, we got into a conversation about bias and how it’s important when you read to be aware of biases.  This word was new for my son and my husband and I both tried to give him examples but without something tangible, he was curious but lost.  He didn’t quite get what we were saying.

Fast forward to this morning when Newsday ran an article with this headline:

 After reading this tragic story, I called my son in to take a look.  When he finished reading, I asked him what he thought.  He gave me that blank stare that told me that he didn’t quite get what I was getting at so I asked him if we remembered how we were talking about bias. 

He nodded. 

I asked him to go back up to the headline and reread it, this time thinking about what the biases of the writers of this article might be.  What did he think they wanted us to know about this car accident?

He looked again and said, “That a kid on drugs killed his two friends.”

This is when the lightbulb turned on.  His eyes grew wider and he said, “Wait a minute.  In the article it said he had a taken a prescription drug.” He got out his finger and reread the part of the article that said, “Police said a blood test confirmed that Smith was impaired by a prescription drug, which they declined to identify.  Smith told deputies he had a legal prescription.”   He narrowed his eyes and began to think out loud.  “This headline makes us believe that the driver was irresponsible, like he did a bad thing and because he did that, now his friends are dead.  But, from the information in this article, it’s not like he was out snorting cocaine or something.”

We went on to talk about bias and how perhaps, in reporting about accidents involving young drivers, the writers’ bias was to make assumptions that they happen because kids were acting irresponsibly.  While this may be the case with the driver in this particular accident, the facts reported here do not support that conclusion.  

In teaching children to read closely, we need to introduce them to the idea of bias.  Identifying bias means prompting students to think as much about what isn’t written on the page as it requires looking at what is written on the page.  

New Adventures

As many of you know, I have been journeying to learn everything I can about the Common Core.  I have been driven by curiosity to look closely at the new standards to help me understand how best to refine my own instructional practices and consider how these changes will influence the future of literacy instruction.  As it turns out, I haven’t been on this journey alone and am very excited to share with you that I am now collaborating Jan Miller Burkins, author of Preventing Misguided Reading to scrutinize and understand the Common Core State Standards.  We have set up a new website where we are blogging and reporting daily about many important issues surrounding implementation, interpretation, policy, and understanding each of the six shifts.  If you share my concerns and curiosity about literacy and the Common Core, I invite you to visit www.burkinsandyaris.com. As I mentioned before, we are committed to daily posts and reports so be sure to subscribe for email updates or add this new site to your RSS feed.  In addition, Burkins & Yaris has a Facebook page and Twitter account where we will be posting important links to valuable information about the Common Core, so be sure to follow us there, too!  We plan to be very busy and we hope that you’ll join us on our journey.  The more you interact and share your concerns with us, the better we will be able to utilize this outlet to address the issues that are paramount to teaching reading and writing in the Common Core era!

I hope to see you at Burkins and Yaris! (But don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging here too!) 

Pruning the Educational Landscape

If you’ve been in education long enough, the refrain, “The pendulum swings again,” is not new to you.  With the Common Core State Standards, many teachers have expressed a concern that as we usher in this new era, we’re saying good-bye to our latest and greatest and moving on to yet something else that is new.  I share this concern and I’ve been watching this unfold very closely.  I have a lot questions, and one of my biggest is about the suggestion that all students need to read grade level complex text and the way in which to go about this is through close, careful reads.  I come from the school of strategy instruction.  I’ve taught children how to connect, infer, question, determine importance, visualize, and synthesize with success.  The suggestion that I abandon this practice in exchange for something that seems to be brand new to the educational landscape makes me say, “What gives?”

What gives is the need for me to be open minded.  If this is the new educational dictum, then before I can criticize it, I need to really understand it.  I need to carefully consider what I don’t understand about close, careful reading, and I need to understand what’s behind the suggestion that this practice could potentially help solve the problems that ail American schoolchildren when it comes to comprehension. And so, I have been on a quest to learn everything I can about close reading.  I have watched and rewatched the EngageNY videos about the Gettysburg Address and Letters from a Birmingham Jail.  I have scrutinized the Feynman text and I have read and listened as people who know way more than I do about reading explain the rationale and justification behind it and I confess, I have stumbled upon some new understandings. The first being this idea that if children are going to be successful on state assessments, the first time they see grade level text cannot be the day of the test.   Now, I don’t mean to imply that the authors of the Common Core are only about good test scores, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that they are about improving reading proficiency.  The contention is that in our classrooms, we don’t do enough to create dissonance and when students don’t have ample opportunity to puzzle through the complexities of complicated text, they don’t stretch as readers.  Instead of working in zones of proximal development, we create zones of maximum comfort and like an exercise routine that isn’t adjusted when a certain comfort level is achieved, growth stifles.  We don’t get the results we are looking for.

So this idea of stretching a reader is an ideology that I share with the Common Core so I found myself very willing to experiment with close reading. Part of the theory suggests we shouldn’t provide students too much information about the text before actually reading it because doing this takes away the need for students to attend closely and puzzle out what the text is really saying.  This idea intrigued me because I’m so conditioned to preview and provide background knowledge but I decided to suspend what I know best and give it a try. And I have to say, I’ve noticed some interesting things begin to happen.

In the past, as I prepared students to read, I would often invite them to share their experiences and talk about their connections to what they thought they were going to read about.  Students would get super excited and we’d sometimes have interesting conversations, but there were also plenty of occasions when I felt like I was running interference trying to get the students back on track because the conversation had taken a serious detour from what the text was really about.  In addition, these pre-reading conversations would often eat up a lot of time.  Once upon a time, I thought it was time well spent. But since I have backed off from activating schema, I have found myself entertaining far less extraneous conversation about text.  Because there is less idle chatter, there seems to be less “noise” interfering with students’ understanding. On many occasions I’d observe students answering questions based on what they knew rather than what the text actually said.  I’m seeing a lot less of that now and it’s the result of a simple change.

My little experiment has taught me many things, mostly about close reading, but also about change.  Skepticism is a knee jerk reaction to change.  So is dread. Cynicism. Criticism.  When I first encountered the Common Core, I was suspicious that as educators, we were “being forced into a brand new educational landscape.” As I become more familiar with the Common Core, its shifts, and ideals, what I realize is that we’re not creating a brand new landscape so much as we’re pruning the one we already have. While we can hope that the greatest outcome of the Common Core will be better readers, writers, speakers, and listeners; the more immediate outcome will be reflection.  This document will force us to “closely read” our curriculums and teaching practices.  It will force us to try new things and in pruning the landscape, we may actually begin to create a new—and better—landscape for the 21^st Century.

Reading Volume in the Age of the Common Core

Back in November, I worked with a group of fourth grade students on how to determine the main idea of a passage.  We worked with a passage about forest fires that read as follows:

Some fire is a natural part of the life of a forest.  Fire cleans out dead brush by burning it to ash.  Then animals that live in the forest can find food more easily.  New plants and trees have more room and sunlight to grow.

From Fires and Floods by Kate Waters, p 11

When students finished reading, I gave them the following question:

What is this passage mostly about?

A. How fires destroy forests

B. How fires can be helpful

C. How fires help animals

D. How fires clear away dead brush

The students collaborated and wrestled with each of the responses and then we gathered to sort out which response was the best one. After some debate and discussion, the class decided that the right answer was B. 

Sitting off to the side, there was one little boy who wore a puzzled expression.  He squinted his eyes, tilted his head, raised his hand and voiced his vehement objection, “Mrs. Yaris, there is no way that the answer can be B.  This is about fire and I know that fire makes smoke and when smoke goes up into the sky, it makes holes in the ozone layer and that causes global warming.  Global warming is bad.  Fires aren’t helpful.”

Take a moment to digest this story.  Think about what this child is doing as a reader and then think about what went wrong on his path to answering the question correctly.

As you do that, allow me to tell you one more story. 

Last week, in my post titled The Reading Advantage, I wrote about the importance of reading volume and it sparked a lot of conversation in the twitterverse and among my local colleagues.  As I chatted with classroom teachers about what gets in the way of allowing ample time for students to read, the conversation kept coming back to “the curriculum” and concerns about being in compliance with “the Common Core State Standards.”  One teacher even shared that in “shifting curriculum and instruction to meet the new demands of the CCSS,” she felt like she was sacrificing what she “innately knew was good teaching and learning.”  She felt like the Common Core didn’t allow room for creativity in teaching and certainly there would be no room for reading volume.

When she said this, it surprised me.  My reading of the Common Core had led me to believe that reading volume was central to achieving the goals of this document but yet she planted enough doubt to force me to go back to look again.  As I reread, I encountered line after line, paragraph after paragraph that spoke both directly and indirectly to this issue of reading volume: 

From the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading:

“Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems and myths…”

Appendix B, page 3:

“There is also evidence that current standards, curriculum, and instructional practices have not done enough to foster independent reading of complex texts so crucial for college and career readiness, particularly in the case of informational texts.”

The bottom of page 3 of Appendix A discusses the “general lack of reading” and goes on to attribute the “deterioration of overall reading ability” to “the problem of lack of reading.”

Also on page 4 of Appendix A:

“To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought.”

Surely, if I looked hard enough, I could cite other examples but in going on this quest, I began to wonder if some educators are reading the CCSS in much the same way that my fourth grade student read the text about fire.

His response to the question about main idea was rooted in his background knowledge.  While extensive and impressive, he wasn’t using what he knew to support what he was learning. His response was based on his reaction to the topic. And because of that, he got it all wrong. 

In thinking about implementing the CCSS, we need to carefully consider the way in which we have read this document.  Are our understandings of the Common Core based on what we know?  Or, are they based on close, thorough readings of the text itself?  If we allow our background knowledge to drive our understanding, like my fourth grader, we run the risk of getting it all wrong. 

The Reading Advantage

During a recent teacher training with a group of middle school teachers, I shared a video titled Why Students Don’t Read What’s Assigned in Class. 

In this video, high school students come clean about what they have and haven’t read in high school.  When left to read “according to the curriculum,” some students admitted to reading only a couple of books that were assigned. Some read only one.  Others said they didn’t do a single bit of the reading that was assigned.  As I watched, I wasn’t surprised by these admissions, because after all, I was once one of these very same high school students doing the very same thing—reading Cliff Notes and faking it.  It’s discouraging to think that things haven’t changed in 25 years. We know so much more about engaging teaching practices.  We have barrels of evidence about how reading volume improves proficiency. Yet, we still churn out generations of kids who don’t read.  Why is this?

Still mulling over these heady questions of reading volume and curriculum, I went home to  poke around the web, and as I did, I came across a new manifesto by Seth Godin about changing education titled Stop Stealing Dreams.  In the opening pages, Seth writes:

We invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but end up training most of them never to read again for fun (one study found that 58% of all Americans never read for pleasure after they graduate school).

There it was again: this idea that in our schools, we don’t create readers.

And I began to think about why this bothers me so much and in the deep recesses of my mind, I heard the echo of Mark Twain’s famous words:

 “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

During the days when our economy was based on factories and a good worker was one who could follow and execute instructions and provide brawn to perform manually difficult tasks, I suppose this was fine.  But now, success in a global economy means being one step ahead of competitors; it requires innovation. Reading inspires ideas.  It spreads knowledge that leads to new and deeper understandings.  Never has the need for an informed and literate citizenry been more important, yet, we are in the same place that we have been for years and years with kids who barely read…

When I talk with teachers about what they believe lies at the root of this problem, they cite things like “curriculum demands” and “getting them ready for the test.” But what I’m wondering is this: Are these “demands” a distraction from what really matters?   In “getting ready for the test,” do we sacrifice a more pressing need: getting them ready for life?   And if that is indeed the case, what can we do to change this?  

Everything in Moderation

Today I visited a fourth grade classroom.  In this fourth grade classroom, there is a girl who is currently reading below grade level at approximately a Level L/M.  We’ll call her Danielle.   During today’s lesson, I presented Danielle with a grade level complex text (lexile: 840) titled Smoke and Mucus. 

During the course of this lesson, I watched this reader mark up her text with a highlighter as she noticed captions and photographs.  She engaged in animated discussion with her peers.  In fact, at one point, another girl raised her hand to question the validity of the title wondering out loud if it should really be called Smoke and Mucus because it seemed to her to be more about smoking.  When Danielle heard this, she cocked her head slightly to the side and raised her hand to disagree.  She said, “Mucus is related to coughing and in this article they talk about that a lot.” With that statement, she buried her head in the text and proceeded to reread and share three different examples in the text that backed up what she was saying. 

As I watched, I thought to myself, This is a below grade level reader? Because at that moment, she did not appear to be.  What’s more, I couldn’t help but hear the echo of David Coleman’s words addressing the importance of children reading grade level complex text.  When I first heard him speak of allowing children the opportunity to experience dissonance, I was skeptical.  I am a firm believer in the reading tenet that says that in order to become more proficient, most of children’s reading should be at their instructional level.  But here I could see what he was talking about.  This text was within Danielle’s zone of proximal development—harder than what she would read in guided reading but yet not so hard that she couldn’t wrestle with it and use what she knows to piece together meaning and experience the satisfaction of successfully completing a hard task. 

I think the lesson for me here is an important one: good reading instruction depends on teachers striking a balance between presenting children with instructional level and grade level complex text.  If children are to be successful on their reading assessments, and more importantly, “college and career ready,” we don’t want their first (and only) experience with grade level complex text to be the day of the test.  And conversely, if children only work with grade level complex text in preparation for the test, we risk creating situations where children do not read eagerly and voluminously and that, too, would be counterintuitive to the idea of “college and career readiness.”

So where this leaves us as teachers is trying to puzzle out what our instruction should look like.  What percentage of a child’s instructional time should be spent with independent text?  What percentage of time should be spent with instructional text?  And how much time should be spent should we spend working in whole groups with grade level complex text?  The Common Core is still new to all of us and I’m wondering if you are grappling with this too?  What do you believe is the right “balance”?  

The Energizer Bunny Problem

If there is one thing that I have learned about teaching writing through the years, it’s that we cannot assume anything. If we’re talking to students about writing sentences, we cannot assume that they understand that the word “sentence” implies a subject and action working in harmony to formulate a complete thought. When we talk about paragraphs, we cannot assume that children know that topic sentences set the stage for what is to come and that everything that follows should be organized and focused around a central idea.


It is for this reason that when planning mini lessons, I try to look at the components of writing through a child’s eyes and try to figure out what pieces they will need to know in order to best build their understandings of how to compose text. I know that writing volume and pleasure are contingent upon success and so I try to figure out how to make the building blocks of writing tangible and concrete.

This week, I worked with a group of third graders working within a unit of study of compare-contrast essays. My charge was to help these students develop their ideas into well rounded paragraphs. When I looked at a paragraph through a child’s eyes, it occurred to me that paragraphs appear to be ideas stretching down the page so when I began my mini lesson, I talked about how a single sentence leaves readers wanting for more and paragraphs step in to fill the need by providing the details that “stretch” an idea down the page. Knowing that understanding “what” writers do would not be enough, I searched for a way to show students “how.” I settled on telling students that writers accomplish the work of stretching out ideas within paragraphs by asking themselves, “What would my reader want to know next?” and set about the work of composing a paragraph together.

Our paragraph went like this:

Lunch is one of kids’ most favorite times of the day. They love lunch because they can talk to their friends and they don’t have to do school work. With busy mornings, kids get hungry so kids love lunch because they get to eat.

From there, children paired up to write a paragraph about another school day favorite: recess.

As they talked, they wrote, and as I circulated the classroom, I heard them asking one another, “What else would my reader want to know?”

At the end of this guided practice exercise, the classroom teacher and I observed that all of the children had successfully written a detailed paragraph about recess. However, when we looked closer, we noticed something. Take a look. Do you see it too?


In case you’re having trouble reading, Angie and Jake’s paragraph goes like this:

Recess is loved by kids, too because you can run around crazy. They can spread out and play games like tag. There is a lot of things to go like slides, swings, monkeybars, and soccer. You can also play on the blacktop and play games like jump rope, hop scotch, and hula-hoop. Recess is fun for everyone! Kids think recess is cool and fun and awesome. Another thing you can do is go on the spider web. You can play sports like baseball, basketball, tennis, ping-pong, and exercising. Recess if fun!

Perhaps the verb tense and pronoun switches are glaring at you, but we were looking at this from a stretching the paragraph point-of-view and what we saw was a paragraph that kept going and going and going and going…It felt like this paragraph could have or should have ended at the first “Recess is fun for everyone” but in asking “What else would my reader want to know,” these writers marched forward, just like the Energizer Bunny.

So what does this mean? Can we call ourselves effective teachers if in the course of teaching one thing, we create the need to teach another?

When children are learning new skills and strategies, it is not uncommon for them to overgeneralize. What has happened here is not unlike when children first take note of apostrophes and periods: they sometimes appear where they belong but they often turn up where they don’t belong. In this case, children have stretched the details down the page to craft a paragraph, but they’ve stretched it a little too far. Now we get to teach them the next part of a paragraph which will be how to know when enough is enough because after all, when you stretch a rubber band too far, it will break and no longer be functional.

So was this lesson effective? Well, it all comes down to instructional decision making. If tomorrow I decide to return to the teacher’s manual that says that on the day after “how to write a paragraph,” I need to teach “how to write a good beginning,” and do it because the books says so, then yes, I have been ineffective. If, however, I decide to teach that lesson about how to know when to end a paragraph, well, then, that is a different story entirely. Effective instruction is teaching children what they need when they need it.

The Importance of “Why Do You Think That?”

Last week I shared the story of the exasperated teacher who wondered why children who demonstrate such great understanding when they talk about text can’t seem to demonstrate the same understanding when faced with multiple choice test questions.  Ever since she posed this question, I have been on a quest to find answers that help explain this apparent lack of transference.

In the past week, I have led numerous close reads of text and have been informally researching what seems to be behind this problem.  Today I had one of those moments that we all covet as teacher-learners: the epiphany, the moment when what was once very confusing begins to make a lot more sense.

This is what happened:

As I worked with a group of fifth graders to look closely at the “The Great Mouse Plot” from Roald Dahl’s Boy, we zeroed in on the following paragraph:

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful.  Truth is more important than modesty.  I must tell you, therefore, that it was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot.  We all have our moments of brilliance and glory, and this was mine.

Knowing that the shift in focus here can be confusing, we puzzled through the question who is Roald Dahl addressing when he says “when writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful”?  The students postulated different responses including “himself,” “his friends,” and “his audience.”  We took great care to eliminate incorrect choices one-by-one as we noticed evidence like “I must tell YOU…” and “we ALL have our moments…”and that there were not quotes around this part of the story as opposed to what was happening just prior when the characters were speaking to one another.  All of these examples supported that Roald Dahl was speaking to his audience.  The conversation was pointed and rich but of course the question about transference lurked in the back of my mind so after all was said and done, I gave the students the following question:

When Roald Dahl, writes, “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful.  Truth is more important than modesty,” who is he concerned about lying to?

1. Mrs. Pratchett
2. His friends
3. Thwaites
4. His reader

Based on our conversation, I was certain there would be unanimity about the correct response being 4. 

However, that was not the case.

Many students answered 1.  When I asked why, they said, “Mrs. Pratchett is mean.  He knows that lying to her would get him into trouble.” 

Because I asked, “why do you think that?” I now understand that part of the problem is that they are not giving full consideration to the entire question.  They saw the word “lying” and had just finished reading about and discussing Mrs. Pratchett so that made A seem like a reasonable response.  That’s a problem I can fix.

Other students answered 2.  At first, I was stunned because these children spent no less than ten minutes discussing why he wasn’t addressing his friends in this part of the story.  But then I asked, “why do you think so?” and a boy raised his hand and explained that it seemed to make sense because “look Mrs. Yaris, it’s in quotes and didn’t you tell us that when words are in quotes, that means that people are talking?”  The skies opened up for me.  The problem here isn’t understanding the text, it’s understanding the function of quotation marks in text. In this case, these readers couldn’t distinguish dialogue from a direct quote. That too is a problem I can fix. 

So in returning to the question about why the apparent lack of transfer, I am beginning to conclude that students do achieve new understandings when they have rich discussions of text.  When they fail to demonstrate the same understanding on test questions, very often the error is not in understanding the text, it is in understanding the question being asked which leaves us wondering how to rectify the situation.   

I think the answer to that returns to the Common Core suggestion that we train students to gain and integrate new information through the close, careful analysis of text.  What we must realize is that text does not only mean passages and poems, it also means test questions as well.  I’m wondering when close reads become part of our regular classroom practice if it will naturally begin to occur that students read questions more thoroughly and subsequently begin to do better on tests?  Will one good practice beget another? 

Only time will tell…

An Epidemic of Poor Comprehension

This week, at a teacher training for using conversation to lift student comprehension, an exasperated teacher raised her hand and asked, “I’m concerned because my students seem able to have really thoughtful conversations about books but when I turn around and give them a “test question” about it, they bomb!”

This question set me thinking—a lot.  

Is the problem the topic of the conversations students are having?  Is it that their conversations aren’t going deep enough?  Do their ideas dance around the periphery of the real meaning of the text?  Or is the problem something different all together?  Is it an issue of vocabulary?  Or careful reading or interpretation of the questions themselves?  The fact of the matter is this: when this teacher asked this question, I had no idea how to respond because it felt like the answer rested with  any one of a series of infinite possibilities. 

But here’s the good news.  As a follow-up to this training, I have started visiting classrooms in this district and together with the teachers who echoed the same sentiment voiced by this exasperated teacher, we’ve begun to take a close look at this lack of transference. While the jury still seems to be out on the absolute answer to this question, the observations we have made have been fascinating. 

One behavior that we saw time and again was the inclination to make snap judgments. Test questions require that we fully absorb all aspects of what is being asked.  They require that we not only read the text closely and carefully, but also that we take the time to fully reason and consider what a question is really asking.  What we saw were students who seemed to be skimming the questions and answering according to what they knew instead of using the information provided in the text.  For example, when we asked the question “What does the word prise mean in the first paragraph of “The Great Mouse Plot” from Roald Dahl’s Boy, many children saw the word knife and immediately concluded that the best definition for this word would be cut.  When we asked a question about Roald Dahl’s relationship with his friends, they saw the word truthful in the line that read “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful,” and immediately thought that their relationship was based on honesty. When asked how Roald Dahl felt when he was placing the mouse in the jar, students said “proud” in spite of the fact that at the point when he places the mouse in the jar the text says his “heart was thumping like mad” and his “hands had gone all sweaty.” Instead of honoring those words,  they keyed into the last sentence that read it was marvelous to be so popular and called it a day.

Instead of reading closely and carefully, the students we looked at read lightly and literally.  And what I’m wondering is why?

When I was first introduced to the Common Core State Standards, specifically the idea of being able to read increasingly complex text through close readings that emphasized text-based questions, I was somewhat skeptical.  When I heard David Coleman speak about it, I felt that he was disparaging strategy instruction and as a teacher whose entire career has reflected the ideas espoused by Ellin Oliver Keene’s Mosaic of Thought and Harvey and Goudvis’ Strategies that Work, this felt a little blasphemous (amazon affiliate links).  However, what I have observed in the last few days is enough to convince me that aspects of our strategy instruction may well be counterproductive.  I sense that we may overemphasize things like making connections and predictions and underemphasize things like synthesis and determining importance.  And in so doing, students’ thinking dances around the periphery of the text never quite making it to the core.  And as a result, we’ve got kids who answer test questions based on what they think as opposed to what they know from the text they are reading—and you know what that means: bad scores.  But what’s worse than that is this: We’re grappling with an epidemic of poor comprehension and that’s a bigger problem. 

The question now is what can we do it about it?  I know that’s what I’ll be thinking about in the coming days but I’d love to know what you’re thinking, too.  What are you doing to help students achieve “close, careful analysis” of text?

Reading is NOT an Option

As someone for whom reading is like eating, a necessary part of human existence, not wanting to read is a perplexing occurrence.  When I feel the pull to do other things, anything besides read, I wonder, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME????”  The weight of my distraction is disturbing, in fact, so much so, that even though I choose not to read, I am burdened with guilt for feeling that way.  Eventually, the guilt becomes overbearing enough to compel me to pick up my reading and muddle my way through a couple of chapters until I find that stride that reconnects me with my “other” world. And usually, I am not disappointed.  And when I am, I know I will keep trying because for me, reading is not an option. 

When I think about my own inner struggles with an engaged and active reading life, I can’t help but turn my thoughts to students. With the advent of the Common Core, our focus and attention has turned toward figuring out how we are going to raise student reading proficiency.  In thinking about this, our focus has turned toward instructional strategies and practices. What do we need to do to TEACH these children better?  As I think more about this, I am wondering if perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree.

The scores aren’t telling us that students can’t read, they are telling us that they can’t read well enough.  When we don’t do something well enough, is it because we haven’t learned what we need to know or is it because we haven’t practiced what we learned? I don’t believe that our problem is illiteracy, it is aliteracy.  We have far more children who can read and don’t than we have children who simply can’t read.

But unlike me whose lack of reading induces feelings of malnourishment, most children (and dare I say alliterate adults as well) are unburdened by a less than robust reading life.  THIS is cause for alarm.  THIS is what is causing scores to stagnate.  And THIS is where we need to look long and hard if we are going to figure out how to breathe new life into scores that have flatlined for over thirty years.  If we want to change test scores, we shouldn’t only be looking at HOW we teach, we must also be looking at how we MOTIVATE children to want to read MORE.   In the same way that it is unconscionable to think that a sports team would improve their game simply by hiring the best coach, we can’t be lured into the false belief that our problem in reading lies solely with instructional practices.  Good coaches know that positive game results require that players get out there and kick the ball around. And as educators we need to recognize that positive test results require more than good coaching: readers need to read. My question is this:  What can we do to make kids WANT to read?  And as classroom teachers, how do we fit more time for reading into an already jam-packed schedule?    

Need It to Make Sense? WRITE!!!

One of the things that I preach to teachers when talking to them about deepening student understanding is the importance of writing in response to reading.  I tell them about the research that correlates higher reading scores with frequent writing.  Everybody nods in polite agreement but there is that small piece that remains skeptical.  After all, how often do we, as sophisticated adult readers, stop to write something after we’ve read?  Surely deep understanding is possible without picking up a pen???

So, in spite of the lingering doubt, we resolve to make sure to have students write more in response to reading.  Why?  Because it’s important.  Why is it important?  Well, because the research says so. 

And then it happens.  Sweet epiphany.

As I went about my daily life as a literacy coach helping teachers improve the practice of having conferences, I wrote vigorously as the teachers talked to the students. As I wrote word-for-word what they were saying, I couldn’t help but start to analyze what was happening.   Oooh, I thought to myself, she’s doing what I do when I get nervous that students aren’t saying anything.  I bombard them with a string of questions that might prompt SOME sort of response.  And that was but one of MANY of the thoughts that occurred to me as I wrote.  And as I wrote, I thought…and then, I thought some more and that’s when I realized why it’s so important that we have students write in response to reading—a pen becomes an extension of the brain and when we have it in hand, we can’t help but begin to think things that we would not have had we not touched the pen.  The literal extension morphs into a figurative one and that is what we want to happen to our students: we want them to S-T-R-E-T-C-H themselves.  We want them to reach deep and extend their thinking.    

Writing is a reflective practice.  It forces us to slow down and carefully consider all of the noise that resides inside of our heads.  It’s the reason that I blog.  It helps me to make sense of my professional life and as for students, writing can help them make sense of many things, books just being one of many.  

Reading: The Home-School Connection

One day last spring, I listened with my jaw dropped as one of my closest colleagues shared how the parents in her district were complaining about the amount of reading she expected that students complete each night and over the weekends.  Didn’t she know that these children play sports, attend dance class, go to religion and have a myriad of other after school obligations that occupy those precious post-school hours? And did I fail to mention that the teachers in the following year’s grade don’t require nearly as much reading as she, so really, what’s the point of so much this year?

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I sat in the office of a district administrator in my children’s school pleading that they do more to increase my son’s current reading volume.  I explained that I do my part as a parent to make sure that he cracks a book each night but when the teacher only requires twenty minutes, four nights a week, it’s hard for me to convince him to do more.  From my son I get, “What’s the matter?  I’m doing what I’m supposed to.” And from the administrator I get, “I appreciate your concern, Mrs. Yaris, but for every parent who wants more for their child, we get ten complaining that it’s too much.”  

And all I can do is wonder. Are those the same parents that complain when their children don’t do well on the ELA?  Are they the ones who point their fingers at the school and say, “You’re not doing your job.  You don’t deserve what you are paid,”? Because the way I see it, raising a literate child is the not just the school’s responsibility, it is society’s, beginning first and foremost with parents.

Children who are read to from birth till the time they begin kindergarten start school with a significant vocabulary and sight word advantage.  If every parent did their part to ensure that children were read to daily and valued reading for homework the same way that they value soccer practice, it is conceivable that the gap we’re looking to close would be considerably smaller. 

In my mind, disregarding a teacher’s advice to read twenty or thirty or forty minutes a night is akin to saying “No thanks” to the doctor who just prescribed a rigorous course of antibiotics for a bacterial infection.  When patients make the decision to refuse the medication, they can’t blame the doctor when they don’t get better.  Nightly reading homework is part of the prescription for bolstering reading skills.  If parents continue to refuse the treatment, they have to assume the consequences of the decision. 

And the consequences are dire. Two thirds of our nation’s schoolchildren read at or below basic reading proficiency.  Our national reading test scores haven’t budged in thirty-five years.  We live in the age of a global economy.  Competition for jobs is fierce and if we’re going to maintain an advantage, then we need children who know how to communicate, collaborate, and think critically and creatively.  These are the skills possessed by literate individuals.  How do we become literate?  We read.  How do we read better?  We practice.  If our students aren’t making the progress we expect that they should, then we need to look carefully at reading volume and ask: How much time do these children read and what can we do to make sure they practice more?    

The Time Quote Mash-Up

Wherever I go, I listen as teachers share their frustrations about time.

“I know I have to teach reading AND writing, but I don’t have TIME for both.”

“I know I have to teach small groups, but I have so many pull-outs, I don’t have TIME.”

“I know kids need to do more independent reading, but I only have a forty minute period, I don’t have TIME to do everything!”

In Star Trek Generations. Jean-Luc Picard says “Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalks us all our lives.” And as a busy teacher-educator, I can’t help but think, “he’s got that right.”

However, bear this in mind: Time pressures and constraints are not a condition unique to teaching.  My husband works in social media and he races the clock to complete projects and meet deadlines. My mom stays at home and cooks and cares for the house and she complains there isn’t enough time to water her flowers or walk along the trail after the first snowfall.  Jean-Luc was the captain of the Starship Enterprise in approximately 2371 and what was he lamenting? Time.  While it seems like education is wrought with an unfair share of time pressures and constraints, not having enough time is not unique to any one job or profession, it is simply a part of being human.

Each and every day is comprised of twenty-four hours and as Randy Bomer once said at a workshop I attended long ago,  “There’s only time, no more or less, and we have to decide how to use what time there is.”   When he says it like that, it seems simple but it is true. As people and educators, we have important decisions to make about how we will spend our time because like Katie Wood Ray once shared,   “If we fail to set aside time for getting the work of [writing] done, we send the message that we don’t value the work.”

As we sit amid the holiday frenzy and listen to more bad press about teaching and learning, we need to be asking ourselves what is it that we value?  We need to prioritize and think hard about what we aim to achieve because after Jean-Luc Picard personified time as a predator, he went on to say “but I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived.”

And on that note, I ask you, how do you choose to live?  What part of your journey will you cherish?

Defending the Reading Workshop in the Common Core Era

No matter where you go, conversations about the Common Core dominate.  While educators are at all levels of understanding the Common Core, there seems to be one question that everybody is asking: What will it mean to my instruction? 

Some doomsayers have declared the end of the Reading Workshop asserting that the goals of the Common Core do not align with this approach.  I would argue that nothing could be further from the truth.  As a document, the Common Core dictates “what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach.”  And as a way of teaching, I believe that the components and practices inherent in the reading workshop are not only a well-founded methodology for approaching implementation of the Common Core, but probably our best option for effective implementation of the new standards.

To illustrate why this is true, let’s look at the first anchor standard for reading: 

Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions from the text.  Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions from the text. 

When I look at a standard like that and ask myself, what will I need to do to be in compliance, I can see that children will require an understanding of inferential thinking.  They will need to understand how to go back into the text and find evidence to support their thinking.  How will I help students unpack these heady concepts?  By providing explicit, focused instruction.  What is the best way I know to provide this kind of instruction? Mini lessons.

While mini lessons are the cornerstone of the reading workshop, they are but one aspect of the reading workshop.  The standard goes on to specify that students cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions from the text. This implies that our instruction build in opportunities to write in response to reading.  The reading response journal is another key ingredient of the reading workshop.  Very often, we have students “Stop and jot” so that they can experience what it means to respond and have an opinion about text.  On other occasions, we have them write extended responses as a way of developing and defending their positions.  Both offer students opportunities to practice drawing conclusions, using evidence from the text, and afford us the rare glimpse into children’s thinking processes that enable us to respond to where they are as learners and plan instruction that meets their needs as readers.

In addition, this standard asks for students to be able to defend their position when speaking.  This implies that students will require ample opportunity to speak with their peers to develop their ideas.  How do we do this in reading workshop?  Through partnerships where students turn and talk and eventually, when students learn to talk effectively, we release children into literature circles and allow them to develop theories and ideas that will shape and change their thinking about text, and subsequently, the world.

Another thing that I want to point out about reading workshop and the common core is this: The Common Core calls for all students “to be able to read grade level complex text.”  I have encountered many teachers who have latched onto “close reading” as the means for making children increasingly capable of reading grade level complex text. While I agree that we do need to instill a value for rereading, I whole-heartedly disagree with how some teachers have proposed meeting this challenge:  Handing out a short passage on Monday, reading it, talking about it, putting it away and taking it out again on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for the purpose of rereading it and getting something new out of it. The goal of close reading is deep understanding and careful analysis.  That is achieved through purposeful rereading and accountable conversation.  Once again, these components are built into the reading workshop. 

People who are “college and career ready” have been described as being able to do the following four things:

• Think critically
• Communicate effectively
• Collaborate
• Create and innovate

I fear that loose interpretations of the Common Core will lead to people embracing bad practices which will do nothing to help our cause of helping children become more proficient readers so that they are college and career ready.

However, if we are thoughtful about what needs to happen so that children can read increasingly complex text and gain the knowledge that helps them to solve complex problems in the workplace, we will see that children will need to read widely, they will need to read a lot, they will require explicit, expert instruction in whole groups, small groups, and one-on-one, they will need to talk and write about their ideas and where do all of these things happen?  In a reading workshop. 

In my opinion, reading workshop should be on the radar in every school district across the United States. Not only does it provide a good possibility for meeting the standards of the Common Core, it offers the best possibility of being successful.

Assigning Reading Comprehension vs. Teaching Reading Comprehension

When it comes to comprehension instruction, we have data that says that we spend as little as 2% of our instructional time teaching children how to make meaning.   (Lanning, 11) What we tend to do instead is give students a passage like this:

Some fire is a natural part of the life of a forest.  Fire cleans out dead brush by burning it to ash.  Then animals that live in the forest can find food more easily.  New plants and trees have more room and sunlight to grow.

(From Fires and Floods by Kate Waters, p 11)

And ask questions like:
What is this passage mostly about:

1. How fires destroy forests
2. How fires can be helpful
3. How fires help animals
4. How fires clear away dead brush

And when children respond anything but answer 2, we conclude that this student does not understand main idea. 

However, foregone conclusions like this are not particularly helpful in helping us make decisions about how to correct the problem.  We are left wringing our hands, wrought with worry over what will happen come April when these students take the ELA.  We know we need to fix the problem but we are all left wondering the same thing: How?

The sample question that you see above actually came from a group of six fourth grade students working together to figure out the main idea of the paragraph about fire.  This group of children had received explicit instruction on what a main idea is and how identifying main idea helps readers monitor text for meaning.  Next they took a look at this paragraph and worked with partners to figure out what it was mostly about.  As they did that, the teacher listened closely and took notes about what they said and discovered that sometimes children were too broad and general when identifying the main idea.  In other cases, she recognized that  students were too specific and pulled details from the story and dubbed them “the main idea.”  And in yet other instances, children relied solely on their background knowledge about the topic to identify the main idea.

The small group structure allowed the teacher a rare glimpse into the otherwise invisible process of making meaning.  In returning to the original dilemma of knowing that there’s a problem but feeling stuck knowing what to do about it, this glimpse provided the answer to the original question of HOW to fix the main idea problem: Responsive small group strategy instruction. If we are to effectively raise children’s reading proficiency, creating situations where children are active participants in their learning is imperative.  We must listen closely to clues they provide about their learning processes and then work with the diligence of Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery of what is standing in the way of growth.  In the end, good assignments don’t make children better readers but good teaching…wow!  What a difference that can make!

Lanning, Lois A. 4 Powerful Strategies for StrugglingReaders, Grades 3-8: Small Group Instruction That Improves Comprehension. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2009. Print. (Amazon affiliate link)

The Blame Game

Yesterday I checked in to the Hilton in Rye Brook, New York for the New York State Reading Association’s annual conference.  When I arrived, I checked in at the front desk and then proceeded to lug a duffle filled with clothes, a suitcase of AV equipment, and a couple of errant bags through the elevator and maze of hallways to finally arrive at my room.  Ready to lighten my load, I eagerly took out my key card and stuck it in the door. 

The yellow light in the middle lit up. 

Desperate for a green light that signaled entrée into my room, I took the card out, and put it in again. 

Again, a yellow light. So I tried a third time. 

While famous for my technological ineptitude, I figured after three failed tries, the problem wasn’t me.  So I loaded up all my stuff and headed back down the hall to find a phone to call the front desk. 

A short while later, a man in official looking hotel attire showed up to let me into my room.  We exchanged niceties and viola, I was in!  Let the conference begin!

After trolling the exhibit hall and greeting colleagues whom I haven’t seen in a long while, I returned once again to my room to freshen up for dinner.  When I arrived, I put my key in the door and guess what?

Yellow light. 

Fortunately this time my roommate was there to let me in.  She had two keys that seemed to work so I took one and once again, my key issue seemed to be resolved. 

I left the room, checked to make sure that the key would let me back in and joined friends and colleagues for a lovely dinner with the folks from Scholastic.  When I returned at nearly 11:00 PM, I put my key in the door and need I even say?

Yellow light. 

I trekked down the hall once again to the community phone and called the front desk and this time they sent security.  When the hotel representative arrived, he took my key and looked at it, then he looked at me, and then he tried sticking it in the door.  Yellow light.

At that point, he turned to me and said, “When you left the room, did you slam the door?”

I couldn’t believe it.  Was he insinuating that it was my fault the door didn’t work?  I explained that this was the third time today that this had happened and that generally I don’t slam doors when I leave rooms. 

Then he inserted his specially programmed, ultra powerful, get into any room key card and unlocked my door.   He jiggled the lock on the other side and said, “See, this wasn’t all the way over, that’s why you couldn’t unlock the door.”

As I got to thinking about this incident, it made me think a lot about teaching.  My son told me last week that he asked a teacher a question and was told, “You should have been paying attention.” In the same way that the security man made me feel responsible for the problem, my son’s teacher made him feel the same way.  When children have questions, it could be because they weren’t paying attention but it could also be that the directions weren’t clear or the child is not an auditory learner and can’t picture what the teacher is talking about. No matter what the case, if there is a problem, we need to quickly assess and evaluate and troubleshoot to solve it.  To take the extra step to blame or pass the buck is just that: an extra step.  It is neither efficient nor EFFECTIVE.

I’m old enough and experienced enough to know that if I have another problem with my door, I will continue to seek the help I need to fix it.  But I wonder about my son.  The next time he has a question, will he ask it? Or, will he blame himself and stay stuck?