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The Tenets of a Writing-Based Curriculum

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Alright, so we’ve got the new school year off to a good start. We’re setting the tone, getting to know our students, establishing rituals and routines for meaningful learning. It’s a perfect time to spend a few minutes and remind ourselves of what is at the heart of a meaningful ELA learning environment. Here is a quick guide to what makes a writing-based curriculum tick.

Artifact studyWhat fuels a Writing-Based Curriculum?

  • Identifying a goal/product/performance/culmination that you want to achieve with your students that is connected to the world outside the classroom
  • Figuring out all of the ways that you and your students can be writers to accomplish that end (writing reflectively, analytically, and creatively)
  • Modeling the writing life through the design of the unit and the way you think, talk, and act with your students.

What does the writing life look like in the classroom?

  • Catching thoughts, ideas, questions, solutions, passing fancies down on paper/screen to create a reservoir of potential writing material
  • Reading models to help you think and do your own writing
  • Discussing models to figure out the moves that make the writing work
  • Engaging in idea generating conversations to figure out what you might want to write
  • Writing….a lot!
  • Returning to a piece of writing to elaborate and craft it based on the understanding you’re developing around the moves that make writing strong
  • Sharing works in progress for feedback
  • Putting the writing out into the world for impact
  • Keeping all writing work to be able to access and use at a later date because the writing that happens in class should have multiple lives and serve multiple purposes

What are the kinds of writing that should be happening in a unit?Tzaras Hat

  • Reflective writing: thinking in writing about life and work; post product analysis; question posing; answer seeking
  • Analytic writing: writing about reading; reports; essays; criticism; speeches; technical; informational
  • Creative writing: stories, poems, plays, memoir, blogs, hybrid-texts

What are potential culminations?

  • Performances: plays, public readings, debates, websites, shows, live museums, installations, works of art
  • Publications: books, anthologies, individual pieces, newspaper editorials, letters to officials, websites, blogs
  • Actions: meetings with significant people (physically/virtually), rallies, service

The goal is to design writing environments that don’t look, sound, or feel like school in school. That is the irony. Any way that the writing environment can be connected to the lived practice of writing out in the world beyond the classroom means that there is a greater chance that enduring understandings will be developed and life-long reading, writing, and thinking skills will be enhanced.

The Role of Grading and Feedback in a Writing-Based Classroom

Canon EOS Digital CameraWhen we tune our classrooms to the habits of mind and body of writers, we need to interrogate traditional notions of grading. It quickly becomes obvious that we need to  increase the ways in which students get meaningful feedback on their work. Put simply, our job as teachers is not to use our mental and creative energy grading papers. Our job is to create ways for students to see the impact of their work at multiple stages in its development and to design ways to articulate to students the kind of quality work that is expected. This means being a sleuth of sorts, constantly looking at our students’ writing and finding examples of quality that we can show back to the class. These models of quality work provide a platform for developing a shared sense of what quality writing looks and sounds like. And, of course, this modeling of quality goes beyond writing. Students should understand what a quality discussion sounds like. We need to provide models of what a quality reflection looks like, for example. Basically, any form of work that is going to be expected needs to have models of quality so that students have a sense of the moves they need to make to produce something good. This doesn’t mean that the teacher needs to have these models ahead of time. Sometimes that is a good thing, but it can be just as powerful to pose the challenge of a particular kind of writing, let students take on the challenge, and then look for models of quality writing in the way they approached the challenge. A sense of quality writing is developed over time. It evolves as students practice. The notion that showing students “perfect” writing or other forms of work in the beginning of the process of learning something and expecting students’ understanding of what quality is to come from that initial example is a fallacy. An enduring sense of quality develops by continually looking at models of quality, developing a quality language around them, experimenting in the form of work, and comparing one’s own work to the model of quality. The process is cyclical, mindful, intentional, and ongoing. Focusing on the grading of work takes away from the time to explore what great work looks, sounds, and feels like with our students.

In a writing-based classroom, there are a few carefully chosen times when work is graded in the form of a summative assessment. Limiting grading to a few select products is important because it not only more closely mirrors the way we are evaluated in the “real” world, it is also a proactive way of addressing the ridiculous student loads that teachers have, particularly in middle and high school. In my work, I see a correlation between student load and a teacher resorting to pedagogical choices that are not in the best interest of the students or the teacher, not surprising since it feels easier to do what has been done before. But these uni-directional, static forms of evaluation are not faster or easier, really. And they define a teacher’s work in a narrow and limited way. The narrowness can be stultifying and ultimately contribute to burnout. Instead, a feedback stance, with intentional moments of grading that are both process and product oriented, expands a teacher’s role and perhaps more importantly expands who should be providing feedback on the work (teacher, students, self). This means that the burden of providing the feedback, and maybe even the grading, does not only rest on the shoulders of the teacher. It rests on the class as a whole. This orientation better prepares students for being able to interpret and apply feedback and more honestly assess their own work. It helps to avoid a fixed mindset and learned helplessness which are often the partner of excessive grading environments. In terms of the teacher, a feedback approach, opens up time to live the work alongside the students, making for a more collaborative, responsive, and spontaneous work relationship.

Education is very good at making things unnecessarily complicated. When it comes to designing writing environments with our students, we can keep it really simple. Answer this question: what does it look, sound, and feel like to be a writer out in the world? The answer to that question should guide everything that we do.

Category: Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 4 – Trust Your Impulse

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LeapIn the mainstream teaching world, even in this moment of seismic change and technological advancement, there is a fairly narrow conception of what a teacher is and what a teacher can be. To step out of these limiting parameters takes courage and support. We know that students develop enduring understandings in learning environments where teachers subvert institutional norms. This is perhaps the paradox of schooling. No one ever learns when we do it by the book.

Unfortunately we are conditionalizing teachers (and students) to do it exactly by the book. And we are at a point in schooling where teachers (and students) are afraid to do anything but the book. I was just with a high school teacher the other day who explained to me how her curriculum was “pretty lock step” which left her little room to innovate or “be creative.” A vice principal told me a story of a student teacher with whom she was working recently. Something had happened in the classroom, and the vice principal wanted the student teacher to reflect on that event. The vice principal asked, “How did that make you feel?” To which, the student teacher responded in the form of a stale, saccharine, five paragraph essay thesis statement. The influences of NCLB are deep and crippling.

Approaching teaching from the stance of an improviser provides tools for us to combat the numbing effects of scripted curriculum, market-based assessments, resource impoverishment, and burn-out. I spent the last three posts in my series Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning exploring the ins and outs of the first rule: Say “Yes…and.” We looked at what it means to accept an offer from someone else and how to build on that offer to deepen relationships, solve problems, and improve outcomes. For this post, we’ll unpack Rule #2: Trust your impulse. How do we push aside the inner critic, the self-consciousness, the anxiety and tap into the core of who we are to be the teachers we need and want to be? Read on to learn a warm-up game that helps to develop this skill; to explore why this rule can be difficult to adopt, and to learn the benefits of putting this rule into action as a student and a teacher.

I am; I Feel

It’s Monday. First period. Eighth grade. The students are filing into class. Since it’s February, they know just what to do. They circle up in the middle of the room. It’s tight. There are 26 of them, but there is enough room to form a circle without touching shoulders. To make this space, the molded metal desks are pushed to the periphery. Mr. Laswell, the students’ History teacher meets them in the circle. There’s banter. Students are laughing, finishing up conversations started at the lockers, poking fun. Mr. Laswell looks out at the group and welcomes everyone back. “How was the weekend?” Some students shrug. Others say “Good.” He continues, “Any good stories?” One student tells a quick story of losing her Iphone and then finding it in the washing machine just before her father hit the start button. There are audible sighs of relief. Mr. Laswell runs the back of his hand across his forehead and lets out a dramatic “Phew!” which elicits laughs from a few. He then claps his hands and says, “Alright. Let’s get started with I am; I feel. Sophia, start us off.”

There is a slight pause, eyes turn to Sophia, and then she steps into the center of the circle, making eye contact with other students. She says, “I am Sophia, and I feel…” and with that, she kind of leans in a bit, wriggles her body, shoots her hands straight up in the air and lets out a full-voiced “Whoooopalala!” Sophia then steps back into the circle. Without missing a beat, the rest of the group takes a step in and imitates exactly what Sophia just did, minus the “I am Sophia, and I feel.” The group takes a step back and the person to Sophia’s right steps in, and the game continues. “I am Levi, and I feel” and then a sound and action until everyone around the circle has a chance to announce themselves to the class and share how they feel at that particular moment in time. The game takes less than 5 minutes. By the time it ends, the class is warmed up, loose, and ready to focus on the challenge ahead.

Several years ago, I initiated this ritual  at the start of  every class. I found that it pushed my students to listen to themselves and others, trust their impulses, and empathize with their fellow classmates. I knew it was working in part because if there was a rare day when we did not start class with I am; I feel, the students would be upset, some even angry, and the class would be just a bit off, a bit on edge. I wanted to share this game for this particular post because I do think it illustrates nicely what it looks, sounds, and feels like to trust an impulse as well as being a fantastic warm-up for any class.

One of the goals of the game is to be true to the way you feel the moment after you announce yourself to the group. The students and I work hard over many weeks to coach ourselves out of preplanning the sound and action we are going to make when it is our turn. Predetermining isn’t trusting your impulse. Instead, I tell them to lean into that moment and allow to come out whatever needs to. This is harder for some students than others, but over time, they all are able to tune into that particular moment and trust the way they feel. Another particularly powerful aspect of the game is that the rest of the group imitates the sound and action of the person. The group as a whole takes in that sound and action and gives it back to the person – a wonderful act of empathy and acceptance. This important part of the game provides further support to trust an impulse because the person witnesses the group as a whole accepting and honoring it through embodying the sound and action.

Impulse Trumps Instinct

I have to admit that this rule of improvisation has always been a tough one for me. I worry that the impulse I have is not necessarily the best move to make in a given situation. I also don’t necessarily trust the impulses of my students. Quite a damning statement, to say the least! Why don’t I trust my students’ impulses? Because I equate my students’ impulses with all of the baggage that they bring with them into class, all of the assumptions and biases that supposedly cloud their perceptions of what school is and could be. My assumption here is not fair, probably an obvious statement to any caring person. First of all, impulses exist under the layers of assumption and bias. In fact, trusting one’s impulse is a way of moving out of assumptions and biases. Who am I to decide whether a person’s impulse is good or bad, right or wrong? It’s an impulse, supposedly coming from someone’s core or from someone’s true self. If that is indeed the case, then that is where we need to start from when it comes to learning, right?

One of the obstacles that has kept me from embracing the idea of trusting an impulse is that I equate impulse with instinct when in fact there is an important difference between the two. Instinct is a hard-wired reaction to something. We can’t get out of it. It is in our genetic make-up. An impulse can be a renegade reaction, something outside of habit. It should surprise us. An impulse gives us permission to do something out of the ordinary. The dictionary definition of impulse is the “sudden strong urge or desire to act.” On the other hand, instinct is “An innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior.” Impulse is based on guts and spontaneity. Instincts are predetermined responses to stimuli.  Instincts can get in the way of meaningful teaching and learning. Take the flight or fight instinct, for example. I have a hard time counting the number of times my amygdala has kicked in, telling me to run away from a particularly challenging moment in school (confrontational parent, frustrated student, ornery colleague) when what I really needed to do is trust my impulse and work through the moment rather than run away from it.

The Connection Between  “Yes..and” And Trusting An Impulse

When doing improv as well as when being a teacher who is informed by improv,  you are not flinging an impulse out into the ether, hoping that someone will grab on to it or recognize it. In improv, someone must accept that impulse and build on it in order for the scene, relationship, or learning to grow. It means that the responsibility of supporting an impulse is shared. It mingles with other impulses and becomes something new. Maybe even something better. Impulses are inherently unstable, risky, and potentially dangerous. Impulses aren’t supposed to be unchaperoned as it were. Impulses need other people saying “Yes…and”  to massage them and sculpt them into more lasting ideas (See the “Yes…and” game in part 3 of this series for more information).

Our impulses are often times masked by what we think others think we should be doing in our classrooms. The official line keeps us from doing what we want to do or what we know would be best. We spend valuable mental and physical energy silencing an impulse because of the normative power of the status quo. When you allow your impulse out, it can surprise you and in that surprise, your mind is open to learning from the experience. When we are constantly covering or doing something that we think others are expecting of us, then our mind is occupied by the next cover-up or the next expectation. In other words, we are spending all of our time imagining a future rather than living in the present.

Think about this in relation to students as well. What would happen for them if they trusted their impulses instead of doing what they think is always expected of them? The more a student is able to trust an impulse, the better he/she get at it.  What comes with that trust is an ability to more quickly respond to situations. Instead of thinking them to death, or arguing oneself out of a good idea, the student can respond immediately because she/he is in tune with the inner-self and more comfortable with allowing that inner-self out.

Most importantly for both teachers and students, trusting your impulse has a lot to do with doing what you really want to do with your students. In other words, if we trust our impulses, we are more likely to design curriculum that we want to participate in rather than do curriculum that is handed to us. Impulses live in the world of possibilities not in the given circumstances. So you are given 10th grade World Literature for the first time. You have never taught it before. Your instincts tell you to say no or to protect yourself by doing whatever was done before. That’s your amygdala talking, the deepest, most primitive part of your brain. The fear center. Your impulse is something different entirely. Your impulse is that tiny voice inside of you that says, “Go for it!” The center for possibility.

Unlike instinct, impulses can be trained or coached. See what happens if you implement I am; I feel in your classroom. Instincts on the other hand come from millenia of genetic layering. Instincts are biological, and impulses are sociological. An impulse can overcome an instinct and that can be very good news for a teacher, a student, a classroom, and a school.

Category: and Learning, Improvisation | Tags: , , ,

What does it mean to be a writer? Ask a fourth grader

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What does it look like, sound like, and feel like to be a writer, reader, and thinker in the world? This is the overarching question that fuels teachers who design writing-based curriculum. They are constantly scheming and planning how they can design learning environments where students and teachers become many different kinds of writers over the course of the year. One of the rituals of the writing-based classroom is  to think critically about the writing work that has been done over the year as a way to process the work, deepen the learning, and set future writing goals. The questions that teachers ask their students are pretty simple:

What have you learned about being a writer?

What is your favorite piece and why?

What do you like about writing?

Bonus question: What do you want to get better at as a writer?

The way in which students reflect on these questions depends on their developmental level. Pre-K students talk about the questions as a group with the teacher writing down what she hears. 4th graders write down their own answers to the questions. Teachers collect the responses and use them to reflect themselves on the year and to plan for next.

As this school year quickly comes to a close, teachers and students are in the throes of this ritual, and I wanted to share a particular class of fourth grader’s responses to the questions. For me it shows what can happen when we design learning environments where students and teachers are living a writing life together, where they are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically out in the real world. Specifically, what I love about these responses is both the sophisticated writerly-sense that the 4th graders have developed over the year and the sense of play that they connect to the act of writing. The responses are also a guide for how we should be designing writing environments if we want students to truly be engaged and to feel that writing is a part of who they are.

1. What do you like about writing?

  • exciting stories from my imagination
  • making up fun awesome stories and characters
  • I like the part where you are kind of just thinking what you’re going to do.
  • I like when I try to put my own self in the story
  • I like when I’m about ready to go to the next chapter but before that I may leave a little “Cliffhanger!”
  • I like to have a sharp pencil.
  • I like when the teacher gives us topics.
  • I like to write stories about fairies.
  • My favorite part of writing is the editing because I get to go back and reread my stories and make sure everything is the way I want it.
  • A fun activity you can do pretty much everywhere.
  • Writing gives you the chance to write down what you’re thinking or about what happened today.
  • Sometimes I like to think about a book that I want to read but hasn’t been written yet, and then write it myself.
  • I love writing fiction stories.
  • What I like about writing is that I can just be free. I can just express how I feel while I am writing.
  • I love that you can pick your characters and their personalities.
  • You can use your imagination to create someone else’s reality.
  • Writing is a new way to let out your emotions on paper

2. What have you learned about being a writer?

  • have fun
  • use your imagination
  • get creative and write about  what YOU want to write about
  • you need correct punctuation and uppercase letter
  • write about what you think you will like
  • all stories don’t have to be true – it can have talking bugs or whatever
  • you can always add people in it if you don’t have the people you want
  • Plan your story before you start writing
  • Don’t ever pick something you don’t like.  Don’t pick it just because your friend is doing it.
  • Write a story that fits your personality.
  • An author should remember the Steps of Writing: Peer conferencing, editing, revision
  • Don’t get frustrated if writing a story takes a long time.  Writing takes a long time.
  • Start with a good beginning.
  • Your book has to make at least a little sense.
  • Choose to write about something that you know a good amount about.
  • Be proud of what your wrote even if someone else does not like it.

3. What is your favorite piece and why?

  • Persuasive letter to Channel 10 – I had fun writing about it and used my imagination from my Robotics team
  • Friendship story – I worked hard on it and at the end it has this thing where it’s like a fable.  Some parts were funny and some were sad.
  • My Dress story because this is the first time I actually wanted to keep writing all day long.
  • I liked my Time Travel and Special Place stories. I like them because they are very different than any other story I wrote.
  • I like my story about my dad because I feel like I got all the details from when he was 10 to when he is 50.
  • My favorite was my time travel story because I put a lot of detail in it and big adventures. I felt that I had a really good connection with the story and the characters.
  • My animal story because it’s different than anything else I’ve written. This story did not have a happy ending which is different for me.
  • I am proud of Chloe’s Dress Visit because when I wrote this I felt like I was a professional author.

 

 

Category: Being a writer, General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: , , ,

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 3 – The Significance of the “And” in “Yes…And”

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOver the last few weeks, I have been exploring the usefulness of an improvisational mindset, specifically the power of “Yes…and” and the dangers of “No…but” in teaching and learning. In this post, I want to focus on the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and.” Seems kind of trivial, but in actuality, the “and” is the key to this improvisational rule. Without the “and” you have a surface, and sometimes mindless, acceptance of what has been offered. With the “and,” you have the potential to transform the original offer and in the process deepen relationships, solve problems, improve outcomes, and change your status.

“Yes” without the “and” places the sayer in a spectator role as opposed to an actor role. By only saying “Yes,” the person is passively receiving what is being given to him/her. As a result, the original offer becomes stagnant. It does not expand. Taken to the extreme, only saying “Yes” can have dangerous outcomes. There is a passivity in simply saying “Yes.” The ownership and the power rests with the person who made the original offer, and the receiver of the offer is merely approving it. On the other hand, there is a thoughtfulness to the “and” in “Yes…and.” It requires the receiver to not only accept the original offer but to add something to it, to take it to the next level, to put a little of him or herself in the “game,” and to share the responsibility of the success of the original idea. Patricia Ryan Madsen writes, “With the rule of yes[…and], we call upon our capacity to envision, to create new and positive images. This yes{…and] invites us to find out what is right about the situation, what is good about the offer, what is worthy in the proposal.”

The other day, I was writing with three classes of first graders. They had been exploring African animals and one of the ways that the teachers wanted the students to share their understandings of the African animals was through writing acrostic poems. To prime the pump, I first wanted the first graders to find their partner in the other class who was studying the same African animal, and sit down and have a conversation about what they had learned about the animal, using the notes that they had taken. Instead of organizing all of this for them, I challenged them to find their partner on their own – a true ill-structured problem. When I said “go,” the students started milling around, looking for their partner from another class. After about 15 or so seconds, a small group of students came up to me and said that there was a problem. One of the girls said, “you want us to be in pairs, but there are five of us who have the same animal.” Faced with this dilemma, I could have gone down a few different paths. The “No…but” path would have looked like this: in the essence of time, I would have solved the problem for them. I would have pointed to the first two girls and told them they were partners, the next-two girls and told them they were partners, and told the last three girls that they were a threesome and that it was ok. This path would have blocked the proposal that the girls were making – there was a problem that needed to be solved – and instead put me in the position of solving the problem for them. The “Yes…and” path looks quite different. Instead of solving the problem for the students, I said yes to their conundrum and I built on it by asking them to solve it. Now, what is interesting is that the students pretty much came up with the same solution that I would have on my own, but the important thing is that they came up with it. They put their brains in gear to figure it out and then were able to witness the affect of their problem solving strategy. The “and” in this case was putting the responsibility of solving the problem back in the laps of the students.

Employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can dramatically influence the power dynamics within a colleague to colleague or a faculty to principal interaction as well. In improvisation, power dynamics are often referred to as situations of status. Every interaction that we have with others involves the delicate interplay of status. Who has high status? Who has low? Does the status change because of the conversation? The interplay between teachers and between teachers and principals is fraught with status. In order to understand status a bit better, let’s take a look at the situation I described above.

When the students came to me with the problem, they were giving me high status. They wanted me to solve the problem. In this case, having high status was not the ideal position to be in in order for that moment to be a true opportunity for learning. I needed to change the status. I changed the status by employing the “and” in “Yes…and.” By accepting the students’ offer that there was a problem, and then building on that offer by suggesting that they find a way to solve it, I moved myself from high to low status in that situation and gave high status to the students so that they could have the power to solve the problem. Within school situations, it is important to remember that status is not static. It constantly changes, and we can make choices as students,  teachers, and administrators in terms of the kind of status that we have in different situations. In Keith Johnstone’s words, status is “understood as something one does (his italics).”  It is also important to remember that having low status is not a “bad” thing and that having high status is not an inherently “good” thing. Instead, if we are truly embodying an improvisational ethic, we are constantly in tune to the situation and what it demands in terms of status for there to be a positive outcome. Too often, I find teachers desperately trying to maintain high status in classroom situations when it would be better for them to move to low status. I can say the same thing for principals as well. High status is often falsely connected with control and power when really the power and control is associated with the kind of status that you choose to have in a given moment. Our power and our success as teachers rests in our ability to read a situation and determine the kind of status that is needed to move the situation in a positive and meaningful direction.

In this current teaching climate, it can be tantalizingly easy to keep our heads down and spend our energy just trying to get through the day, employing “No…but” strategies like keeping our classroom doors closed, not eating with our colleagues at lunch, avoiding the principal on the way out the door, and spending inordinate amounts of time talking about things with little to no action. What’s interesting is that keeping our heads down actually doesn’t make teaching, and our lives, any easier. Instead, it has the potential of keeping us in a static status state which impedes relationship building, creative problem-solving, and ultimately joy in our work. We need to constantly fight these blocking urges, and employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can help us do that. What is particularly liberating about emphasizing the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and” in teaching is that it reframes our work. The profession of teaching can often feel like only “Yes” work. We have a curriculum we need to teach. We have standardized tests we need to give. We have demands from parents to meet. We have committees we need to serve on. We have expectations and demands on us that we did not have a hand in making. By employing the “and” we take some of the power and the control rightfully back. The “and” creates a space in all of these demands to put our own stamp on them, to decide how we want them to go, to have a stake in the outcome. In this case, the “and” provides us as teachers a chance to have high status in an environment that attempts to put us in low status. Ultimately, the “and” in “Yes…and” is the impetus for positive change personally, professionally, and even societally.

 

Category: and Learning, Improvisation, Teaching | Tags: , ,

Episode #2 – Amy Lafty on Motherhood, Project-Based Learning, Losing Control, Prom, and End of Year Blues

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Welcome to the second, leaner episode of The Craft: The Podcast about Teaching, Learning, and School. The obsessive goal of The Craft is to capture teacher stories from all along the spectrum of this beautifully frustrating, transgressive, and elemental practice that is essential to the sustainability of society and the world. That’s right, I said it!

In the first episode, we met David Sokoloff, fourth year high school history teacher extraordinaire, teaching in the Philadelphia School District. In this episode, you get to meet Amy Lafty, six year high school, English teacher, teaching in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. She is a journey woman, even though she has only been teaching for six years. Her travels through the Archdiocese are interesting, often comical, and illustrative of how many struggle to develop a career in teaching with the unpredictability of working in certain schools.

We get to hear about what it is like to have a young child and teach, something that is not often discussed in circles outside of close friends and family. Amy shares her challenges with being a young mother as well as the strategies that she has developed to make it work for her and her family.

The Craft would not be The Craft without robust discussion of teaching! In the spirit of sharing the work, Amy takes us into the classroom to hear a bit about a cool graphic novel project she did around Paradise Lost. More and more, Amy is turning to project-based learning to generate the kind of energy needed for enduring understandings. In fact, the pictures that you see here are from two of those projects – the graphic novel project around Paradise Lost and the Grecian Urn project inspired by Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Finally, we also get to hear a bit about her project around Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. If you have never heard of the book, you can check out a sample of it here.photo (3)

All of this talk around designing meaningful projects with students leads us to a wonderful conversation about the importance and difficulty of releasing control as a teacher. Now in her 6th year of teaching, Amy realizes the necessity of letting go of control as a teacher. Easier said than done. She shares with us how challenging that can be with certain groups of students.

Since we are so close to the end of the school year, it seemed appropriate to end the podcast with some thinking on how to make the end of year meaningful, particularly for seniors who often check-out around December! And let’s not even talk about the power of prom to disrupt learning! Amy walks us through that humorous world as well.

Amy shouts out to the Bread Loaf School of English and Arcadia University for helping her become the teacher that she is. You can find information about Bread Loaf here and Arcadia here.

Who will be the next guest on The Craft? Maybe you? Feel free to reach out to me and let me know what you think of the show. Share it with friends and family. Let’s grow this to be an essential part of how we understand what it means to be a teacher in this present moment!

As always, keep learning, keep teaching, keep honing your craft.

 

 

photoA big shout out to Chris Perrin, the DJ behind the music of Perrin & Tonic that is featured on The Craft. Check him out: https://soundcloud.com/perrinntonic

 

Category: The Craft | Tags: , , , ,

What is a Writing-Based Curriculum?

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hillman students 2At the core of a writing-based curriculum is a learning environment where students (and teachers) are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically together.

This writing practice positions students and teachers as readers, writers, and thinkers in the world.

This writing practice also creates a platform from which students and teachers can design projects with real-world implications. The writing is the work of the project. It is the engine from which products and performances are generated. The work of the class is framed around a question like: what are all of the ways we can write reflectively, creatively, and analytically to help us accomplish real world projects?

This means that writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically is the engine for any and all of the work happening within the class. There are no extraneous, peripheral forms of work. No worksheets. No quizzes. Very few, carefully chosen tests. The goal is to limit or eliminate busy work for the student and the teacher and instead to live a writing/reading life together.

Work for both the student and the teacher revolves around:

  • Sharing stages of a project or piece;

  • Providing feedback;

  • Discussing reading; post-product analysis;

  • Strategizing next steps;

  • Incisive mini-lessons that help to push a project or piece forward;

  • Guest-lectures;

  • Intentional fieldtrips;

  • Echoing skills and concepts that are being developed;

  • Spontaneous challenges that help to deepen the learning;

  • Practice in a skill that needs to be developed in order for the students to do an aspect of a project;

  • Conferencing with individuals and small groups.

All of this work is meant to embody the genuine habits of mind and body of writers out in the world and to avoid the dangers of schoolification.IMG_3487

A few thoughts on schoolification

Schoolification is when we take a real-world practice (e.g. writing), and we remove any of the real-worldness out of it. Here are some classic examples:

  • Having students come up with their thesis statement before giving them a chance to figure out what it is that they want to write about through actually writing

  • Making an assignment for writing a poem where most of the line is written for the student, and they just need to complete the line

  • Making students read a book that they don’t like

  • Limiting the writing of a paper to a rough draft and a final draft

  • Providing no time for feedback on in-process writing

  • Providing no feedback on writing before the piece is turned in

  • Making work ‘easy’ so that there is no conflict, no difficulty, no struggle

  • Designing work to only be graded by the teacher

  • Limiting reading to whatever is provided by the school (e.g. textbooks)

  • Having students memorize literary terms

Part of the purpose for a writing-based curriculum is to engage in the real world of work and learning. We want to attempt to make our classes fit seamlessly in that world. And since we are designing ELA classes, and writing should be at the center of ELA, we want to design experiences that position our students and ourselves as writers out in the world doing the real work of writers:

  • Reflecting in writing about their life and their work

  • Reading a heck of a lot and writing about that reading

  • Writing a lot! Everything from a fleeting thought to a fully fleshed-out piece

  • Collecting stuff that can be used as fuel for writing and projects (research on topics, images, other writing, lists, doodles, print material, etc.)

We know from the literature that is out there about the writing craft that writers engage in these four habits of mind and body: they reflect, they write about what they read, they write, and they collect. These four habits feed off of one another, making it possible for writers to create poems, short stories, essays, plays, speeches, etc.

As we developing writing-based curricula, we don’t want to limit our conception of who a writer is to the taken for granted examples: poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist. We should certainly be these kinds of writers in the classroom, but we should be a whole host of other kinds of writers as well:

  • Website developers

  • Novelists

  • Journalists

  • Bloggers

  • Tweeters

  • Editors

  • Hackers

  • Biographers

  • Folklorists

  • Sociologists

  • Memoirists

  • Orators

  • Debaters

  • Urban planners

  • Screenwriters

And in our classes, we need to design ways for these different kinds of writers to reflect, write about what they read, write, and collect in order to generate interesting forms of work in that particular genre.

Redefining the work of the teacher

When teaching revolves around designing learning environments where we are living a writing life with our students, our orientation to the work of teaching changes as well. Our focus in a writing-based curriculum is to create environments where our students and ourselves can be many of the kinds of writers that I list above. This means that we, as teachers, need to develop a sense of and be open to the kinds of work that these kinds of people do. We scour resources to tap into what makes these kinds of writers tick. We look for media that captures these different kinds of writers discussing their craft. We look for anything that can help us embody the practice with our students. We want to become these kinds of writers just as much as we want our students to do the same.

We then think creatively about how the classroom environment encourages these ways of working for ourselves and our students.  In a traditional ELA classroom, teachers grade papers. In a writing-based classroom, teachers focus on designing opportunities for students and themselves to share their work for feedback and then to publish that work out in the world. In a traditional ELA classroom, all of the students are doing the same thing at the same time. In a writing-based classroom students may be doing different things at the same time according to where they are in the project. In a traditional ELA classroom, the teacher is the primary source for feedback and evaluation. In a writing-based classroom, everyone is viewed as a resource for feedback. In a traditional ELA classroom, the only time something is shared is at the end of the process. In a writing-based classroom, work is shared in process to determine next steps and to gauge impact.  In a traditional ELA classroom, the language of learning is predetermined and given to the student. In a writing-based classroom, the language is co-constructed through the work.

In this kind of a classroom, the teacher removes him/herself from the center of the experience and instead becomes a co-reader, writer, and thinker with the students, bringing his/her own work into class for feedback. The teacher is involved in and is as invested in the project that the class is doing at the time. The success of the project is dependent upon the teacher in a fundamentally different way to a traditional ELA classroom. In a writing-based classroom, the teacher spends energy pushing the work outward in the world rather than inward into a grade.

IMG_3482In the next post, I’ll speak to skill development within a writing-based curriculum as well as provide some examples of writing-based curriculum in action.

Category: Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: , , , , ,

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 2: The Dangers of “No…but”

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALast week, I started a series on Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning. You can read my first post here. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into the idea of “Yes…and” by focusing specifically on the dangers of it’s opposite: the “No…but.”

In our current educational climate, it can be pretty difficult to practice the ethic of “Yes…and.” Regulations, hyper standardization, furloughs, ahistorical attacks on teacher quality, and the transitory nature of school leadership create a frigid atmosphere for accepting and building on other people’s offers. Instead, it becomes easier and easier to say “No…but.” This blocking move of “No…but” as a teacher often involves moves like keeping our heads down, closing our classroom doors, not volunteering for committees, adhering strictly to union protocols, not having our eyes and ears open for times to make connections, and giving way to stale curricula that we know doesn’t serve us or our students. These moves are understandable when considering the current circumstances mentioned above that many teachers face, but I would argue that it is precisely within these kinds of constraining circumstances that we need to employ an improvisational ethic.

Madsen says that blocking “is a way of trying to control the situation instead of accepting it…the critic in us wakes up and runs the show.” On the surface, this makes complete sense! The situation within a school is not good, not supportive, difficult, and our answer, as teachers, is to wake up the inner critic and defend against the sometimes dire situation in some way. Madsen writes, “We block when we say no, when we have a better idea, when we change the subject, when we correct the speaker, when we fail to listen, or when we simply ignore the situation.” Ironically, these moves, the ones that may even feel right in the moment, don’t move the situation forward. They don’t serve to fix the problem. They don’t make us feel better. Instead, they entrench the difficulty.

And it is so frustratingly easy to say “No…but!” Isn’t it? I am shocked by how often I find myself saying “no…but” in my personal life, let alone my professional one. I can’t tell you how many times I say “no…but” to my kids when I really could say yes. My kids ask if we can go for a bike ride in the park. My answer, “No, not now,” when we really could go. My kids make a suggestion for dinner. My response, “No…but how about this?” when we really could have gone with their suggestion. There are other more subtle blocks that I catch myself doing as well. I may not return a phone call or an email because of the challenging nature of it, for example. Or I may not take my students up on an idea they have for what we should do in class. In these situations, my eyes and ears aren’t open for the opportunity that is presenting itself. I am focused inward on myself, not outward to the collective. So what would happen if I said “Yes…and” to these things?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhen I think about how I block my kids, the first thing I realize is how much less angst and frustration and just plain whining there would be if I said “Yes…and.” I also think about how me saying no is basically communicating to the kids that I am in control of the situation, that I know better than them, and that I will make the decisions for them. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are times when I do know better and no is the right response, but I have found that I can say no a lot less and in doing so, I honor self-determinacy. The “No…but” response sets up the potential for my kids to keep coming back to me for permission for things because they are afraid that if they don’t ask and do it on their own, I might get upset or punish them. Or, the exact opposite will happen where they will never consult me for anything, and just go off and do it on their own, because of the fear that I will say no and block the idea in the first place. I don’t want either of these scenarios. I want kids who feel in control of their lives and who see me as someone that they want to come to and consult.

I want to support my students in this way too. When they come to me and suggest an alternative to an assignment, more often than not, I need to accept that offer and build on it. When they don’t seem to be following through on homework, I can’t block that with my inner-critic. I need to accept it and build on it. When I don’t seem to have the best work relationship with a student, I need to open up, say “Yes…and” to the challenge and see what is possible. When I have a particularly challenging relationship with a colleague, I need to look and listen for those opportunities when I can share control with him or her. Ultimately, that move will bring me far closer to a positive end result.

Tomorrow, when you go into work, challenge yourself to say “Yes…and” to as many situations as possible. Work to accept the offers that are being made to you by your students, colleagues, and administrators and build on them in a positive, open way. This will feel funny at first, and it will be hard work. That’s ok. Keep doing it. Saying “Yes…and” will become more natural over time, and you will reap the benefits of it.

Next week, I’ll explore the often over-looked importance of the “and” in “Yes…and.”

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Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning: Part 1

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Teaching and Learning as Improvisation

Over the next few weeks, I will be exploring how adopting the practices – the habits of mind and body – of improvisation as a teacher and as students can profoundly change the feel of the work, the culture of a class, and the quality of the learning for the students and the teacher.

First, a quick primer on improv. Improv is acting without a script, thinking on one’s feet, responding in the moment without premeditation or a preconceived response. In improvisational theater, performers create scenes simply by building on whatever their fellow actors are offering in the moment, no script, no net.  Viola Spolin, one of the luminaries of improvisational theater, helps us see how the sensibilities of improv extend from the actor to the teacher and the student. To her, improvisation is:

Playing the game; setting out to solve a problem with no preconception as to how you will do it; permitting everything in the environment (animate and inanimate) to work for you in solving the problem; it is not the scene, it is the way to the scene; a predominate function of the intuitive…”playing by ear;” process as opposed to result; not ad-lib or “originality” or “making it up by yourself”…setting object in motion between players as in a game; solving of problems together; the ability to allow the acting problem to evolve the scene; a moment in the lives of people without needing a plot or storyline for the communication; an art form; transformation; brings forth details and relationships as organic whole; living process.

Professor Patricia Ryan Madson, founder of Stanford’s improvisational troupe, builds on Spolin’s already expansive understanding, “A good improviser is someone who is awake, not entirely self-focused, and moved by a desire to do something useful and give something back and who acts up on this impulse….[someone who] play(s) fearlessly, and…work(s) with greater ease. ”

Whenever there is a difficult situation within a school or a classroom, I inevitably come back to thinking that if the teachers, students, and administrators of that school lived more of an improvisational life, the difficulty that is being experienced at the time would either not exist or turn more readily into a positive learning opportunity. And I am continually pleasantly surprised to witness what happens when an administrator, teacher, or group of students approaches working and learning as improvisers. To put it in Spolin and Madson’s words, when we open up to utilizing everything that is available to us, when we focus on process instead of result, when we allow the actions of ourselves and our students to take us where we need to go, when we are awake, when we are not self-focused, and when we are moved by a desire to give something back to someone else in a fearless way, many of the perennial issues that block administrators, teachers, and students from being successful disappear and powerful learning happens. .

So how do we live an improvisational life in schools? In the world of improvisational theater, there are understood rules that are followed that support players acting in the ways described above. There are a number of different improv rules lists out there, but they generally whittle down to four essentials: Say “yes…and”, trust your impulse, make your partner look good, and work at the top of your intelligence. When players follow these rules, surprising things happen on the stage – whole characters are born, elaborate stories evolve, truth happens, possibilities materialize. What is particularly interesting for the purposes of this series of posts is that when these rules are understood and practiced within schools, creativity unleashes, respect develops, and learning deepens.

Let’s take a closer look at these rules and see how they apply in the school and classroom.

Rule #1: Say “yes…and”

In improvisational theater, saying “yes…and” means accepting and building on the offers of others. If someone introduces the idea that you are all on a boat in a scene, the players accept that idea and run with it, giving their entire bodies and minds to the idea of being on a boat as opposed to saying no and blocking the possibility of the idea. Saying “yes…and” opens up avenues to explore and potential to unleash. Saying “yes…and” acknowledges the worth and the ideas of other people on stage. Saying “yes…and” relieves the burden of responsibility for the scene off the individual. Saying “yes…and” creates connection and collaboration. Saying “yes…and” puts someone in the active role of making something positive happen. Learning how to say “yes…and” is a crucial part of developing a risk taking and supportive learning community.

On the best ways to explore the potential of “yes..and” as well as how to introduce the concept of accepting and building on the offers of others in a class is to play the following game:

Try this. Have your class pair up or pair them up yourself. You are going to play “yes…and” to show your students the power of accepting the offer of another. The game is simple. Have each pair find a place in the room to sit down and face one another. Each pair will choose who will start the game. The person in each pair who volunteers to start will offer something that they hear about their partner. The more fantastical, the better (e.g. I heard that you ran away to the circus when you were 8 years old). The job of the partner is to accept that offer by saying, “Yes…and….” and then completing that thought with something that builds on the original offer. To which, the partner who started the game replies, “Yes…and…” and then builds on whatever the other partner offered. Coach the pairs to try to truly accept what has been offered before and to build on the story that is evolving. Here is an example:

Partner 1: I heard you ran away to the circus when you were 8.

Partner 2: Yes…and I apprenticed as a sword swallower

P1: Yes…and there was that time when you accidentally cut your tongue off

P2: Yes…and my father had to sew it back on

P1: Yes…and he was a bit tipsy that night and accidentally sewed it to your right ear lobe

P2: Yes…and after that night, when I heard things, I could taste them too.

P1: Yes…and rumors tasted like chocolate and directions to places tasted salty

You get the idea. A few important things to remember when you try this game with your students. First, don’t ruin the surprise! Don’t explain the power of the game before they experience what happens. Just lay down the rules and let the students discover what happens. Second, make sure that you coach your students to say “yes…and” after every offer. They should not simply say “yes” or even worse, nothing at all! Coach them to say, “Yes…and.” This move helps to push the players to build on the offer that has been made instead of taking it in an entirely different (some would say, selfish) direction. And finally, coach your students to not ask questions. Questions are the death of good improv, good building. Asking a question shirks the responsibility of accepting the offer and building on it and instead lays the expectation back on the person who just made the last offer. One other tip, sometimes it is good to show them a model of this before you have the class break up and do it themselves. You may want the class to gather in a circle and then you choose a student to model the game with you to give the rest of the class a taste of what you are looking for.

Once you let your students play the game, have them share the stories that were created. Then, ask them what it felt like to say “yes…and.” Finally, ask them to describe the kinds of stories that happened because of “yes….and.” This simple game will lay the groundwork for how important it is to accept the offers of others in a community that needs to work and learn together.
Next week, I’ll dig more deeply into what “Yes…and” looks like in the classroom as well as the broader school and spend a bit more time discussing how important the “and” is in “yes…and.” In the meantime, try the game above, and get back to me with how it goes.

Category: Improvisation | Tags: , ,

Wearing Tzara’s Hat: Collaborative Writing With Young Kids

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One of the things I love to do more than almost anything is write with kids. It is especially fun to write with young kids. I want them to see how language can surprise them, how they can manipulate words, how there can be multiple meanings, how writing is play, more specifically, serious fun. One of the ways that I show them this is through collaborative writing games, and one of the more popular ones with kindergartners and first graders is Tzara’s Hat.

tristanTzara’s Hat is a collaborative writing game created by Tristin Tzara a French poet and essayist of the early 20th Century. The story goes that at a Dada rally back in 1920, Tristin created a poem on the spot by picking words and phrases out of a hat. The crowd was stunned. Years later, William S. Burroughs, another experimental, avant garde writer, was famous for saying that Tzara’s Hat, and other cut-up forms like it, were a way to see into the future. He wrote, ““Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines, the future leaks out.”

The way that I do it with young kids is I first find a text that we have read before or that they are familiar with. I type up all of it or a section of it in large font so that only three or four words fit a page. That is the only prep needed.

The next day, I head into the class with my typed up story, a bunch of scissors, and a large hat or basket of some sort. I sit down with the students and I may first read the story or I may not. Next, I tell the kids that I want to make a poem out of the story that we just read or that we read a while ago. I pass out the piece of paper with three or four words on them. Already, the kids are looking carefully at these words, either reading them outright, or sounding them out, trying to figure out how they are connected. I ask that one of the students carefully pass out the scissors, and then I ask them to cut out the words and to put them in a neat pile in front of them. Scissors are brandished. Tongues are moving to the left and right. Words continue to be read. Some cuts are ragged. Some cuts are laser straight. It doesn’t matter. Once the kids have placed the individually cut-out words in a neat pile. I ask them to place their words in the basket or the hat. By this point, they are getting a  bit antsy, wondering what is going to happen next and how this could ever become a poem. With all of the words in the basket, the real fun can begin, but I don’t want to discount the serious literacy work that was happening even before we built the new piece. The cutting out of the individual words are key, demonstrating to the kids that words are material that you can manipulate and play around with. Not to mention all of the reading that goes on at this time.

Back to the real fun. We shake up the hat or the basket a few times so that all of the words mix and mingle, and then I tell them that we are going to build this poem one word at a time and each line of the poem is going to be one word. I hand the basket to the student next to me and ask him or her to pick a word out of the hat and begin our poem. This continues around the circle, each student picking out a word and making the next line of the poem. When the basket has made it all the way around the circle and back into my hands. We pause for a minute and look at what we have created. The poem is in a straight line, bisecting our circle. Students are on their haunches, leaning towards the piece, reading it under their breath or out loud. I let them bask in this mystery for a bit, and then I ask them if they would like me to read it aloud.  They always say yes. I read it carefully and intentionally, paying attention to the inner-logic, the surprising story that is underneath what looks to be randomness on the surface. I pick up on the rhythm of the piece, the unexpected rhymes and repetitions that may occur. It is a performance to say the least, and the kids love it. It is guaranteed to bring laughter, and it is also guaranteed to bring out the literary critic in a five year old. It is not unusual for many in the group immediately after the reading to begin to comment on certain lines, whether they worked or not. They are also keen to discuss what parts of the piece really sounded like a poem. There is something about this experiment that gets their writer antennas up.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. You see, there are more words left in the hat! At a certain point, once the discussion of the poem has died down a bit, I’ll shake the hat or the basket and let them know that there are still words left. What should we do with the rest of these words? Sometimes students will say, “Make another one!” which isn’t a bad idea. What is even a better idea is to add these words to the poem that we have already made. There is usually a student who will bring this idea up too. I grasp onto that idea and encourage them to give that a try. The basket gets passed around the circle again, and this is where the really interesting work happens.

Students start thinking strategically about where they want to put their next word. Should they put it before or after the word already there? They may try it one way, read it, and then try it the other, read it, and make a final decision. Other students will start to wonder if they can put a word upside down or vertical rather than horizontal. Discussion will ensue as to how we should read that when the poem is completed. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, what often happens is that there will be a student or two who will notice that they can slide part of the second word under the first and make an entirely new word! What a discovery! The group oohs and aaahs and searches for other ways that they can make that happen. Eventually the words are exhausted and we have the final poem. Again, I ask them if they would like me to read it aloud. A resounding chorus of ‘Yes!’ happens. I read it. More laughter. More serious literary discussion. I then read it again in a different way. At the end, I ask them to compare the two readings. What did they notice? Which did they like better? Why? I emphasize their choice by reading it in the preferred way again. Often, we will read it together.

Before the poem gets trampled on the way out to recess or art or lunch, I take a quick picture of it or write it down. That night, I go home, write it up on a big piece of paper and bring it in the next day to hang it up in the room, a luminous example of how words are material to be manipulated and played around with, how writing is serious fun.Tzaras Hat

Category: Writing poetry | Tags: , ,

Writing Open Letters, Memoir, and Flash Fiction with Middle Schoolers

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Johanna classThere is an incredible 8th grade ELA team at a public, middle school near my university. Maria, Johanna, and Sam are dedicated teachers who work closely together and aren’t afraid to take risks to deepen the learning for their students and themselves. They are living a writing life with their students that meets the skill and conceptual goals of their district and the Common Core. This is the first year that they have put into practice a writing-based curriculum, and it is changing the culture of their classrooms and the quality of the work. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of their students’ writing in Curved Lines On The Terrestrial Sphere, our online journal for student and teacher writing. The first issue focuses on the art of the Open Letter, Memoir, and Flash Fiction. The Open Letter is a wonderful literary conceit because it is never intended to be read by the person, place, thing, or idea to which it is being addressed while at the same time, the letter is open to all to read. This irony tends to diminish writing inhibitions and give license to students to reveal the sharp, witty, and fresh writers that they are. Memoir is the perfect genre to explore craft because the moves that writers make in memoir are often transparent and accessible to  young writers. It is also a slippery genre, meaning that the writer can play around with the sometimes subtle differences between truth and fact. Middle schoolers love t0 mess around with those kinds of distinctions. Finally, Flash Fiction is usually no more than 400 words. This concision pushes students to think strategically about what they put in and what they leave out. The form lends itself to mirroring life’s idiosyncrasies.

When the teachers submitted their students’ writing, I asked them to respond to a few questions regarding the work and how it is influencing them as teachers. They talk about developing a culture of risk-taking, the ease of differentiating within a writing-based curriculum, and how the deep practice of writing prepares their students for life. For this first issue, I include below their thoughts on what their students’ writing makes them think about.

What does your students’ writing make you think about?johanna 3

Looking over the student writing makes us think about the growth the kids have achieved not only in terms of skill but in terms of confidence. They were mired in self-doubt in September. For so many 8th graders, the idea of writing is fraught with fear, anxiety, and a certainty that they will do it “wrong.” In their early journal reflections, students offered sentiments such as: “I’m a terrible writer. I wish I could be better but I don’t know how to be.” Worse yet, some firmly closed the door on the idea of writing and declared, “Writing is for some people but not for me.” Now, though, we see writers who are skilled and confident, eager to delve into new writing challenges, to experiment, and to take bold risks. It really drives home the fact that literacy is tied to cognition and that as their writing/reading grows, so does their analytical and problem-solving skills.

It also excites us to reflect back on what worked really, really well and what didn’t work so well so that we can refine it for next year. With stunning clarity, we can see that any time we veered from the routines and rituals of our writing-based classrooms – whether because of interruptions, timing, or other extraneous factors – we were frustrated with the results. This provides us with great reassurance and comfort that this path is the right path to journey with our students.

Submit your students’ or your own writing to CLOATS

If you are interested in submitting some of your students’ writing, or your own, please send it to Leif Gustavson at gustavson@arcadia.edu. I will be happy to include it in future issues. Please also leave a comment about the writing. We’re interested in hearing your thoughts.

Go to Curved Lines On A Terrestrial Sphere to read the first issue!

johanna 2For other great examples of open letters go to McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies

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