The Daily 5 and Results Now

[Catherine Guild]

The school I teach at continues to struggle with meeting AYP, so I read two books that deal not only with writing, but literacy and student achievement as well. I read The Daily 5: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades by Gail Boushey & Joan Moser and Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning by Mike Schmoker.

The Daily 5 includes the elements of:
1) Read to Self
2) Read to Someone
3) Listen to Reading
4) Work on Writing
5) Word Work

The Work on Writing element is done every day and can be an extension of Writers’ Workshop. Students learn that writing isn’t just something the teacher tells them to do. There is always a purpose and students are given choice. Writing helps students become better readers and writers, to care about writing and the people who read it, to work the on fluency of writing, and it is fun. Students brainstorm ideas with the class about how independent writing should look. The teacher models writing in her writer’s notebook. Slowly time is added each day until students build stamina and can write continuously for 20-30 minutes. They learn to write drafts and that it’s okay not to know how to spell every word correctly. As they write, they sound-spell the words they are unsure of, underline them and go on. They can check spelling later. To me, this is a great way to get them started editing in a very simple manner. Once this routine is in place, I am hoping the writing students will do during this time will be much more beneficial than many of the activities I have done in the past to keep students busy while I work with reading groups.

The second book, Results Now, emphasizes teaching the essential standards and working collaboratively in teams (Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)) to improve student achievement. Schmoker stresses repeatedly in the book that reading must be joined to writing. Writing combined with close reading is one of the most valuable elements of learning and is necessary to reach the highest areas of Bloom’s taxonomy. Students need to read, reread, discuss and write in “redundant abundance.” To me, this means that students not only write during the “Work on Writing” time from The Daily Five but write across the curriculum to increase learning and understanding.

My questions are:

1. Have you or do you know anyone who has implemented The Daily 5? Since this is the first year I will be doing it, any helpful tips or ideas would be appreciated.

2. If you have PLCs, how do they function at your school? Is there a major focus on writing in your PLC? If so, what does your team focus on when it comes to writing and have you seen student achievement improve?

[Temoca Dixon]

Hi Kathy,

I haven't seen or heard of the Daily 5, but I think the reading and writing piece makes sense and is suggested in other professional development books. I read Readicide and The Book Whisperer this summer and book seem to have pieces in there about teaching writing and reading together. The more students read the better their writing becomes so I'm working on my reading workshop and my writing workshop this year. I have a current events/article of the week assignment that I'm trying out this year that will have the kids read the article about three times, discuss the article twice or so, and then write too. We'll see how it goes this year!

We have teams where our kids have the same content area teachers for two years, technically this is to help build realtionships and we can work on cross curriculum assignments. Then we have dept. meetings that work in the content area, language arts, math, science, etc. We are hoping to see improved results in our students' achievment. I'm working on independent reading time in my class on top of the literature circles I usually do and the Silent Sustained Reading time my kids participated in and in a writing workshop with a couple of writing assignments. My kids will write letters home to their parents about their week at school, they will maintain a writer's notebook, and they will write their middle school memoir. I hoping these opportunities will help get my kids motivated and successful.

Good luck with your school year. I'm interested to know how the Daily 5 works out.

See you the 11th,
Temoca

[Sarah Russell]

Kathy, I haven't read "The Daily 5" but the process is pretty close to what we do in our classes, although we don't always follow that exact order. We always work to give our students multiple opportunities to work through texts using all the language functions. I usually embed parts of grammar or word study in the summary I ask them to write, thereby intertwining their language and literacy studies. I find it helps students understand the point of all the various aspects of language a little better to have them intertwined and supporting each other. They get a lot more out of the reading from the multiple modalities as well.

We read "Results Now" a couple of years ago at my school. We use a certain kind of PLC kind CFGs at our school. CFGs are Critical Friends Groups (see nsrfharmony.org). In our CFGs we talk a lot about student achievement and depending on the teacher facilitating, we generally talk a lot about writing across the curriculum and how we all can support student literacy. However, most of what we discussed surrounding Schmoker was reducing the "buffer" between the child and the teacher, the teacher and the administrator.

[Ray Hirschman]

Hey Cathy,

It's so nice to read through your post. I have have never taught The Daily 5, but we partake in these activities in class. The one thing I found about reading (Especially aloud) is that some can do it well (with and without comprehension) and some simply can't do it. So, I allow people to choose whether or not the want to read aloud and allow the others to follow along, Since my objective is heightened comprehension, it seems to work out in the end. I've even experimented in allowing groups to read aloud to each other using the same text. It can get chaotic but there is a wonderful excitement in the air as they all navigate through the text at their own paces. Fun!

We do have PLC's and we do it vertically (by grade level). Our Freshman PLC group is very strong and focused. We choose beginning-of-the-year common assessments, mid-semester common assessments, and end-of-semester common final assessments. We all focus on teaching the traits with an emphasis on exposition for the first semester and persuasive writing for the second semester. I'm looking forward to see how it all plays out. We're also grading each other's papers using a common rubric and a norming system. : )