Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Four; Content Area Writing: Chapter Six

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 74) “Voluminous reading alone does not make the writer, but those students who are readers come to the writing task with a marked advantage.”
I love the basketball metaphor Gallagher uses to support this thought to remind us that we have to provide explicit writing instruction for our students. Even when I was a teenager I was able to make the connection that people who read a lot write well, though no one ever told me this. I based my scientific analysis on one subject—my sister who was a voracious reader (it amazed me she could read an entire book in two hours) and wrote very well…in fact she and her friends wrote stories just for fun. (Ironically, she was the less scholarly of the two of us, though she has written many a complaint letter and received free meals because of them. Even today she often writes letters to editor, but I digress…) It is interesting that some people aren’t able to transfer all of that reading into writing. I can think of a student I taught who was an avid reader—always had a book in her hand—but her writing left much to be desired. I know of an adult who reads all the time but when he has to put something in writing, he needs someone to edit it for him. I think the point Gallagher makes, though, is that these type of readers-not-so-great-writers will learn more easily when given specific writing instruction because they have so many examples to pull from.

Content Area Writing
(Page 122) “But if they believe (writing’s) main purpose is just to display what they’ve memorized, or worse, to call them out on things they didn’t get, they’ll always play it safe, take few chances, and stick with what they already know.”
This goes along with what we talked about with Britton’s continuum—that when Britton did his research, he found that the majority of students were doing transactional writing, which mainly included taking tests and spitting out the “right” answer to teachers. What are students really learning if they’re just regurgitating what the teacher said? Students (and we) can learn so much more if we widen our criteria and give options for writing. Daniels et al seem to reiterate what we’ve read with Gallagher—model, model, model! I like how this chapter breaks down how content teachers can support the writing process in their classrooms. The whole idea of teaching writing as a process can be scary if you’re not an English teacher (and maybe even to some English teachers), but we’re given practical ways to accomplish the task in this chapter. I like how some of the strategies we’ve explored before for the purpose of reading were twisted a bit to cater to developing writing. There’s definitely a lot covered in this chapter; it’s one to bookmark and refer to in the future.

Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Three; Content Area Writing: Chapter Five

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 48) “They don’t need a teacher who assigns writing; they need a teacher who demonstrates what good writers do.”
How many times have we said about a student, “That kid can’t write”? Although we don’t have a definitive answer, what are the odds that same kid was repeatedly taught HOW to write? Just as with reading, we often expect students coming to high school knowing how to write—that’s something that’s taught in elementary school. Or, if it does need to be taught at high school, it’s the English teacher’s job. Just as the English teacher can’t possibly teach every kind of reading, she/he can’t teach every kind of writing. I surely don’t know the first thing about how to write a lab report. The thing is writing isn’t easy and our own work isn’t always pretty, so it makes us nervous to share our own with students—they might think it’s hard for us. But that’s all the more reason to share! Let the kids see that we—college graduates—struggle with writing at times ourselves and show them what we do to get a finished product. Students often think good writers (and especially professional writers) don’t have any difficulty, and a final draft is instantly produced. I attended a panel discussion made up of four writers of different genres while I was at the WIN conference last week, and they were asked how many revisions they make to their work. While they said it varies, the lowest number of revisions by one of the professional writers was 2-3 while the highest was 10-11. How much more approachable does a person become when you discover he or she has difficulty doing something? I find myself walking on eggshells a bit when I think someone is an expert. But if I could have that expert break down the process and show me that things don’t come so easily to him, I can learn so much more from him and am much more willing to show my flaws. Last year we discovered how important it is to model our reading (a la the think aloud); I think we’re discovering it’s just as important to do the same practice with our writing.

Content Area Writing
(Page 118) “The lesson here, as we think about content-area writing, is that kids need examples, models, templates, samples of what good writing in the field looks like.”
If we rely on the English teachers to teach all writing, we’ll end up with students who only know how to respond to literature or the HSAP rubric. Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. We have to give students plenty of examples of good writing in our content so that they have a variety of models. The writing requirements on SAT and AP are tied more to content, so we all need to make sure students are learning how to write like historians or scientists.

I assigned this chapter as introduction for producing public writing. I realize there aren’t a ton of different ideas to respond to within this chapter, but I think it gives a good overview of writing in the classroom.

Jim Trelease

I hope you all enjoyed Jim Trelease as much as I did (even though he said I’m now classified as a stalker since it was my third time seeing him). One thing that really stood out for me that I haven’t heard Trelease mention before is that seven percent of incoming kindergarteners from poverty score the same on tests as students from high income families, and that is the exact same percentage of students from poverty who are graduating from college each year. I think we’ve all known that income level has a great impact on student achievement (hence the reason why a neighboring district always scores so well on standardized tests), but do you think there’s anything we can do to increase the number of poverty level students going on to college and graduating? What can we do at the high school level to promote lower income families to become more literate? For this post share any ideas you have to answer that question as well as one thing that you learned from Trelease or something that you found exceptionally interesting.

As a side note, if you look under the links on this blog page, you’ll find one to Jim Trelease’s website. He basically has his entire Read Aloud Handbook posted on it.

Content Area Writing: Chapter Three

There’s not really a quote for me to start off with from this chapter, since the chapter is made up of seven different quick writes that can be implemented in the classroom. As with Subjects Matter, I do like how Daniels and his colleagues set up the explanation of each strategy by giving a general description of it, when it can be used, how to use it, and telling the reader just what can go wrong. I think just about any student could easily use these strategies. I’m betting even those students who tend not to be visual (read: Claire and Pam) could successfully complete the one that seems to be more visually based (Drawing and Illustrating). Hmmm…perhaps that shall be an experiment for our next study group meeting! J

I’ve asked each of you to try one of these strategies with a class and to share with the rest of us how it went. I will share my comments about the Exit Slips I have y’all complete at the end of each class. The Exit Slip provides me some good feedback on the class. It’s always interesting to see that different parts of class and strategies strike a cord with different teachers. Sometimes one teacher will love a strategy and can’t wait to use it with his/her class while another didn’t like it at all. That just goes to show why we have to have a toolbox of strategies to use with kids because not all strategies will work well with all students. The Exit Slips are also helpful in letting me know when I haven’t done such a hot job of presenting something. (Can we say Britton’s Continuum?) By having y’all complete the Exit Slip, I realized that I needed to go back and revisit the Continuum (on more that one occasion!) so that y’all could have a better understanding of it. Had y’all not written about your confusion, I would have just gone on with other topics during the year, and there really would have been mass confusion when you had to turn in your portfolios at the end of the year that include writing samples from each end of the spectrum! So, please keep up the honest feedback…it helps me tremendously!

Content Area Writing: Chapter Two; Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Two

Content Area Writing
(Page 24) “For now we’ll just tell you flatly: the intensive correction of student papers does not work; it has never worked and it never will work. Kids’ writing does not improve when teachers cover their papers with corrections, no matter how scrupulous and generous that kind of feedback may seem.”
It does seem like we, as teachers, would have figured this out a long time ago. I am just as guilty as the next teacher of collecting my students’ share of final drafts, making corrections on them, and giving them back, expecting that the students would improve their writing based on my comments. But let’s flashback to our own high school (or possibly even college) days and think about papers we turned in to the teacher. Upon getting the paper back with lovely marks all over it, did you ever once decide to take their suggestions and revise the paper, so that you’d have a better final draft? Did you make note of the grammatical corrections and from that point on never make that mistake again? Of course not! If you were like me, you just read through the comments and stuck the paper in your notebook, never to be looked at again. This idea of waiting until the final draft to give students feedback does seem a bit off base when you think about it. Wouldn’t it more beneficial for students to get extensive feedback after the first (and/or second) draft, so they can actually improve their writing? This is a concept we’re going to explore even more in the weeks ahead. I know this chapter is on writing to learn, but I just wanted to touch on this idea of making endless comments on student work that the authors write about in the shaded section…I know y’all will have lots to say about the idea of writing to learn.

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 29) “What good is a curriculum that is a mile wide an inch deep?…Shouldn’t we concern ourselves a little less with getting students to recite facts and figures and concern ourselves more with helping them develop these cornerstone skills they will need to lead literate lives?”
Finally, a well-respected person puts this thought in writing! I think students are missing out on some great instructional opportunities because there’s so much material to cover that teachers feel like they don’t have time for some activities because they need to get to all of the standards. I think Gallagher brings up a really good point that reminds me of that “30 years from now no one will care what clothes you wore…” poster. We’ve got to make sure our students can read, write, and think, so they can be productive citizens in the world. One of the main things I remember Elin Keene (Mosaic of Thought) saying when I attended her best practices seminar was that kids who think well, test well. Maybe if we focus on teaching our kids to read, write and think, the test will just take care of itself!

Content Area Writing: Chapter One; Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter One

Both of these texts were just published this year, and I read over them this summer without highlighting, just to get a feel if they would be good options for our class. As I reread and highlighted them to compose my post for our blog, I realized that I did indeed make good choices for our class. I’m loving these books! I have so much highlighted in each of the chapters, but I’m going to narrow it down to just one thing for each, so you’ll have plenty to choose from to write about yourself!

Content Area Writing
(Page 3) “Teachers often say that kids hate writing. But maybe what they hate is the kind of writing we make them do.”
I really like how the authors note all the writing that kids do today that never used to occur—texting, instant messaging, e-mailing, blogging, MySpace, chatrooms, etc. We often do complain about students’ writing, but at least they are communicating and writing something! I think the problem we see as teachers is that kids convert their technology short-hand into formal writing and don’t necessarily see where there’s a problem with that. I believe one of the keys is going to be bridging their style of writing into our classrooms and then teaching them when certain types of writing are appropriate. How cool would it be for students to create a MySpace page for Abraham Lincoln or a character in a novel they read? Or what if they had to write out an IM conversation between Romeo and Juliet? We would certainly learn if the student knew the material! After creating “their” type of writing, they could then convert it into a more standardized form of writing as well to work on their "professional" writing skills.

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 2) “A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth century England. (Wurman 1989).”
(Page 4) “The ability to write well, once a luxury, has become a necessity. Today, writing is foundational for success."’
The thing I love about Kelly Gallagher’s books is that they are always chock-full of statistics…and interesting ones at that! Because so much is technologically based now, our students do need to become more proficient writers to be successful. Yes, there is the “slang” writing they all use for recreation, but we also use technology for formal purposes as well. I know I prefer to be able to e-mail a company or another professional a question rather than call them about it. What does it say about the sender if they can’t send a coherent message? How many messages have we received over e-mail where we couldn’t believe the grammar used in it? (Even if we didn’t fall into the executive pay scale for our grammar skills!) The fact of the matter is that there is a time and place for different types of writing, just as there is a time and place for different types of talking. We’ve just got to make sure kids realize this, why it’s important, and how to do it!

The Reading/Writing Connection--Chapter One

(Page 15) “Inexperienced readers and writers are just that—inexperienced, not incapable. It is the teacher’s responsibility to make visible what it is that experienced readers and writers do when they make meaning from or with texts…In addition, teachers need to introduce these cognitive strategies to students in meaningful contexts and provide enough sustained, guided practice that students can internalize these strategies and ultimately, perform complex reading and writing tasks competently and confidently on their own.”

Can we say model, model, model? I think writing tends be one of the hardest things to teach students because so often we don’t feel confident in our own writing, so we’re often hesitant to share pieces that we’ve written. But sharing our writing with students is going to be one of the best ways to show them what goes through our minds as we put our thoughts onto paper. Students tend to think that good writers just spit out their best work off the top of their heads—they have no idea the amount of revision a professional writer does to his or her work. It’s easy to blame (especially at the high school level) all the teachers students had at the elementary and middle schools for not teaching a student how to write well, but we have to ask ourselves: What are we doing to make the student a better writer? So, I think we have to meet them where they are and make as many improvements while we have them. Otherwise, we’re churning out graduates who are lacking a fundamental skill.

Final Thoughts

I am so glad each of you decided to join Airport's first SCRI study group. It has been a great experience working with each of you this year; I have loved facilitating our classes and sharing in professional discussions. Whether you realize it or not, you all have been pioneers by participating in this blog. We are the first SCRI study group to ever use the web to share our thinking!

As you reflect on the year, consider the following questions...

What has been the most valuable part of this course for you? Is there something in particular you learned that has been helpful in your teaching? Has your approach to teaching text changed at all? Have your views on reading and writing changed at all? Any other thoughts you have?

Subjects Matter: Pages 124-143; When Kids Can’t Read: Chapter 8

Ahhhh…after reading strategies. I think this is the area we’re most familiar with when it comes to before, during, and after reading strategies. Of course for some folks (not any of us, of course!) the after reading is often limited to quizzes and tests. But what about the kids who can understand but struggles with the traditional tests???

Daniels and Beers give us a plethora of ideas to check for understanding as alternatives.. We’ve seen some of these strategies before and some are new. And, as usual, Beers goes into much greater detail in describing the strategy. We’re all now familiar with exit slips in our study group, but has anyone tried using them in class to see how they’ll work with your students. Before even knowing she was going to read this section, Rita mentioned in class the other night the idea of having students complete an exit slip to have them reflect on the day and what they learned. Not only do exit slips give the students time to reflect, but it can help you become aware of problems the students are having with the work and what you may need to go back and reteach. Or, it may just confirm that you did a great job at executing a lesson!

So were y’all able to try to incorporate some of these after-reading strategies in your classrooms? Do tell!

Subjects Matter: Chapter 8; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 14

Subjects Matter
(Page 184) “…to grow the community of lifelong learners around our schools, part of every school day must be devoted to independent reading. Period.”
I think we’ve established in class the importance of having students read every day at school. So how do we convince teachers the value of this, that reading isn’t just a waste of time, and that kids really will read if you put something worthwhile in their hands? We’re exploring the possibility of implementing a school-wide SSR next year that is built into the school day. What do you think it will take to convince the faculty who are not a part of this study group that this really will improve student learning and make students more successful in all of their classes?

For those of you who do SSR in your classes: What do you do while the students are reading? In this chapter the authors suggest having conferences with students about their reading, but I always had difficulty keeping students focused on their own reading if I wasn’t doing the same. I found my students to be most engrossed in their books if I was reading along with them. This also gave me the time to read lots of YA literature and be able to make recommendations. Has anyone tried the conference thing with success?

When Kids Can’t Read

I love how Beers gives all of the features struggling readers like to find in books. Perhaps if my teachers had known this when I was in high school, I would have read some books. There always seemed like there were a million words on a page of those classics and there was practically no margin! I think students have been given so many books that carry no interest for them for so long that they tend to lump all books into one category: boring. The world of YA lit has exploded over the last several years and the choices are endless. I’m amazed at how much the section has grown at Barnes and Noble; it has doubled in size over the past few years. I think we also need to remember that just because a kid (or adult) doesn’t read a book doesn’t mean he’s not a reader. There are so many other types of material out there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my husband read a book, but he reads the newspaper every day religiously. How many of us read magazines? It’s important to recognize different types of reading. Does it really matter if a kid doesn’t read a novel if he reads tons of other informational text?

Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents; Subjects Matter: Chapter 7

Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents
(Page 3) “Mastery involves strong initial teacher education and career-long staff development…There is a ceiling effect to how much we can learn if we keep it to ourselves.”
To me, so much of this article supported Airport’s mission in becoming a professional learning community. As educators, we’ve got to be able to admit that there’s always room for improvement, and we need to continue to learn new things (kudos to all of y’all for already doing so by taking this course!) and work together. Think about how much we’ve learned from each other in this class by having the opportunity to share our successes, concerns, and strategy spotlights. And how much have we accomplished by having time to work with our colleagues during delayed start? I don’t think there ever comes a point to where we don’t need to take another class because we already know it all. How would we feel if our physicians took this stance? Would we want to go to a doctor who was doing things the same way he did 15 or 20 years ago? What if he didn’t use any of the latest practices in his work? We would think such a doctor was outdated and couldn’t possibly serve us appropriately. When my husband and I were having all sorts of issues with my daughter and she didn’t seem to follow the textbook on a diagnosis, I was thrilled when my pediatrician (who is absolutely wonderful) told me that he spoke with a few of his colleagues about her case to try to see if there was anything he was missing. By using that same method in education, we can become even better teachers and take our students to the next level.

Subjects Matter
(Page 167) “We need to make the classroom a community, a place where students feel safe to take the risks involved in learning where they see it connected with their lives, and where they help and learn from one another instead of working only as isolated individuals.”
Daniels and Zemelman stress the importance of building community and having a rapport with kids in order to increase student achievement. We talked about this with Beers’ book last week. The authors have given lots of different examples of how to accomplish this in our classrooms. Rather than just writing about what the authors have shared, I’d like for you to share one or two things you do with your students to build community, so we can learn from each other. It may be something that’s included in the chapter, or it may be something completely different that we haven’t read about. Tell us what you do and how you think it makes a difference in your classroom!

Freedom Writers

Wow. Wow. Wow. What an AMAZING movie! I hope you all enjoyed Freedom Writers as much as I did. I think the movie goes hand-in-hand with what Beers wrote about in Chapter 13 on the importance of building community and setting high standards. I can’t imagine being an educator and not seeing the value of having a relationship with the students after seeing this movie. There were so many powerful scenes! One that really stood out to me was when Eva finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank and fussed about it to Ms. Gruwell then Jamal jumped in and gave his two cents. How many times do you think either of them ever discussed a book before? (Heck, how many times do you think either one of them ever read an entire book before?) They both clearly connected with the text and it had an impact on their lives. That is the power of reading. I think it goes along with Teri Lesesne’s thought of finding “the right book for the right kid at the right time.” Gruwell found the right book for these kids and made it relevant to their lives. If we examine Gruwell’s practice, we discover she didn’t just hand the kids the book and tell them to read it. She did a lot of frontloading to build that background knowledge so the students had some information about the topic as well as developed an interest in it. How do you suppose the students would have reacted to the book if they had not been to the Holocaust museum or learned anything about the Holocaust beforehand?

In case you haven't heard, Erin Gruwell is going to be at the WIN (Writing Improvement Network) conference November 7-9 this year.

When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 13

(Page 260) “Though we can say (and should say), ‘You can do it!’ on a daily basis, the reality is that unless students believe us, they won’t do it, won’t even attempt to do it. And students won’t believe us unless we create opportunities for success.”
I whole-heartedly agree with Beers when she basically writes about building community with kids. We’re never going to get kids to reach their full potential if they don’t think we have a genuine concern for them. Having a rapport with students is essential for them to be successful in class. Think about it: which teachers in school did you work the hardest for? I suspect it’s the ones you thought cared about you. I really like that Beers explains that just because students feel valued in class doesn’t mean we have to lower our expectations. I think if we have an environment where students feel safe, that’s all the more reason to RAISE our expectations—they’re going to be more willing to work for us, so we have the opportunity taken them to new heights!

(Page 274) “We suddenly also understand why young adult literature, with characters like the readers, will appeal more readily to students than adult classics.”

Amen! Perhaps if my teachers in high school had given me some YA literature, I would have actually read a book instead of the Cliff’s Notes. (Not that Cliff’s Notes are available for YA lit—another advantage of using it!) I really enjoyed reading about the stages of literary appreciation. I was able to reflect on students I’ve taught in the past and think about the stage they were as they were reading. What really got me thinking was the fifth stage of reading, “often not ever seen, but usually not seen before the college years.” Under the implications section, Beers notes that students at the fifth stage gain enjoyment from literary devices. Perhaps this is why so many of our students struggle with figurative language and other lit devices while reading. While they’re able to identify them in isolation, I think they have a more difficult time with them in general reading. If they’re only on the second or third stage of reading, they may not really be able to identify these things with much ease. I guess we just have to ensure that they read LOTS so that they can get to all of the stages!

Winter Literacy Conference

I hope you all had a wonderful time at the Winter Literacy Conference! If you're able to leave a conference with at least one new thing you can turn around and use in your classroom, then it was worth it. Since we all went to different breakout sessions, take a few minutes to share something you learned that will be useful for your classroom. If there's something from the keynote speaker, Nancy Akhavan, that you found especially helpful, share how you will be able to use that information.

I attended the "Making Vocabulary Connections" session and discovered the book Les Trois Cochons by Sheila Herbert Collins that can be used to teach students how to use context clues to determine meaning. (It also shows how background knowledge is important in determining word meaning as well.) This book is a version of The Three Little Pigs with some French words tossed in every now and then. Students are able to use their background knowledge of the original story, look at the stems within the words, and use the rest of the sentence to determine meaning of the French words.

And kudos to Jamie and Christy on a great job with their book club session. If you missed their session, be sure to ask them about book clubs in their classrooms. They've been having great success with them!

When Kids Can’t Read: Pages 127-137; Subjects Matter: Pages 114-122

For me, the during reading concept often seemed to be the trickiest of the before, during, and after reading options. With before reading, you’re setting up the reading and providing the background information needed to make sense of the text. After reading, you’re checking for what they understood. So what’s up with this during reading stuff? If you stop and have students do something while they’re reading, wouldn’t that technically be considered an after reading activity since they had to stop reading? It all eventually made sense to me…with during reading process, we’re responsible for teaching the students HOW to read the text.

On page 137 Beers writes, “Students often don’t know how to do all this thinking. For too long we’ve told them to ‘think carefully’ about what they’ve read without showing them how to do that thinking.” When using during reading strategies, it’s more of a formative assessment, so we can see where student thinking breaks down. If students aren’t using good reading strategies, they’re going to have difficulty understanding what they’ve read. The problem is that many students don’t know what they should be doing as they read, so it’s our responsibility to show them. And of course this goes back to why all content area teachers are teachers of reading—most English teachers would not be very proficient at explaining what thoughts should be going through one’s mind when reading a lab report or a word problem, just as the math or science teacher would probably struggle to analyze a poem or piece of prose.

So…questions, questions, questions. Which of the during reading strategies from Beers and/or Daniels did you try? What material were you using as your anchor text? How did your students do with it? Do you think it was helpful? What would you do differently next time?

Be thinking about these strategies and which one you’d like to use with your new book club. The role sheets we used last time were intended as a training ground of the types of things you should be thinking about as you read. I was going to choose the Post-It note strategy for us all to do with our next book club, but after further reflection, I think I’ll let y’all decide as individual groups which strategy you’d like to use. Be sure to bring your textbooks to class, so you can refer to them in your groups!