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Every now and again, there is a convergence, a similar theme that runs through the conversations I have with colleagues at work, colleagues in the field, and folks in my personal life.

The issue? The amount of time students spend doing coloring. For example, the child who circled the correct picture on a primary worksheet on beginning sounds instead of coloring it in … and got it marked wrong.

In this case, the student learned an important (albeit goofy!) reading comprehension lesson: even if the teacher said you could circle the answer instead of color so you could save time, circling is so detrimental that it overshadows the fact that you understood the beginning sound. Thank goodness for assessments. The poor kid got a 60% because apparently, the goal of the task wasn’t to identify beginning sounds (he picked the right choice, so he understood the content). The goal was to color something in. He didn’t, and as a result, his grade book entry demonstrates below-average comprehension skills.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that the kid is already reading, thus making a worksheet on beginning sounds a mismatch for the skills he’s ready for …

It brings to mind Mike Schmoker’s 2001 essay for Education Week, “The Crayola Curriculum.” Here are a few snippets of what he says, though you will definitely want to read the whole thing. In over 300 school visits, supposedly when the school was “at its best,” he observed lots of activities during reading block that had nothing to do with, uh, reading. He found …

Students were not reading, they weren’t writing about what they had read, they weren’t learning the alphabet or its corresponding sounds; they weren’t learning words or sentences or how to read short texts.

They were coloring. Coloring on a scale unimaginable to us before these classroom tours. The crayons were ever-present. Sometimes, students were cutting or building things out of paper (which they had colored) or just talking quietly while sitting at “activity centers” that were presumably for the purpose of promoting reading and writing skills. These centers, too, were ubiquitous, and a great source of pride to many teachers and administrators. They were great for classroom management—and patently, tragically counterproductive.

One of the questions I would occasionally ask teachers during these rounds, especially if it was late in the school year, was whether or not students knew the alphabet and its sounds. The teachers would regularly say no, but add that, after all, these were either poor or second-language students. The question in my mind, never uttered, was this: “Why wouldn’t they be learning the alphabet? Why are they coloring instead of being taught to read?”

…In one high-poverty district where I made several visits, the principals were not only ecstatic, but ecstatic at the opportunity these observations created. In two years, their scores on the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition for grades 2-4 went up by 25 percentile points; in math, they went up by 40 points.

That’s just a snippet of Schmoker’s essay, but even a decade later, his words ring true. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve been there. So often, we reach for the craft supplies for a “response activity” in our elementary library classes that’s really a kind of behavior management caulk to fill the space between storytime, checkout, and dismissal. It keeps little exploring hands busy. (They don’t call it busywork for nothing!)

Seriously, I have seen a case where the title page of a book has been copied and the children have been guided to color in the characters.

Coloring is not an art form, right? We don’t have art curriculum objectives that are solved with coloring sheets, so I’m excluding from concern those activities that directly correlate to the learning objective and have explicit art-based instruction around them (e.g., learning to work with pastels to better understand Caldecott art forms).

And I do believe there is some value in sketches and drawings to help young students work through or demonstrate understanding of informational texts. Just like rulers and tape measures to help us convert numbers into concepts.

But just coloring? That’s not what is meant by the NETS*S pillar of “creativity and innovation.” NETS*S mean creative THINKING, not having a tool in one’s hand.

For most of us, Common Core is starting to nip at our heels. If you’re looking for a fast activity, try something with WRITING with your youngest library learners. For example, the word “because” can do a huge amount to help young learners recognize that arguments need to be supported by details. So here are a few potential “because” prompts you could try:

Mudge is a good companion for Henry BECAUSE …
The [animal]would be a terrible pet BECAUSE …
This book does/does not deserve to win a Caldecott BECAUSE…
[Classmate] would enjoy reading [book you’ve read] BECAUSE …
Anansi is a trickster. We know this BECAUSE …

You know my old saw: that as a single person approaching (gulp) middle age, there’s a high chance that I will have nursing home attendants caring for me in the sunset of my life. And I sure as heck don’t want them coloring instead of articulating what should happen.

What non-coloring sponge activities have worked for you and your students’ development?

PS - For the record, I have nothing against Crayola products — I own lots! — or crayons. It’s not the tool, it’s how it’s used.

On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS - To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!

I love big ideas and big words. So when I hear a term like “knowledge construction,” it’s like inhaling the scent of warm chocolate chip cookies. But then I take a step back and have to ask myself, “What exactly does that mean?” Because there’s always a fine line between Amazingly Inspirational Terms That Make Me Want to Strive Higher and EduJargon. And I’d rather be in the first camp than the second!

One of the things I like most about the Stripling Inquiry Model is that there is a concrete step — Construct — between Investigate and Express. Stripling forces us to consider how we will help students move from gathering stuff to sharing it with others.

I’ve got a hunch that the reason most of us — librarians and educators alike — skip right over Construct is because it is a scary chasm of uncertainty. We’re like Evel Knievel — maybe if we just gun it, our mental motorcycle will just leap over the canyon and land on the other side.

How do we make sense of a variety of data and inputs? As adults, most of us do it, but unpacking that invisible experience proves difficult.

For January’s “Nudging Toward Inquiry” scenario, we look at what is becoming a popular project: the disease report, in which “famous diseases” are divided up among members of the class. How can we help students do more than list the facts they discover? It is a reality that in our Wikipedia World, where basic information is abundant and, at a library terminal, free, asking students to create lists of facts adds little to the space in which they live.

I’ll admit that this is a “Nudging” topic for which I have as many questions as answers, but I’ll start by taking a stab by suggesting that disease research needs a lens. The Big6 calls this Task Definition: identifying, up front, the purpose for doing the research. Perhaps the instructors put forth a scenario. For example, imagine that the students are going to create a plot treatment for an upcoming episode of House. The episode will end by revealing the disease, but what symptoms should the patient manifest along the way? How might some symptoms lead the team to a misdiagnosis? What is the one symptom that convinces the doctors that their first diagnosis is wrong, leading them to the proper diagnosis? A frame like this might help students sift through information and give them both a context and a motivation for making connections. Plus, it would be fun.

Now, you don’t want to let grumpy Dr. House have the last word, do you? We’d love to hear what you would do if faced with the scenario below.

Thanks! (And thanks to Debbie Abilock, who said to me, “Do doctors make disease posters?” in the first place.