35En glish Journal  105.1 (2015): 35–41

This is the story of Sara and how she, like other students labeled special needs, found her voice. Responding to an invitation to ELA teach-ers throughout several, regional school districts calling for research participants to test the effects of a knowledge- building approach to literacy in-struction, Mrs. Fleck, a sixth- grade language arts teacher in a suburban school adjacent to a major metropolitan city, was selected for the rich aca-demic and ethnic diversity in her classroom as well as her interest in improving students’ literacy skills and dispositions. The results reported here are from a six- month research study with one sixth- grade language arts class. Mrs. Fleck met regularly with the primary investigator to develop instruc-tional practices and procedures and was considered a key member of the research team. I was a daily observer, and sometimes co- teacher, for the entire design- based experiment, and the data reported are from classroom observations, transcribed classroom meetings twice weekly, and digital discussions. The purpose of this design- based experiment (Reinking and Bradley) was to purposefully enact changes to learning activities with the intended goal, mutually decided by the author and Mrs. Fleck, to improve the deep reading and deep literary understanding of students by teaching them how to collaboratively create textual interpretations rather than consume the teacher’s knowledge. Four students were selected as case studies based on their academic and cultural diversity, and interviews were held at the onset of the intervention, midway through, and after the in-tervention was formally concluded. However, just a

f you believe that knowledge is socially and collaboratively con-structed, as do I, then an over-whelming challenge for the

language arts instructor in this age of rigor and high demands for all is engaging students with individualized education plans (IEPs) who tradi-tionally shy away from participation in classroom discourse. It is easy to assume that students who do not participate in classroom discussions are off- task, disengaged, or simply not up to the task. We can allow for shy students to observe rather than participate in an effort to keep them within their comfort zones. We can prod, draw out, and call on silenced voices in a supportive, nonthreatening manner. However, what concerns me, and this ar-ticle, is that students labeled as special needs, who may have IEPs outlining specific guidelines for differentiated instruction, may inhibit, rather than foster, the growth of students who need it the most in the social construction of knowledge by allow-ing their voices to remain essentially unheard by the teacher and, more importantly, by their peers. Participation in class discussion and, subsequently, the collaborative construction of knowledge about texts is difficult for many students but even more so for students who may have several years of self- doubt struggling with literacy, keeping pace with other students, and especially for those who are la-beled special needs. The challenge, then, is finding instructional practices that scaffold special needs students into valued, productive, and equal collab-orators in the production of knowledge.

I

Marc Nachowitz

How Sara Got Her Voice Back: The Importance of Tentativeness

Sara’s story reports the effects of an experimental intervention applying knowledge-building principles for learning, as well as the unanticipated improvement of literacy skills of students with IEPs.

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continuously note weaknesses, or add evidence, or suggest alternative theories until a final, thorough literary analysis is constructed by the entire class.

Knowledge Forum, an online learning envi-ronment employed in most knowledge- building experiments, is where student ideas are generated, revised, built upon, and brought together. Unlike other digital discussion forums such as Blackboard or Moodle, Knowledge Forum fosters progres-sive discourse because students must select from a menu of options scaffolding their entrance into the collaborative discussion. When students want to enter or extend a discussion thread, they must choose a scaffold that focuses their post whether it is to create, extend, justify, challenge, or bring ideas together into a cohesive whole. Teaching students how to create literary interpretations by teaching them the language and structure of lit-erary discourse resulted in improvements in close reading skills (Nachowitz and Brumer). However, the unanticipated outcome of scaffolding students’ engagement in the knowledge- building principles of idea diversity, idea improvability, and collective responsibility for community knowledge was the impact these elements had on students labelled special needs. The following sections capture the instructional moves during the experimental in-tervention that scaffolded special needs students’ learning—and mastery of—the essential aspects of creating a knowledge- building community of readers.

One reason students don’t like to participate in class discussion is the fear of saying something wrong or sounding unintelligent in front of their peers, and this is particularly strong for students with special needs. Mrs. Fleck noted that her “stu-dents don’t come in with that skill to discuss, to ask questions. . . . I find the students kind of rigid in that way.”

All four students in the class requiring some form of accommodations (IEPs or reading remedia-tion) never contributed during observed, classroom discussion during the first month of the experiment. Thus, in an atmosphere of feeling the pressure to provide a correct answer while putting yourself out there, how did the intervention reposition students as self- agentive? The first noticeable improvement came about only when the students knew that all ideas were welcomed and valued.

few weeks into the intervention the research team observed an unexpected outcome: the four students with IEPs showed the steepest improvement in participation and the production of literary ideas. This article captures how a knowledge- building ap-proach to learning, emphasizing idea diversity and idea improvability, enabled so many silenced stu-dents to find their voices.

Knowledge Building

Knowledge building is a theory of learning initially developed by Carl Bereiter proposing that students need to create, revise, and extend explanatory the-ories by asking and answering their own problems associated with understanding a particular topic or course content. That is, deep understanding of the connections between ideas, the individual declara-tive bits of knowledge and procedural skills asso-ciated with a discipline’s learning objectives, can only come about when students are actively apply-ing their understanding by generating their own theories rather than merely consuming the theo-ries of others. Knowledge building, like scientific communities, requires progressive discourse, that is, discourse that goes somewhere, that results in a rigorous explanatory model, and the purpose of all classroom learning activities is to foster students’ contributions by generating, adding to, building on, revising, and noting weaknesses of explanatory theories.

Several characteristics of knowledge- building classrooms were particularly salient in achieving positive results for the special needs students in this intervention. According to Carl Bereiter and Mar-lene Scardamalia, knowledge- building classrooms should embrace idea diversity, where all student ideas are valued, and work toward idea improvability in which the impetus of classroom learning activi-ties is to foster student collaboration to build on, deepen, and extend their ideas working toward a shared, deep understanding of the content. Thus, rather than debate literary theories or interpreta-tions, students collaboratively construct, over time, rigorously defended and revised community- shared interpretations of a text. This outcome can only be achieved through progressive discourse, usually supported by digital discussion boards, where the goal of student contributions is to generate and

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reminding her of a elephant. But the beans could cause a lot of farts so your right about that.

Tara: Challenging ideas: I think that [Abdel] should put more detail. Why do you think that the dad is so fat and eats to much? you have really no reason!

Azim: Challenging ideas: Thats not nice. He is very stressed with life, maybe because his child has a disability. How is he fat, just because he naturally farts. Maybe thats a way to release his stress

The next day this thread was displayed on the in- class computer screen and a discussion ensued about how this seemingly inappropriate thread ac-tually led to some excellent examples of progres-sive discourse where students challenged Abdel’s original idea, which, incidentally, is an exact quote from the text, and in doing so, brought the discus-sion back to justifying inferences about character as well as discussion of the au-thor’s craft. In fact, Abdel’s initial post, however soph-omoric in tone and con-tent, did initiate a lengthy thread with seven student posts building onto and extending theories about the narrator’s father, even asking questions and mak-ing predictions, evidence of engaged, thoughtful reading and literary analysis. The primary point of this debriefing session was to explicitly inform students that any ideas, any initial response, was welcome, as long as it was appropri-ate and justified by the text, and that even the sil-liest initiations into a discussion could and would be welcomed by the teacher. This is not to say that middle school humor would always be welcome and that there were no boundaries for appropriate discussion topics, but if it was in the text and stu-dents wanted to react to any element, they were free to do so.

The preceding Knowledge Forum discussion excerpt was a beginning toward inculcating a sense among the students that discussions could be initi-ated at any entry point into the topic; subsequent learning activities were designed to reinforce and

Idea Diversity

Idea diversity is not necessarily a new concept, but creating a classroom environment that truly en-courages all ideas, no matter how absurd, out there, or just plain weird, and where students really know their opinions are valued is a challenge. Subtle teacher uptake responses, such as, “yes, that’s inter-esting, but what about . . .” may actually sound to students as if you’re suggesting their point is weak, when in fact you are merely prompting them to dig deeper and elaborate. Teacher uptake can often manifest to the students as “you’re wrong.” Eventu-ally, they tire of your persistent pestering for details and find it easier to listen rather than contribute. But in the knowledge- building classroom, teachers cannot assert their opinions at all. Students must construct knowledge via lesson plans supporting progressive discourse, investigation, and problem- posing and problem- solving issues of understand-ing a text.

True idea diversity was achieved by scaffold-ing students into the kinds of close readers who notice and note things in a text. To initiate conver-sations, our students were given sentence starters: I want to talk about and I have a question. Students were asked to start conversations on Knowledge Forum using either of these scaffolds, based on anything they noted in the assigned reading. How-ever, idea diversity did not really kick in until the weekly debriefings of the digital discussions. This change to instruction involved projecting discus-sion threads from the previous class’s computer ses-sion and providing teacher feedback on the quality of student posts and guided practice and explicit instruction in how to improve student responses. A breakthrough took place during our first debriefing after reading the opening chapters of Sharon Drap-er’s Out of My Mind in which a student with cerebral palsy struggles with the inability to communicate with others. Abdel, one of the students requiring reading remediation, initiated the following dis-cussion thread after reading the author’s description of the protagonist’s father:

Abdel: I want to talk about:1 STEP FART STEP FART STEP FART! HAHA I THINK THE DAD IS FAT AND EATS BEANS

Brian: Challenging ideas: I disagree b/c Melody never told us about her dad

Teacher uptake can often

manifest to the students

as “you’re wrong.”

Eventually, they tire of

your persistent pestering

for details and find it

easier to listen rather

than contribute.

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Students needed to know that there were no teacher repercussions for posting about anything they noted during reading. Mrs. Fleck learned to, in some ways, keep quiet and not challenge any stu-dent input, but rather to instruct students in how to challenge, justify, and extend other student posts in appropriate ways. Thus, the proof was in the sus-tained honoring of diverse ideas and ensuring that all ideas, by all students, would be heard and val-ued. However, idea diversity most likely truly sank into the students when the concept of idea improv-ability gave them the freedom to start discussions wherever they desired.

Ideas Are Improvable

The progression of emerging literary theories and understandings also requires the student to not only try out possible thoughts, but to weigh, con-sider, and let them develop. A classroom environ-ment that supports idea diversity establishes and encourages students to share emerging understand-ings and gives them space to grow, rather than re-quiring a “correct answer” as is often the result of teacher- initiated dialogue. In short, idea diversity is not enough to support the development of deeper understandings and the creation of literary theories and interpretations. Students must be taught that understandings are always emerging, always grow-ing, and this requires training them to be tentative with their input into the classroom discourse. This comes from a classroom environment that does not require final answers to literary discussions. Rather, students feel that their ideas put forth during class-room discussions or through digitally mediated discourse are not required to be certain or fixed, that theories and interpretations should be exper-imental, provisional, taking hesitant steps yet al-ways moving forward and deeper into unraveling the many layers of textual meanings.

The next stage in the intervention involved supporting students to learn how the language of tentativeness could encourage them to improve others’ ideas, to extend discussion threads with “maybe” statements. During this stage of the in-tervention, students were taught how to extend, challenge, justify, or add further evidence to oth-ers’ discussion posts by providing them with more

encourage students’ idea diversity especially for the students like Abdel who were labelled special ed-ucation. To honor all voices and to draw attention to the traditionally silenced students, the instruc-tor led further discussion debriefings by choosing threads initiated by the four students with spe-cial needs. On this particular day, students were grappling with understanding the motivations of a complex character, Mrs. V., a nurse helping the protagonist, and the teacher noted the original in-terpretation by Sara, a student with severe literacy challenges, which provided an excellent opportu-nity to feature the contributions of students who traditionally had remained silent during class. Sara’s discussion post, as follows, was projected on the classroom screen:

Sara: I have a question: yes that is true but I think that ms.v is so excited over melody is it because she is different??

Sara’s intention, to explain the character’s mo-tivations as not altruistic but rather more for per-sonal curiosity, initiated a new way for the other

students to consider character-ization. During this debrief-ing session, Sara’s voice was honored and the teacher ex-plained that Sara’s theory was different from all other theo-ries about the character posted on Knowledge Forum, but no one added to or built on this discussion starter. The class then practiced extending and building onto Sara’s post with guided practice in these liter-ary discussion moves. Sara was initially overwhelmed by the

selection of her post as a model for other students to emulate as well as encouraging other students to read and build on her discussion prompts. Subse-quent lessons debriefing the quality of discussion posts and instructing students in progressive dis-course further highlighted the contributions of the three other students with IEPs.

In short, it took time to build a classroom en-vironment welcoming all student ideas and draw-ing attention to the traditionally silenced voices.

A classroom environment

that supports idea

diversity establishes and

encourages students

to share emerging

understandings and gives

them space to grow,

rather than requiring

a “correct answer”

as is often the result

of teacher- initiated

dialogue.

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end of the experiment, all four became significant contributors to the class’s literary discussions on Knowledge Forum. Sara contributed 22 notes, Tara contributed 11, Abdel contributed 15, and Sharon posted 8, which are significant findings in that the average number of discussion posts contributed by all student authors was 20. Thus, these silenced voices, not heard during early classroom observa-tions, did contribute to the collaborative discourse but below the class average, and Sara contributed slightly more than the average student.

Sara Speaks

Sara has an individualized education plan (IEP) for her documented weakness in writing and language development. Sara has a warm, cheery personality, and her teachers often call her Sunshine. Accord-ing to her special education teacher, Sara is a confi-dent learner but struggles a little bit on tests that require her to remember a lot of information, and she needs assistance adding details to her writing. Sara considers herself “a really good reader . . . but sometimes it’s hard to process.” She loves the Harry Potter series and has read them several times. Sara rarely spoke in class and explained that while she felt comfortable initiating Knowledge Forum dis-cussion topics, it was other student’s build- on posts that helped articulate her thoughts more specifi-cally. She particularly noted the benefit of starting discussions with questions about the reading be-cause “then they’d answer for you.” It seems as if Sara is indicating that the benefit of asking a ques-tion on Knowledge Forum is that someone else will provide an answer. This may be an indicator of her need for learning support and Knowledge Forum provides answers without having to wait for read-ing remediation, which she received several times each week.

Furthermore, Sara admitted that she liked reading the discussion threads and selecting the scaffold The Big Picture, which requires students to articulate how the reading helps them under-stand the world, themselves, or their place within it. As she explains, “the big picture [scaffold] . . . it helps, like, understand, like when you’re typing it, like, it’s hard for me to process and then write it down. So I just type what’s in my mind and then I

sentence starters couched in the language of ten-tativeness. For example, students discussing char-acterization, trying to explain motivations for character behaviors, were instructed to build on dis-cussion threads with language such as, “maybe your idea might also explain why . . . ,” or “is it possible that there is another reason why x . . . ,” or “perhaps x might be doing this because . . . .” These discus-sion extenders teach students both how to engage in literary discourse that goes deeper into the text, as well as frees them to posit and weigh alternative interpretations that other students might pick up on and further develop through extended digital discussions. At the same time, we wanted students to learn that “maybe” is not hedging; it’s just a way of brainstorming multiple, potential ideas. The fol-lowing excerpt from Knowledge Forum took place weeks after Sara’s initial observation about the char-acter Mrs. V, and was initiated by another SPED student, Abdel:

Abdel: Challenging ideas: i have a different idea. i think that maybe she is so determined to help melody because something like this happened in mrs v’s life. maybe she a had a kid who had cp.

Cynthia: Expanding ideas: I never thougth about that before. That Mrs.V likes Melody, because shes also diffrent too. But know when i think of it mabye thats why Mrs.V likes melody so much because she feels a connection between her and melody. Melody is diffrent with her sp. and mrs.V is diffrent also. I wonder if Mrs.v is feels mnore comforitable with melody, because she is diffrent to.

Christopher: Expanding ideas: Yeah I think mrs.V like Melody because of her disorder because mayb she has a disorder too, or she doesn’t really care mayb Melody is normal to her.

Idea diversity and idea improvement, two core components of knowledge- building approaches to learning, allowed the silenced voices to be heard. At the beginning of the intervention, during sev-eral weeks of classroom observations, the four stu-dents requiring special services never contributed to class discussion, not once. However, by the

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go over and revise.” When Sara explains “it’s hard for me to process and write it down” she is artic-ulating her difficulty forming the language that shapes her thinking yet she goes ahead and leaps into discussions anyway. Sara refers to a discussion thread in which she came up with an entirely new theory explaining the motivations of a secondary character, Mrs. V., and she acknowledges how sub-sequent student posts, asking questions about her theory and expanding her theory, helped her extend and revise her initial impressions. For example, when asked how other students’ “big picture” posts helped deepen her understanding as well as what she wanted to say, she noted the following:

Sara: When everyone was talking about Mrs. V. and it . . . ’cause I thought that she was, um, just helping Melody because she was dif-ferent, but, um, a few other people helped me understand that she really isn’t. She just wants to help her because she’s . . . um, kind, like she wants to be normal, but Mrs. V doesn’t really see her like that. She sees her as a normal person.

Herein, the central point in understanding how Knowledge Forum helped Sara is revealed: reading other people’s responses to her notes helped her to understand and deepen her own initial re-sponse. When other students take up her ideas and extend them, they give value to Sara’s contribu-tions. In all likelihood, this would not have hap-pened in an environment dominated by correct answers and anxieties about sounding smart. Sara’s engagement in the collaborative construction of literary knowledge is largely due to the classroom climate encouraging, demanding even, idea diver-sity and the tentativeness that comes with knowing your ideas will be improved by others. When other students extend Sarah’s ideas, it helps her elaborate and justify her thoughts with further explanation and, perhaps, more textual evidence to support her theories.

For a student like Sara, who has a diagnosed difficulty articulating her thinking in writing, pro-gressive discourse, especially the kind that leaves a permanent trail of writing that Sara can return to and see the development of her ideas, has a posi-tive effect on improving her literary thinking and

understanding. When asked to describe her pro-cess for composing a literary analysis essay of the novel, Sara explained that she just wrote down her thoughts but used other people’s posts “to make it make sense.” As Sara explained during her post- intervention interview, it was seeing similar ideas put forth by other students that reinforced her willingness to share her emerging understandings with others. Reading other students’ posts “helped me understand what I’m trying to say more . . . like, what I think about it, and telling other peo-ple about it on Knowledge Forum, by people who think the same thing as me.” When asked if this process helped make her feel more confident, she responded with a simple, “yeah.”

The Importance of Tentativeness

Digital discussion boards, in and of themselves, are insufficient means to creating an atmosphere where tentativeness is valued unless students learn over time that diverse ideas are welcomed and that progressive discourse enables your initial impres-sions to be developed and extended by your peers. Instruction designed to improve student literacy, and especially literate thinking, involves growing and deepening student responses to text primar-ily through social interaction. As Abdel, one of the special needs students, explained, digital dis-cussions “make it easier to get your point across to other people. It was just easier than having to talk in a group . . . because I could put out exactly what I want to put out. There’s no restrictions or anything.”

Clearly, from Abdel’s perspective there’s an openness for him in knowledge- building activities that he feels doesn’t limit his responses. It’s one way of overcoming “putting yourself out there” with the understanding that ideas are improvable over time. The students with special needs in this exper-iment learned self- agency because all students were required and expected to take individual responsi-bility for collective knowledge production.

Note

1. Text in italics refers to the discourse scaffold pro-grammed into Knowledge Forum, selected by the student, to facilitate progressive discourse.

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Works CitedBereiter, Carl. Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age.

Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2002. Print.Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene Scardamalia. “Learning to Work

Creatively with Knowledge.” Powerful Learning Envi-ronments: Unraveling Basic Components and Dimensions. Ed. Eric De Corte, Lieven Verschaffel, Noel Ent-wistle, and Jeroen van Merrienboer. Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2003. 55–68. Print.

Draper, Sharon. Out of My Mind. New York: Atheneum, 2010. Print.

Nachowitz, Marc, and Nancy Brumer. “Teaching the Talk, Not the Text.” Voices from the Middle 22.1 (2014): 15–21. Print.

Reinking, David, and Bradley, Barbara A. On Formative and Design Experiments: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research: An NCRLL volume. New York: Teachers College, 2008. Print.

Marc Nachowitz  is an assistant professor of  literacy/language arts at Miami University, and his  research  interests  involve developing pedagogies that scaffold students’ high literacy skills. He has been a member of NCTE since 1995. He can be con-tacted at nachowm@miamioh.edu.

READWRITETHINK CONNECTION Lisa Storm Fink, RWT

Online literature circles provide students with opportunities to discuss a literary work in a forum in which each stu-dent has a voice and the chance to share ideas without being interrupted by others. In this multisession lesson from ReadWriteThink.org, students choose a novel from a list of selected titles that will spark discussion and elicit deep literature response. Students read and discuss their chosen text online with their peers and respond to both teacher-  and student- created prompts. Student- constructed prompts invite group members to think deeper about the literature, engage in meaningful conversation, and share multiple perspectives and unique points of view. After completing an online discussion, students review a transcript of their discussions and reflect on the value of their experience. http://bit.ly/1ydMGXG 

English Journal Awards

Paul and Kate Farmer Award: The Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Writing Award honors current, on-leave, or former secondary teachers who authored the best articles published in English Journal during the previous school year (between September and July). This year’s recipients are Chris Gilbert, for “A Call for Subterfuge: Shielding the ELA Classroom from the Restrictive Sway of the Common Core” (November 2014), and Jennifer Rossuck, for “My Year of Sports” (September 2014). Honorable mentions go to Michael Hoffman, for “Peer Response, Remixed: Authentic Peer Response through Audio Technology” (March 2015), and Alyssa Niccolini, for “Precocious Knowledge: Using Banned Books to Engage in a Youth Lens” (January 2015). Chris Gilbert also won the Farmer Award in 2013.

Edwin M. Hopkins Award: Every other year, the Edwin M. Hopkins Award recognizes outstanding English Journal articles written by authors who fall outside Farmer Award eligibility guidelines. Although usually announced during even years, 2014 Hopkins Award awardees will be honored in 2015. This year’s recipient is Heather E. Bruce, for “Subversive Acts of Revision: Writing and Justice” (July 2013). Honor-able mentions go to April Brannon, for “Love That Poem! Using Imitation to Teach Poetry” (November 2012) and Gregory Shafer, for “Political Language, Democracy, and the Language Arts Classroom” (Novem-ber 2013).

2015 Farmer and 2014 Hopkins Award recipients will be recognized at the NCTE Annual Convention during the Secondary Section Luncheon on Saturday, November 21, 2015.

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