National Day on Writing: Modeling

After following the #nctechat Twitter conversation about the National Day on Writing, I wondered how much I model writing for my students.  Modeling great behaviors...that's what teachers are supposed to do, and yet do we always?

A few years ago, my principal scheduled an observation in my classroom as part of the regular schedule he followed to observe all teachers in the building.  There weren't going to be any bells and whistles.  In fact, we kept to our typical routine of writing, mini-lesson, and reading in our literacy workshop.  And, as was also typical, I slid into a student desk during reading time and enjoyed an adolescent book (I believe at that time I was in the middle of the Haddix series Among the Hidden).  Beside me sat a fidgety fellow who had eyes for everything but his book until I settled myself in a desk in the next row.  At that moment, we were all reading.  It may have been the presence of the principal.  I think it had more to do with the presence of my book and my engagement with it.

I have marked the same engagement during writing time over the years.  Nothing screams "busy work" louder than an assignment given while the teacher grades papers or puts grades in the computer.  I found that active writing or whispered conferences with a student about his or her writing encouraged more pen-to-paper action than the words "keep writing" ever did.  Even actively responding on a student's paper offered limited effectiveness because it was seen as "grading."  So, my notebook filled with half-finished fan fiction stories (I really should finish the one I started based on Boo Radley), class ideas, journal entries, and poems.  If my notebook topic du jour meshed with the direction of the class lesson that day, I also shared what I wrote.  I hesitated to do that too often, though, because I tend to philosophize a great deal, which becomes unbearably tedious at times for the students (and others, I'm sure).

Without having a middle school classroom this year, it will be difficult for me to enact a day on writing with my own students.  In my studies at the university, though, I hope I have the opportunity to instruct a class on teaching writing.  This is not so much because I think I have a great lesson to teach, but rather that I have so much more to learn.  My students have taught me about telling stories and about listening to them.  They have also reinforced how important modeling is in teaching, especially in writing.  I'm not sure I'll be able to finish my story if I don't have a classroom of students to encourage me.  And that's when they become models for me.

Authentic Writing...for a 14-year-old

What is authentic writing?  Would you say that it is realistic, real-world writing that might be created in any advertising company, medical facility, auto shop, or grocery store?  Of course it is. That is most definitely authentic writing for advertisers, nurses, mechanics, and clerks.  It's just too bad that I don't have any students who have their professional degrees or licenses.  So perhaps my question should be this: What is authentic writing for a 14-year-old?

I have been asking myself this question and others as a part of my ongoing study into adolescent literacy.  How can I help negotiate or mediate the space between the teacher and the student?  What do I need to know about students and their writing in order to make their classroom learning real for them?  As part of this inquiry, I have taken some time out of the classroom to attend school full time but am currently working on a project with another teacher in the middle school where I have taught for ten years.

In this writing project, students tapped into their identities and drew out the personal inquisitiveness that sparks most young teens' creativity.  Another teacher and I led them on a quest to find out information about their names and how they felt about the name chosen for them.  Using Sandra Cisneros as a model, students created their own writings about their names, themselves, and who they wanted to be.  Even using a prompt, though, students had difficulty getting their thoughts on paper and constantly asked questions about what was okay as an answer.  They were so afraid of getting it wrong that they weren't experimenting with content, much less style.  Writing about themselves instead of an event was new terrain, and they weren't sure how to handle it.

Because of a few frustrating days, I decided to walk the students through several writing prompts.  I asked for honesty as they responded to these prompts after silent reading time:

• What kept you reading today? Explain in the best details you can. How have you spent the last twenty minutes?
• What made it difficult for you to complete that writing task?  What are some stumbling blocks you had as you described how you spent your reading time?
• Think about today and your habits of reading and what you've written.  Now think about the last few weeks and all we have done (i.e. group work, computer time, etc.).  What have you discovered about yourself over the last two weeks? (i.e. as a reader, a writer, a student, a girl or a boy, a sibling, a daughter, a son)  Has there been an event that caused you to see yourself in a different light?  What would you have me believe about you since I am not your classroom teacher and know very little about you?  
• Imagine a person your age who you have never seen and who you do not know.  What impression would you want this person to have of you?  What do you want them to know?

These, in addition to other questions, may have been too guided, but the students needed guidance at this point. They could see what Cisneros was doing in her writing but not how they could duplicate the effect. They were also unsure of themselves as writers and not sure what counts as writing.  After responding, they marked phrases, sentences, and passages in their notes from this day and previous days in the unit that tied together and could say something about them.

I then switched gears to get a general sense of what these students were understanding about the legitimacy and authenticity of writing.

Sparked by this article that described a 10th grader who wrote pages and pages of a game walk-through (see "The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter"), I asked the students about their writing outside of the classroom.  What a discovery!  Almost every student in that class has a twitter account, and at least half of the students post daily.  One student said he posts at least five times a day. This is the same student who had written very little on this project over the last few weeks, and I told him so.  I knew it was a mistake pointing that out to him when his comeback was that he had written a lot today.  Indeed, he had.  With guidance.  And purpose.

Most students (over 70% by a show of hands) have blogs. At least half of these students post or comment on a blog at least once a week.  A few students have tried writing video game walk-throughs themselves.

  

It was the question I asked next that was most telling.  I asked students to raise their hands if they thought this game walk-through writing was real writing.  Maybe they were worried about being wrong, or maybe it seemed odd that I would ask that question, but only a few students raised their hands; an additional few others raised theirs only half way.  I asked the same question about blogs and blog comments and received similar responses.

My next question:  How can we as educators work to see these other types of writing as legitimate while also helping the students see all of their writing as real? 

The question I am afraid to ask:  What writing do students see as real?

I promised their writing for this project would be real and posted here for comments.  Hopefully, I can make that happen in the near future as they send me digital pieces.  I look forward to reading what these certified 8th graders have to say.

Argument, Close Reading, the "Who" and the "Why"

We all have our favorite authors, whether we are recalling our youth, enjoying our limited free time as adults, or furthering our professional learning.  For most of my life, I have thought about authors in terms of novels, and with professional reading I thought about topics or themes.  It has taken until now to recognize that the quality of the source can be found more in the works cited than in the table of contents.  I am finding that the "what" of the book is becoming outranked by the "who" and the "why."  Additionally, I advocate reading professional articles, books, and other resources to stay connected with the "who" and the "why" of our disciplinary fields.  If we only focus on the topics in the table of contents, we lose sight of our educational vision.

When I re-entered graduate school two years ago, I still researched by using key terms.  Yes, to me the topic was the most important aspect of the research.  Over the last two years, however, it has become clear there are hallmark voices in the educational profession whose words continue to speak from the pages of theory, research, and practitioner volumes.  The keywords on theory in my research have evolved to include the names of Vygotsky (zone of proximal development), Bakhtin (dialogic discussion), Dewey (inquiry), and Guthrie (reading motivation).  Applications of these theories in the classroom include my searches for Beers and Probst (tools for reading motivation and teaching reading), Harvey Daniels (teaching writing), Nancy Steineke (reading/writing strategies in the classroom), Smith/Wilhelm/Fredrickson (teaching modes of writing).  The lists are far more extensive than this, though, since these authors are also cited by a number of other writers in the field of literacy education.

So what do we do with this information?  
The shift in my thinking came while exploring the historical frameworks of different classroom strategies.  By reading the theories and research studies I gained a grasp on why some classroom practices work and some...well, do not.  Is it any coincidence that the new Common Core invites students to research topics in answer to a question and come up with their own questions?  Inquiry as a method for learning has been suggested by theorists and researchers in a number of publications and studies notably John Dewey, Jeff Wilhelm and Michael Smith.  Reading complex texts with productive struggle suggests that reading a text multiple times for multiple purposes will enrich a student's understanding to a greater degree than cursory readings of multiple texts.  New interpretations and understandings emerge with each "conversation" with the characters or components of the text (Bakhtin). This close reading stance has been taken up most recently by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst in their new text Notice and Note that I am eager to read.  But right now, John Dewey and his Child and the Curriculum is taking my full attention because he is the center of a current book discussion group.  I want to know how he developed his theories on inquiry and why so I can apply this framework to future searches for classroom applications.

And what about the students in our classrooms?
It's time for students to examine who is writing the articles, short stories, novels, blogs and whatever else we are reading.  I knew this at some level when I was a younger student, but I continued to cite the sources that said what I wanted them to say.  It did not matter to me who said it.  But it does matter.  The director of the Holocaust Museum will have something very different to say than a one-time visitor or perhaps even a person who denies the Holocaust.  To do this we have to select complex but reasonably accessible texts and devote the necessary time to analyze them.  With the Common Core's increased attention on argument, both analyzing and writing, students should be given the time to dig deeper into what they are reading, why it was written, and, yes, who wrote it and the investment that person has in the topic.  So slow down.  Keep the educational vision by looking at the big picture--more rigorous does not mean just more of everything (remember quality versus quantity).  This 2 1/2 minute video by America Achieves says it well.  Take the time to find out who is speaking and maybe our students will find their lost voices in the process.  Let's give it a try...for our students' sake and for ours.