Xtranormal Presentation-Life is a Beach-Pondering Richard Beach and The Reading Response Theory

I made this video on Xtranormal to include some of Beach's work in a hopefully funny way.  Click on the link below to view.  Enjoy.  It's a creative response to his book. Due to technological difficulties Xtranormal, this hasn't been rendered or published yet.  Will add when ready.

Beach-Reader Response Theories-Presentation

Here is a presentation that I made using Presentme.com.  I was supposed to do it and write down my thoughts from a photographical PowerPoint.  I forgot to do that for the first five minutes.  It is my second time using it.  I hope it is still okay.  I was trying to use it to solidify my thoughts about the different chapters.  The different reading response theories are so dense and they have so much to consider.  I probably should have written down my thoughts after each chapter but I didn't want to stop.  To me, after he was through with the textual theories, it was easier to understand.  I had no idea that when we look at reading response theories there is so much to consider from the different point of views.  Point blank-what does it have to do with me in my classroom?  I need to think about the text I am using as per Smith and then consider different perspectives as I go.  So much to consider.  I am glad I read it after I read Rosenblatt because it made so much sense to me. Purves was so easy and enjoyable to read.  Please click on the link below to access. Thanks  Click on link below "Commentary on Beach's...."

Commentary on Beach's Reader Response Theories

Digital Reading Project-Thoughts and Connection to TORS

Alana, Bruce, Michelle and I journeyed this year together.  We were to create a Digital Reading Project for struggling readers.  So Bruce and Alana worked on the site to be used by 8th graders.  Michelle and I worked on the site to be used by 5th graders.  We initially had 70 students enrolled in this project per grade level.  I want to give you the link so you can check it out.  This is a work in progress and we more lessons to create.  Each student is given a net book to take home to work on.  We have learned many lessons as we have gone through the process.  I have learned many including the fact that I was stretched in many, many ways.  I had to find alternate ways to communicate with my digital students.  I was the digital coach of 12 students.  So after they saw the lesson and was supposed to respond in a Google Document, I was to respond back to them.  If they were in front of me in my classroom, I could ask questions and gauge how they were doing.  Some didn't have much computer technology skills.  They didn't know how to create a Google Document as we had presupposed 5th graders to have.  I also had to find ways to speak to them as they were struggling readers and sending long emails just wasn't working.  I had to slow down and start making videos to explain myself and help them. I encountered a Jing, which I hadn't ever used.  I found out that Snag it! was a great tool to use with students to make videos to show them what to do in the tech and the reading response world.  After lots of trial and error, Michelle and I decided to make videos using Window's Movie Maker and Stupeflix. Just having a flip camera worked wonderfully.  The only draw back is the sound isn't that great.  As we were going through this TORS training and reading the books, our thinking changed and we tried to put into practice in the lessons what we were learning with Rosenblatt's transactional theory and Purves' creative readers response.  We considered many avenues and ways to interpret the responses using Beach's Reader Response theory.  Now having read Smith's book, wow!  There's so much to consider and I haven't even read the all of the 18 books yet.  I will be doing that soon.  My world has been widened and I consider myself to be somewhat dialectic to put in Beach's terms.  These convergent ideas hit me like a ton of lead and then I begin to diverge and create.  So I will put the link to the elementary site on a QR code for you to peruse.  You will see the finger prints of Rosenblatt, Purvis, Beech and Smith all over the place.  It is quite an easy crime scene.  I plead the fifth.  No, I please guilty.  I am guilty as charged.  What crime?  Becoming better in my profession.  Thinking deeply and widely about things I had never even knew to consider and implement.  Guilty and proud of it!

Creative Response and Rosenblatt's influence

I have another blog called Just Write Baby!  I post quite often and recently I have been on tear about Rosenblatt mixed with Purves.  Here are some of my musings and writings from my blog.  Click on the links below.  Some of it is my writing and others is student writing and responses.

Get on the Train-Student Writing

Daniel's Holes  Inspired by my time at an elementary school where I worked with small groups of students for 2 weeks each day.  The poem just flowed that evening.

Knucklehead and Students Responses
From these same students are some reading responses which using the book Knucklehead.

Poetry Pics-Responses


Gary Soto and Mytiburger

Feelin' It On Friday-Student Work

Poetry in the Wild-Student Poetry
Here are some poems that some students wrote.  We used them to read, enjoy and analyze.  They really loved looking at and reading other 5th grade poetry.  It was a start of our study brief study of poetry.

Reading, Reading, Reading It's Transactional

Sketch It Out-Student Reading, Writing and Thought  I was working with 4th grade students in the One Way Dual Language Classroom.

Spanish Student Writing-Poetry and Response

Student Response-Sketching What You See and Hear from a read aloud

Student Response-Spanish

Creative Response


Student Poetry Response Spanish

Reading is Transactional-Poem by M Ucles

TORS Training April 2013

Rosenblatt and Purves inspired Poem

Final Thoughts from Purves

Here are some final thoughts from Purves and technology.  When students are allowed to use their minds, hearts and souls in the creative reading response theory, then what a better way to do so using different forms of technology.  This is not technology for technology sake either.  What I am suggesting along with Purves is that students can "flip" their classroom with projects they choose.  After adding to their creative response tools, technology and bring it to a higher sphere.  The addition of technology brings things into a global perspective.  When students communicate with one another nowadays, it is usually with their smart phone.  They don't just text anymore.  There are a zillion new apps per day.  They could be using some of these social media experiences and bring it to responses.  They could be posting on Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram with the pics they take and the messages that they send.  When you can join the global community and share your thoughts with others, that makes is extremely rigorous and relevant.  I know, since I have been playing around with different technologies the past 5 years my horizons have been expanded.  I used to be afraid of posting anything.  Now, I want to post and read other people's post.  I want to know what they think about what I have written.  So to this happens with students.  This is the real world.  It's time that we put down our dinosaur boots and joined them.

Things to Consider from Purves

It is important for the teacher to select some of the text.  He/she considers interests, culture, and other criteria when selecting texts for discussion.  Student choice is also important in the equation.  Sometimes it takes the teacher sharing his/her own heart and different texts so that students become "hooked" and have a place or reference.  The teacher initially shares his/her own enthusiasm for reading, writing, responding in different fashions to be a model.  Then as time goes on, more students become thinkers and risk takers on their own.  The the community of reader and reading response has been launched.  Who knows where this shall go.

There are many different ways to respond to what we read.  It is important to show the students some of these ways and to try them out together.  Students then are given more "tools" in which to creatively respond to what they are reading.  The response could be in the form of tableau, role play, poetry, interviews with characters or authors, letter writing, using materials in the classroom and out to show how you understood and responded to what you are reading.  This can be done is small groups akin to literature circles or book clubs or any groupings.

As the students are freed to respond in the ways that they connect to the text, they do go deeper.  In fact, through some of the aforementioned ways but not limited to the, the analytical happens.  Some people believe that this approach is a bunch of fluff or kumbaya flaky moments with no real value.  Purvis has shown in the later chapters that you can go even deeper with this reading creative response because it touches on the relevance and affective domain.  Through the affective domain you have a gateway to go deeper and be more episodic.  To me it's "getting the your cake and eating it too" except you get the whole double chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream on top.  The learner is totally engaged in a emotional, cognitive and superlative level.  To me, this is real life.  This is the way it should be in all our classrooms.

More on Purves

I decided in March to go ahead and just read the rest of the book.  It was really inspiring.  I put much of what I learned into practice.  I am going to go back to the book and highlight some notes that I wrote and what I am thinking now.

Highlights on page 64

• If everybody in a group is responding to the same poem, the common point is the poem.
• If a person is responding to a poem, play and a novel, the common point is the person.
• If a group of people are talking about novels they have read, the common points are the language they are using to talk with and the community they enter.

These points are important to me because explicitly state what the focus of the response would be.  It think that is important because sometimes you can get carried away with enthusiasm of the moment and lose the focus. 

I liked the recipe on page 68:

Ingredients:

Take one class of 28 students

Add one literary text written by a real person (and that speaks to the audience)

and one teacher

"
Stir vigorously.  Many, many different outcomes will result.  This is real world reading, writing, listening and speaking.   It is an approach not a curriculum meaning that you can embed this into what you doing in the classroom.  It is a teach style change analogous to lifestyle change.

In a response based approach, the central focus is the experience of the reader with the text and the culture that lies behind and within the text. (Page70)  The transaction continues.  It is the "falling in love" with what you are doing, reading, thinking, writing, relating and gain as a person.

Remember, too, that what is important is not the breadth of coverage, but the depth to which the students explore the works.  Don't worry about covering, worry about digging.  We tend to teach surface instead of going deeper because we are bombarded with state standards that are far and wide.  Sometimes we tend to think of the immensity of the job and then panic.  I would rather go deeper with less then cover more.  It is about the quality.  Again, if there is no transaction, then nothing more can happen.  Even the surface will not do.