Inside CSI

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving – at the heart of Californian classrooms in 2012

Fri, 25 May 2012 03:12:00 GMT

On May 22^nd, 2012, the ASCD Smartbrief led with a story about changes to Californian classrooms as a result of the Common Core State Standards. Included in these changes is the “development of students' critical-thinking and problem-solving skills”.

The authors of CSI Literacy, the cutting-edge reading comprehension resource developed over the past five years, foresaw this trend. CSI Literacy supports students and their teachers to be explicit in teaching and learning critical thinking and problem solving using texts from the content areas of science, mathematics, social studies and English fiction and nonfiction.

Half of the CSI Literacy texts are presented on interactive whiteboards, an innovation designed to take explicit literacy teaching digital, for the benefit of the students. Digital texts that are well-written (quirky, funny, topical and meaningful) engage the students and provide a ready-made platform for teachers’ explicit instruction. Engagement, explicit instruction and content literacy are high on educational evidence syntheses, and feature in the Common Core State Standards, as effective approaches.

Enter the hyperlink! By forming hyperlinks from the texts to glossaries, photographs, and even videos, the text ‘comes alive’ for the reader and essential background knowledge can be provided.

Now let’s turn to the learners themselves. It’s one thing for students to know, through the process of explicit teaching, quite another for them to be able to do. To make sure that students can do today what they ‘learned’ yesterday, CSI Literacy has developed a ‘rich, inclusive learning model’. Students work in pairs using texts and uniquely designed graphic organizers, to demonstrate, under the formative eye of the teacher, that they can use the skills and strategies they have recently learned.

This convergence between the Common Core State Standards and the CSI Literacy resource will be good for teachers and students in the ‘Common Core’ states.

For more information on CSI-Literacy go to www.csi-literacy.com or www.pacificlearning.com

The secret’s out – Boys’ reading achievement CAN be improved…

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:41:00 GMT

Sometimes it takes someone else to tell us what we already know! So it is with the vexed issue of boys’ reading achievement. In its 2009 report, the OECD acknowledged the critical role played by engagement: “Most of the gender gap can be explained by boys being less engaged, and less engaged students show lower performance” (PISA 2009 Results: Learning to Learn, Vol III, 2009, p.13).

In our CSI Literacy project (www.csi-literacy.com) we echo these findings. We deliberately designed the CSI Literacy resources with three key engagement strategies, and the strong data for boys’ achievement that is coming from school evaluations of the project confirms the effectiveness of the resources. The three strategies are:

Short, challenging, often issues-based texts – CSI texts are deliberately challenging, but not too long or daunting. Teachers and students have said they like the texts, yet teachers often say they would not have picked them, fearing they would be too difficult. One key to engagement is this level of challenge.
Interactive media [1] – in CSI the whole-group/class texts are on a new interactive shared-reading interface that we at South Pacific Press developed especially for CSI. There are embedded tools and supports for teachers and students, including some video to provide extra background knowledge. “Digital native” students enjoy the big, bright, engaging digital texts.
Rich pedagogy – teacher modeling, peer group (cooperative) interaction and discussion, and audio texts for struggling readers contribute to a rich, metacognitive, pedagogy. This pedagogy also builds oral language. Boys seem to thrive on class discussion, in preference to working in the silo of their own desk.

Thanks OECD for the reminder that as teachers our job is to engage our students and to be open to new ways to do that!

[1] CSI combines interactive technology with effective instructional practices. All whole-group CSI texts are presented in an interactive format, through the UMAJIN Presentation viewer. UMAJIN takes working and presenting on an interactive whiteboard to new levels with high-resolution multimedia capabilities that support multiple media types, such as text, drawing, images, audio, video, 3D objects and interaction. This allows for visually rich and stimulating content to be created, presented and interacted with by students, as well as teachers. UMAJIN’s leading compression technology allows for high-quality image, audio and video to be embedded within documents, while maintaining relatively small files sizes and low computing requirements. This benefits the user by providing a much higher quality multimedia experience. In CSI, for example, a text about the concept of “space elevators” comes complete with an embedded animation, soundtrack included, allowing students of all abilities to compare their visualizations of a space elevator with that of NASA’s chief artist.

This blog was originally posted on http://literacybraintrust.com/?p=111

Teachers – We have a lot in common wherever we are in the world

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 02:40:00 GMT

I was fortunate to share a meal with a group of educators in Marietta, Georgia recently. The journey from New Zealand had been long, and naturally my first impression was of the many differences between our education systems. But not long into our (delicious) lunch I was struck by the similarities of the challenges we face. I’ll highlight just three:

New Standards – in the US, the new Common Core Standards are challenging states to provide literacy experiences for students that will prepare them for college and later life. In New Zealand, the new standards movement is also challenging educators. As we sat and discussed CSI Literacy, the resources I’ve spent the last 5 years co-developing, it was clear that in Georgia and New Zealand we share great concerns for underachieving students. We talked at length about the need for rich pedagogy for our strugglers – not the usual diet of stodgy workbook activities – so that they receive explicit instruction and cooperative learning via peer interaction as they come to grips with the strategies that good readers use automatically in their reading.
Content, or disciplinary, literacy. The research evidence is clear, and in Georgia and New Zealand the need is being recognized more and more that students in grades 3 to 8 need explicit instruction with text other than fictional narrative. CSI’s engaging digital science, math and social studies texts are acknowledged as being at the cutting edge.
Technology for learning. We acknowledged the monumental impact that Steve Jobs had on the world of technology, but we also sounded a caution. Technology needs to sit alongside pedagogy, i.e., it needs to be “teachnology”! Or all we have is edutainment – and more edutainment we do not need! I shared the challenges we had in developing the first ever digital shared-reading interface for CSI Literacy, and how excited the students are when they can read, think, talk and write about digital texts in a learning community with their teacher and their peers.

Yes, in both Georgia and New Zealand it all comes down to student achievement in the end – but when the journey is rich, the outcome is not just good test-takers, but thinking young people, ready to claim their place in the world.

This blog was originally posted on http://literacybraintrust.com/?p=107

Leveled Text, Leveled Students – Can we do better?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:06:00 GMT

How would you like to spend your school life in the bottom reading group? No matter what native flower or other cutesy name the group is given, there’s no fooling the students in the bottom reading group and Samantha for one isn’t a fan. Recently Samantha spoke to the camera about her experience as a student who has lived her classroom life in the bottom reading group, and she was forthright – “I don’t like it.”

The more the interview with Samantha progressed, the clearer I was that Samantha was no slouch in reading. She could talk at length about the comprehension strategies she’d been learning, and when and how to apply them. Shortly after interviewing Samantha, I read a challenging article by Australians Kath Glasswell and Michael Ford, entitled Let’s Start Leveling about Leveling. The article fed into my own beliefs thatleveling has become a somewhat inflexible and idealistic response to the challenging task of teaching children to read. What are the issues with leveling? Well, three things to begin with:

The methods we use to level students.
The methods we use to level texts.
The purposes we put leveling to.

Now Glasswell and Ford are the researchers, so I recommend you read their article. However, I need to say very clearly that every time I’m in a classroom as part of my CSI Literacy work, I see highly intelligent young people who should not (in my view) be in the bottom reading group. These students love to be liberated, by being included in whole-group discussions about digital texts that they‘re sharing with the teacher and their peers. Their enjoyment of strategic and vocabulary learning, and their enjoyment of oral language – theirs and their peers – shines on their faces.

In CSI Literacy we break the mold by freeing students from their leveled groups and their leveled texts. We bring them together in a classroom learning community and have them share their ideas about texts that are they are able to access through the supportive scaffolding of their teachers and their peers. And they love it!

This blog was originally posted on http://literacybraintrust.com/?p=100

Donation helps rebuild resources in Christchurch schools

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 01:13:00 GMT

On the 27th of September, I visited the Christchurch Principals' Conference in Hamner Springs to make a donation of resources. South Pacific Press and its US partner Pacific Learning gifted 4000 copies of an innovative new graphic non-fiction book to Christchurch schools affected by recent earthquakes.

The Great Earth Magnet, by physicist Gillian Turner, is gifted in memory of my friend Brian Taylor, former Director of Kings Language School, and long-time Director of Science Alive in Christchurch, who died in the February 22 earthquake. Brian was a passionate educator, with a special love of science. He understood that science literacy needs to start at an early age, and there is no better time than now to get students thinking about the earth and the powerful forces that churn beneath our feet. He also championed the wider literacy benefits of learning science – Kings Language School was a pioneer of the South Pacific Press and Pacific Learning CSI Literacy project of which the Great Earth Magnet is a part.

Schools in Christchurch have had their learning heavily disrupted this year, not only with the February 22 earthquake, but also with the thousands of aftershocks that have followed. Many schools have had their resources badly damaged, so it was without hesitation that South Pacific Press and Pacific Learning offered to help. Peter Baker Transport, in a generous show of support for the initiative, will deliver the books from Nelson to Christchurch free of charge.

The Great Earth Magnet explains, in an easy to understand format, the forces impacting on Earth and the consequences of those forces. We have young students playing with magnets and musing, as Einstein did, about the forces involved. This book explains a great mystery – why our planet has a magnetic field – in a way that will enthral and educate anyone, from a young child to a grandparent.

Gillian Turner adapted the book’s script from her book North Pole, South Pole, published by Awa Press, a non-fiction specialist with a strong interest in popular science. North Pole, South Pole was a finalist in this year’s Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize, and an American edition is already into a second printing.

In addition to this donation, South Pacific Press has collaborated with Awa Press to offer The Great Earth Magnet with e-book plus North Pole South Pole as a special package for sale to schools and families across New Zealand. It’s vital for New Zealand’s ‘new economy’ that New Zealanders are science literate, and Gillian Turner is an astonishing science communicator.

Neale Pitches
CSI co-author

CSI Author Wins Education Award!

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 03:00:00 GMT

The author of a soon-to-be published CSI Chapters book has been recognized for her services to education in Wellington, New Zealand.

Dr Gillian Turner was recently awarded an education "Welly Award" for inspiring generations of young scientists through her work with science fairs and teaching.

It was noted that Dr Turner has "an infectious passion for science, which reflects her own enthusiasm for learning and research and overflows to everyone she interacts with."

Dr Turner's book, North Pole South Pole (Awa Press) has been adapted into The Great Earth Magnet, an engaging graphic nonfiction book that unravels the scientific mysteries of the source of the earth's magnetism.

The Great Earth Magnet is one of 25 books that will be published in early 2011 as CSI Chapters, a reading series aimed at accelerating comprehension strategy development across the content areas for students ages 8-12.

Some sample pages from Dr Gillian Turner's CSI graphic nonfiction book
(Due for release in 2011)

Stunning teacher turnout for seminars

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 03:44:00 GMT

This autumn, more than 1000 teachers turned out across New Zealand for the Teaching Comprehension Strategies seminar series run by South Pacific Press.

Kyran Smith, from Miramar South School, and Neale Pitches from South Pacific Press spoke about the impressive gains in comprehension achieved by students learning in the “CSI” way – using digital, shared reading followed by book-based co-operative learning. Maori and Pasifica students, including boys, were of special interest to the teacher audiences, as their reading scores rose remarkably in some cases.

Teachers were given practical teaching approaches – the theory in plain English – and they saw video of students in action at Miramar South School. Many teachers remarked at the engaged, vibrant faces of the (so-called) struggling readers in the video, and marvelled at the way students could read, respond and think their way through texts, familiar and unfamiliar in content.

Student Voices

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:41:00 GMT

What do today's 'digital natives' make of CSI? Roslyn School's Room 22 is a completely digital classroom. The students there have recently been using CSI's Kit 6, and here's what they have to say about it.

Ten Tips for Teaching Comprehension

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Neale Pitches is co-author of CSI - Comprehension Strategies Instruction, and is a very experienced teacher, principal, author, and publisher. Here are his ten tips for teaching reading comprehension:

See each of your students as capable young people, merely lacking in experience – this mindset will help you (and them) with the remaining nine tips!
Think of how you teach a skill, such as kicking a ball. Having modeled how to kick a ball you then ask the students to try, and you give them feedback on their efforts. Do the same in teaching comprehension! Research says feedback is hugely important in learning.
Build your students’ reading confidence by offering them many short, interesting texts from diverse places. Students will have wide interests regardless of how much they normally read. For this reason, you will find they can make many connections to the texts you show them, even – or especially – poetry.
Include texts from across the content areas. Students will have to read material in all content areas as they progress through school. Research says that as the content load grows, some students fall behind.
Model, by thinking aloud, how you read actively to understand and enjoy texts. Model also how you use comprehension strategies to build your own understanding of texts.
As you model, make it clear that comprehension is not an “all-or-nothing” process. Students often think comprehension is about answering questions with a “right” or “wrong” answer. Show them how even a teacher like you doesn’t always understand everything in a text, especially at a first read-through. Comprehension is as much about asking questions as answering them.
As you model, involve the students, perhaps through think-pair-share. This will stave off the boredom and disengagement that can come with “stand-and-deliver” teaching. Also have students place an acetate sheet onto a text and annotate it with an erasable pen where they are having challenges or using strategies. This makes their thinking explicit to you.
As you model, discuss vocabulary with the students. Have them try to figure synonyms or short definitions for challenging vocabulary (encourage them to be “deTEXTives”). Building vocabulary is crucial to comprehension.
Display texts on a digital interface using an interactive whiteboard or a data projector. Your students are digital natives and they will welcome your efforts to use “their” technologies in their learning.
Be a reader yourself and notice your own use of comprehension strategies as you read. Read different books as they challenge you to use different strategies (I find the author Haruki Murakami great for putting my strategies to the test!). Research also shows that the deeper our knowledge as teachers the better we may teach.

Neale Pitches talks about comprehension to educators in Auckland, New Zealand

Digital Shared Reading

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:51:00 GMT

Digital Shared Reading is gaining momentum.

Many hundred of schools across the USA, New Zealand and Australia are studying CSI texts using the UMAJIN digital interface for Shared Reading. The UMAJIN interface was developed by Unlimited Realities in New Zealand in tandem with South Pacific Press, the developer of CSI. (CSI is co-published by Pacific Learning in the USA, making it a unique collaboration across the Pacific Ocean).

Leveled texts?

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:52:00 GMT

How much should we control the level of students’ reading materials?

Neale Pitches, co-author of CSI, writes: “CSI students ‘read beyond their interest and ability levels’ say Hagley High teachers. One challenge for teachers and librarians is how much to control students’ reading choices. In an era of leveled texts and ‘leveled’ students, how literally do we take Lev Vygotsky’s notion of scaffolding and ‘zone of proximal development’? Do we restrict students to texts we believe they can read, thereby restricting their reading experience? I have been concerned for some time about the trend to over-label students according to their reading ‘level’. I know my own reading ‘level’ varies according to three vital factors:

My interest in the text (and therefore my background knowledge)
My engagement with the text, (i.e., how much I want to read and apply myself to it)
The type of text (I’m notoriously troubled by icons in digital texts – unlike 10-year-olds!)

It seems to be the same with students, so I think it’s wrong to limit their access to ‘difficult’ texts, especially if they are struggling readers (or ESL/ELL students). I think CSI shows this. As students encounter the diverse range of nonfiction and fiction in CSI, across the content areas of English, science, mathematics and social studies their interest ‘brightens’ (Kyran Smith’s word, referring to her Miramar South students). Kids like challenge and diversity – so let’s give it to them.

We want your opinion…please.

Newport News "goes live" with CSI adoption

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:00:00 GMT

The Newport News, Virginia, USA, school district will “go live” with the first major adoption of CSI in the US, in the fall of this year.

Neale Pitches, CSI co-author, has just spent two days there working with the reading coaches under the direction of Lori Wall and Theresa McKee. “What a treat!” says Neale. “These coaches are smart and dedicated. We spent part of each day working on our personal knowledge of the comprehension strategies using texts for ‘grown-ups’ – e.g., Billy Collins’ beautiful poem The Lanyard. The rest of the day was spent on CSI texts. We watched the video from Miramar South School and the data showing stellar improvements in comprehension scores from both Miramar South and Hagley High schools. I reckon we formed a ‘learning community’ of our own.”

Audio Scaffolding in CSI

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:03:00 GMT

Why does CSI have an audio component and how is it best used?

Most classrooms are comprised of students with varied strengths, needs and levels of reading and comprehension. Few teachers would debate the importance of catering for the range of students’ needs, either in a composite class of mixed abilities or with struggling readers and ELL students. Even fewer teachers would dispute how difficult it can be to cater for all needs in a busy classroom environment.

In some classrooms, students with reading difficulties are likely to get instruction that focuses primarily on decoding rather than on meaning and comprehension. They are exposed mainly to text that is simply written and often correspondingly simple to comprehend. While there is a place for students to read text at their independent and instructional reading levels, it is wrong to assume that struggling readers, who may have limited ability to decode the words, are incapable of thinking about text in complex ways. Students who are denied any access to age-appropriate text are at a high risk of falling even further behind their peers and never catching up. This applies not only to their reading skills, but to all subjects across the curriculum; students’ skills in questioning, visualising, making inferences, determining important ideas and synthesising information remain underdeveloped or limited to the below-year-level text they have been reading.

It is becoming more commonly recognised that struggling readers need access to year-level material. A way of providing this that is effective for students and manageable for teachers is to use a variety of scaffolded experiences. During the CSI whole-class lesson, the students who are unable to decode the text used for instruction (either because they are struggling readers or ELL students, or they are reading on-year-level but they are in a composite class with classmates who are older and more skilled) are scaffolded by their teacher and their peers in a shared-reading context. During the cooperative learning activities, appropriate pairing of students can allow the struggling reader to be scaffolded by their partner and/or by the audio recording of the text.

The audio version of each text in the cooperative learning activities provides a good model for all students, regardless of their skill level, to emulate. Audio-assisted reading is widely accepted as especially beneficial for ELL students and struggling readers, as it improves their reading performance. It is also a useful support for students who find the on-year-level text too difficult to decode, as it enables them to read text that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Audio support helps to develop students’ fluency by freeing their attention so they can give maximum concentration to comprehension rather than just “getting the words right”.

The audio recordings of the texts are read by professionals (males and/or females) who have been trained to read fluently and at a range of targeted paces. Each pace is, as indicated by research, appropriate for students of a specific age group.

A group of students can listen to the audio recording on a CD together at a listening centre, or individual students can listen to it on a personal CD player or computer. The listening should take place at the same time as the ‘Interacting with the text’ or ‘During reading’ phase of the cooperative learning activity.

One listen of the recording is usually sufficient to make the text accessible to students, especially if they follow the text as they listen. They should, however, be allowed to revisit the text with the support of the audio if the need arises during later phases of the activity, such as ‘Reflecting on text’, ‘After reading’ or ‘Writing activity’. There is also convincing evidence of the value of repeated readings of the same text, with and without the audio for support and modelling.

CSI Case Study Video!

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:06:00 GMT

Click here to see students at Miramar South School using CSI! These students made notable gains in reading comprehension after using the program.

Short, engaging, and diverse texts

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:12:00 GMT

CSI offers 40 diverse, contemporary short texts across the content areas of English language arts, science, math, and social studies.

They can be displayed using acetate sheets on an overhead projector, but it is preferable, to highlight the interaction, that they are projected from the CD-ROM. This can be done using a data projector projected onto an interactive whiteboard or any other suitable screen-like surface. This method is much more likely to engage and motivate students.

Students are able to encounter grade-level texts and reading challenges from a diverse range of materials, including magazines, popular contemporary novels, and classic texts.

Text types include:
Persuasive, recounts, reports, essays, narratives, explanatory, procedural, articles, biographies, and autobiographies, compare and contrast, sequential, cause and effect, problem and solution, enumerative, and descriptive.

CSI offers 80 texts per grade level, 32 of which are for English language arts (16 fiction and 16 nonfiction), 16 for math literacy, 16 for science literacy, and 16 for social studies literacy.

CSI includes a Whole-Group Interactive Texts CD-ROM, which provides teachers with an easy-to-use, attractive interface with embedded functions (such as glossaries, picture glossaries, video clips, and tools to mask and highlight specific areas of text) that aid instruction and support students during reading. This technology supports the needs of 21st-century students, yet takes into account that not all classrooms have access to the same level of technology.

Each piece in CSI has been specifically linked to national content standards.