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How to put the learning to work part 2: The End of Year Reflection

Posted on May 29, 2014 by admin

Idea #2: The Summative Reflection

These few posts focus on how to bring the school year to a close in a meaningful and interesting way that also, most importantly, deepens the learning. The first post explored using the form of the Cento Poem to push students back into their work over the year and to remix it in a creative way. Go here to see how to make that happen in your classroom. In this post, I open up the idea of having students do a summative reflection at the end of the year to remind themselves of what they did, highlight particular strengths in that work, analyze areas for growth, and plan for what they would like to do next.

The summative reflection that I am going to share with you is connected to a portfolio, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is to identify questions that you want your students to address that give them the chance to do the following:

Take stock of what they have done over the year. Often times, learning is designed in such a way that it is easy to forget. Quizzes and tests are taken and then thrown away. Books are read and not revisited. Notes are taken, put to use once, and then not used again. The summative reflection gives students the chance to go back through that work, whether it is for the year, the semester, or the quarter and remind themselves of what they have done. This is an essential first step in reflecting on one’s work.
Identify work that they think is particularly strong. Students need to develop the ability to think critically about their own work and to recognize when they have done something well and why. Chances are, if they can do that, they will repeat the kind of work over time.
Think about what they could do differently. It isn’t enough just to praise oneself for particularly strong work. Students also need to be able to be honest with themselves and point out particular work or a skill that could be improved. They then need space to think in writing about that and come up with a plan for how to improve.
Project forward. Learning should not happen in prescribed time allotments. Learning should also not happen in siloed classes. Real, enduring learning is connected across time, across classes, across subjects. Students need a space at the end of the year to be able to write about what they want to do next with what they have learned. This summative reflection helps them do that.

Click the image to see the Summative Reflection

Ideally, a shorter, targeted form of this kind of reflection would be happening throughout the year so that students would be skilled in this metacognitive practice. If you are interested in that, click here to see my form of a weekly audit. But, even if that isn’t happening, the end of the year reflection is worth doing. To set it up, the last week of your classes, introduce the idea to your students. Take the template I have provided, manipulate it to fit your context, and hand it out. Give them the week to do it. Encourage them to take their time. Have this be the last piece of work that they do for the year.

I have my students send it to me electronically. It is a lot of emails, but I can respond more quickly. Plus, I want to make sure that they get it back. In terms of feedback, I approach it like a conversation. I either track changes or use the comment tab to ask questions, highlight really interesting things, connect them to resources, and encourage them to make something happen. I have my coach’s hat on when I do this. The feedback is always constructive and encouraging. When it comes to grading these, I normally do not grade them. I tell them that this final piece of work is more important than a grade. Teachers often question whether students will turn it in if there isn’t a grade. When I have established a culture of reflecting over time in this way, and my students are receiving regular feedback from me, it is very rare that a student does not turn it in. Even if you have not been having your students reflect on their work over the year, I think you will be surprised by the number of students who will turn it in even if it is not graded. But, if you want to grade it, I would tell the students that they receive an A for this assignment if they turn it in. If they don’t, they fail the assignment. Enough said.

This summative reflection is not only important for students, it is also important for you, the teacher. It provides a great window into the year, the semester, or the unit, depending on how you frame it. You will get ideas for how you might design next year. And, maybe most importantly, they are going to make you feel good about yourself and about your teaching. I can’t emphasize this enough. Teaching is tough, challenging work. It is crucial to design some kind of vehicle in your class to receive positive feedback. Without joy, we don’t have the energy to overcome the challenges.

Category: Reflection, Self-Assessment, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: critical reflection, high school, Language Arts, learning, middle school, portfolio, Reflection, Self-Assessment, teaching, writing-based curriculum

How to put the learning to work, part 1: End of Year Ideas for Reflecting on and Reinforcing Learning

Posted on May 28, 2014 by admin • 3 comments

As the school year draws to a close, it is really important to think about how to design a quality ending for both you and your students. What kind of work can you do to end the year in a meaningful and enduring way? The end of the year is a time for taking stock of the work that has been done, thinking critically about it, acknowledging accomplishments, and planning for what needs to happen next. Here are some ideas for how to make all of that happen in the last few weeks of the school year. We’ll start with the Cento.

Idea #1: The Cento

Remember that one of the goals of the end of the year should be to push students back into the work that they have done, remind them of that work, and have them resee it in new ways to reinforce the learning. You want them to think and act in divergent and convergent ways when it comes to the learning that they did earlier in the year as well as remind themselves of what they did and why. This helps the skills and conceptual understanding stick in their brains. The Cento is a creative way to do just that. The Cento is a form of poetry that is completely made up of lines taken from other poems. There is a long and rich history of this kind of work. Here is an interesting example from Simone Muench:

Wolf Cento

Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf

at a live heart, the sun breaks down.

What is important is to avoid

the time allotted for disavowels

as the livid wound

leaves a trace leaves an abscess

takes its contraction for those clouds

that dip thunder & vanish

like rose leaves in closed jars.

Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot

crystal bone into thin air.

The small hours open their wounds for me.

This is a woman’s confession:

I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Sources: [Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg]

In order to make this poem, Muench rooted around in the writings of the poets above and pulled lines that she liked and that she thought meshed well together. The Cento is a wonderful experiment for close reading and writing, strategic thinking, and play. And that is exactly what you want your students to do with the work that they have done over the course of a quarter, a semester, or even a year.

To set it up, share with your students the idea of a Cento poem. Show them Muenche’s example or create one on your own. Talk a bit together about what you notice, how it works, etc. Then, challenge them to go back into their own work from the quarter, the semester, or the year, and create their own Cento poem out of found lines from their work. You can decide the level of constraint that you want to put on this project. You could limit the work to the creative writing that they have done, or maybe you want them to pull lines from the essays they have written, or maybe you want to open it up to everything (creative writing, essays, notes, etc.). You might want to figure out the constraint with the students. Ask them, “What work should we dig back into to make our own Cento poems? And remember, a Cento poem does not need to be created out of other poems. It can be created out of all kinds of found texts. In fact, the more diverse the texts, the better!

Give them several days to do it. It would be a really good thing to actually do in the classroom. I like the image of students with their work sprawled out on their desks or on the floor, digging through it, finding lines that they like. As they do this process, make sure to tell them to keep track of where the lines are coming from so that they can reference them at the end of the poem – footnoting their own work if you will. This requirement sets up a really nice opportunity to talk about how to cite one’s own work.

I would encourage your students to make the poem a half a page to a page long, depending on the amount of work and the developmental level of the students. You want it to be long enough so that the students have enough space to really play around with the material, but not too long so that it becomes tedious rather than challenging. Urge them to think about the following:

Line length – make sure to vary it so the poem looks interesting on the page
How can you link the lines together so that the poem reads like a unified idea coming from many different sources?
How many different sources can you use?
Variety of material – try to pick a phrase from one source, a single word from another, etc.
Have fun with mashing found phrases and words together to create new meanings.

When they have completed the poem, make sure that they have a chance to share it either with the whole class, in small groups, or in pairs. You might want to collect them and publish them in an anthology. This could start a ritual in your class where your students always publish their work Centos at the end of the year. Over time, you could have a shelf filled with Cento anthologies that your present students can look through. Another idea is to hang them up around the room, gallery style, and have your students and invited guests walk around and read them.

One final reason why I love this idea is because it reinforces for students the idea that the work that we do is malleable and organic. It can transform into other things, other forms. Turning their work into a Cento poem encourages them to always see their work as useful, interesting, and filled with the possibility of becoming something else.

Category: English, General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing poetry, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: critical reflection, English, high school, Language Arts, literacy, middle school, poetry, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

Turning the Olympic Creed into Poetry: Hacking the Olympic Creed, part 2

Posted on May 10, 2014 by admin • 0 comment

If you haven’t had a chance to see my post describing the cut-up experiment we did, click here and check it out. This post highlights some of the great poems that PreK-fourth graders did.

William Burroughs once said, “Cut up Rimbaud, and you are in Rimbaud’s place.” We embarked on this poetry experiment to put us more in the place of the Olympics broadly, and the Olympic Creed specifically. In the process of cutting up the creed and playing around with it word for word, with the goal of making a poem out of those words, really powerful learning happened. Students PreK through fourth grade were carefully studying words, exploring the different meanings of words, discovering different ways to use words, creating sophisticated poems where the meaning was below the surface, and using the shape of the piece to create that meaning.

This poem, Norway, is from a kindergarten class. They wrote the poem together. The teacher teacher started the process in true Tristan Tzara style by putting all of the cut up words in a paper bag. The students picked a word our of the bag, laid the word down on a big board on the floor, and then passed the bag to the next students who did the same. The students used the dimensions of the board to determine line-length. Then, once all of the words had been picked, the teacher made a brilliant move by creating a set of constraints for the next phase of the experiment: the students could either move a word, remove a word, or leave the poem the way it was. The game continued with each student scooting out of the circle and deciding what her next move was. They would read the poem aloud to get it in their head before the move and then would read it again when the move had been made. Gasps, oohs and ahs, and laughs filled the room. Some students would express their disagreement with a move. Other moves were met with universal approval. They were all being close readers, thinking creatively and strategically about the next move that they wanted to make. This process went around the circle three times. And is it progressed, more and more words were removed. I was reminded of Niedecker’s “no break from this condensery.” The students paired the poem down to its essentials. What made it even more interesting and funny was the addition of the title, Norway. One could read the poem as a commentary on the country as well as the Olympics. Once the process went around the circle three times, the poem was complete, the group read it aloud again to hear the music in it, and then decided to hang it on their classroom door.

The other kindergarten class did it slightly differently, more of a prose approach, keeping all of the words in and shuffling them around on the magnetic white board. After a while, they were stumped, they had a few words that just didn’t seem to work with the poem that they were creating.

They tried and tried, but adding the words just didn’t sound right. Should they just leave them out? The group worked to answer that question and in the process came up with the idea of using those words as the title for the piece. Hence, the title of the piece: To Take In The Olympic Games. Below, you’ll see one of the kindergarten students pointing to the words as the group as a whole reads it aloud.

Other students took a narrative approach as well, some to greater affect than others. The trick with the narrative turn is that it encourages the reader to read it like any narrative, and the choppy, broken, style of the text can be a bit off-putting. At other times, this move can be used to create some rather interesting pieces.

It’s important to remember that this writing game is a mix of deep literacy learning and artistic creation. Sometimes the works of art turn out more artful than others, but at all times, this experiment plunges the students into language at the word, phrase, and sentence level, encouraging them to think about how they make meaning on the page.

Here is an example of a version that I think works pretty well. It was created by a group of three second graders who truly embodied the spirit of making a poem out of the cut-up words.

Not only is it interesting to look at since the young poets chose to roughly use three word lines, but if you read it aloud, you can really hear the possibility in the piece. The rhythms come out in the wonderful use of the repetitions. When read aloud, it sounds as if the speaker is thinking out loud, trying to articulate something profound about life. At times, it captures the cadence of real life. The ending in particular feels a bit like an idiom.

Category: English, General Writing Ideas, Writing poetry, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: collaborative writing, elementary, English, experiment, high school, Language Arts, literacy, middle school, poetry, writing

Key Teaching Moves to Make in Differentiating an English Classroom

Posted on March 30, 2014 by admin • 0 comment

Firstly, all classes need to be differentiated. To think that 25 to 30 students in a room are all going to learn the same way, or be in the same place in terms of understanding, doing your bidding, feels kind of Russia 1919 or Germany 1939. Think of differentiation as tapping into the skills and conceptual knowledge that students do have and building from there, not in an effort to get everyone to the same place, but to challenge students to evolve as readers, writers, and thinkers. And remember, we get better at what we do through consistent, mindful practice.

It all starts with relationships

Get to know your students – find them interesting and compelling people
Let them get to know you as the interesting and compelling person that you are
Design ways for the students to get to know each other as people, NOT just as students
Have them get together in groups just to get to know each other, not to do school work
Idea: Start the year with a questionnaire that gives you a glimpse into their lives. Ask questions that can be ways into interesting work that you can do together. Share back with the students what you learned from the questionnaire. Ask them questions to get to know them even better. Design work around what you learn about them.
Great book to read on this: The Social Animal: Hidden Sources Of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

What about reading with students with various levels of skill?

Give students choice! – Not all students need to read the same book
Idea: Scale the reading so that you can get to where you want to go
- Start with students bringing in their own books to read – have them connect the books to a big idea you are exploring in a unit
- Move to small (self-selected?) reading groups around a selection of books
- Move to one book read by the whole class
The “level” of book does not necessarily determine how sophisticated you can get with it
Great book to read on this: Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading And What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher.

How can I write with students with various levels of skill?

Choose models that are accessible on multiple levels
Idea: Start the year with flash fiction or poetry
Establish authentic writing opportunities
Design project-based work where the outcome can be achieved in multiple ways
Idea: Write with your students
Let the writing tell you what skills need to be developed – find the pattern and push students back into the writing to work on it
The more we write, the better we get at it
Have students write reflectively, creatively, and analytically
Coach practice
Great books to read on this: Inside Out: Strategies For Teaching Reading by Dan Kirby, Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow

How do we think in a differentiated classroom?

Create scaffolds to support students figuring out how to take on a challenge
Idea: Develop strategies for approaching the work – have them prominently displayed in the classroom
Let the answers to these questions guide the work:
- When do we know that we have done something well?
- What is the first step in taking on a challenge?
- Who can you go to to get feedback/help?
- What will make this project interesting for you?
- How do you know when you are learning?
- How do you know when you are working hard?
- Why would we want to work hard?
Let students flounder….for a bit
Look for patterns that guide you in terms of when to step in
See if they are able to work their way out of it
If not, establish scaffolds through talking with them. Push them to figure out for themselves what they need to do to be successful
Idea: Build in a reflective writing component to each project where the students articulate what the strengths are in the project and where the areas for growth exist. Have them discuss how they are going to get stronger in the areas for growth
Idea: The Reading Specialists and Special Education Teachers are your friends, your allies, your partners – work with them. Tap their knowledge. Have them come into your class. Plan with them.
Great books to read on this: Mindset by Carol Dweck, Brain Rules by John Medina, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyne, Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins

What about grading/evaluation?

Have high expectations and make sure to coach practice
Have an evaluation system that enables you to see growth over time
Grading of products should be based on quality of the work, not on tasks accomplished
Grading of process should be on how well students took advantage of the project
Not everyone needs to earn an A to be validated. Be honest in terms of where they are and where they need to go
Allow them to make mistakes
Evaluate process and product
Great book to read on this: Authentic Assessments for the English Classroom by Joann Dolgin

Overall, what does work look like?

Create authentic challenges that enable students to enter where they are – authenticity enables students to use the real-world skill and intelligence that they have and bring it to bear in the classroom to build the academic skills you want
Determine the edge of competency for your students and hold them there
Model work and learning yourself
Diversify groups – homogeneity kills idea generation and doesn’t encourage people to work at the top of their intelligences
Make sure that there is a metacognitive approach to the work
Design conversations and reflective work around the how and why of what you are doing
Idea: incorporate some form of an audit into the learning. See here for an example.
Great books to read on this: I won’t Learn From You: And Other thoughts On Maladjustment by Herbert Kohl, Improv Wisdom by Patricia Madson, Impro by Keith Johnstone, Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks

We take small steps in developing skill and conceptual knowledge. It happens over time.

Category: Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: differentiation, elementary, English, high school, Language Arts, learning, literacy, middle school, students, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

Hack the Olympic Creed with your Students: The Art of the Cut-Up

Posted on February 5, 2014 by admin • 2 comments

If you are like me, you’re always looking for a way to bring the here and now into your class in as creative and interesting a way as possible. So what to do with the Olympics? Here’s a great writing (and reading) experiment that will have your students looking at the Olympics and the meaning behind the Olympics in a whole new way.

Take the Olympic Creed:

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.

Paste it into a document and blow the creed up to 24 or so point so that you can really see it. Something like this:

The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.

Make enough copies of the creed so that a group of four or so in your class can use it: e.g. 24 in a class, make six copies. Cut out each word so that it is independent. Put the individually cut up words for one creed into each envelop.

The next day, get your students into the requisite number of groups, and hand out the envelope to each group. Tell them that the challenge is to use these words, and only these words, to create a poem. The only other constraint is that they must use all of the words. The way that they construct the poem is completely up to them. They may add punctuation.

IMPORTANT: when describing the challenge, do not show them the original Olympic Creed! If you do that, it will suck all of the creativity out of this experiment. Another important point: the goal is not for the groups to try to recreate the creed in the exact original wording. Instead, the students are using the words like material, like paint, to create a whole new work of art, a la Gertrude Stein.

Depending on the age of your students, give them 15, maybe twenty minutes, to mess around with the words and to create the poem. When I tried this, I took a good half an hour, so this could be a good use of an entire period. The amount of time that you dedicate to it will determine the kinds of poems that are produced. Less time: probably more abstract. More time: probably more narrative in form. Any time spent is well worth it. This experiment encourages your students to think and act strategically, carefully reading the words and critically thinking about the meaning that they want to create by connecting the words to each other. They will also come to appreciate how many different ways they can use the same word, particularly prepositions, articles, and conjunctions. Not only that, they are also honing their skills of interpretation and persuasiveness by working as a group to make their poem happen. While your students are creating their poems out of the found material, sit back and enjoy listening to and watching the divergent and convergent thinking that goes on.

Once the students feel that they have their poems constructed, have them write them down on pieces of paper, exactly the way that they look on the tables. While they are doing that, you might want to go around and take pictures of each poem in its cut-up form. There is something aesthetically interesting in the way in which the cut out words look pieced together on the table. Give them a chance to read it one more time out loud to their group so that they have it in their head.

Then, reveal the original creed on your smart board or written on the blackboard or handed out on a different sheet of paper to each group. Tell them that this is the original Olympic Creed. You can even use the moment to share the story with them about how the Olympic Creed came to be:

Pierre de Coubertin got the idea for the phrase adopted as the Olympic Creed from a speech given by Bishop Ethelbert Talbot at a service for Olympic champions during the 1908 Olympic Games.

Not much of a story, but it is always good to know where something comes from.

The comparing of the original Olympic Creed and the cut-up versions that the students do should create a very interesting conversation. What is the difference between the original and the new versions? What do we notice about the way the original creed is written? What new meanings are created in the new versions? What do we see differently in the original creed because of our cut-ups? Which do we like better? You get the idea.

For the coup de grace, Have the students type up their cut-up versions with a title and the names of all who contributed to it, and then create a gallery in your room or in the hallway outside of your room where you display the original Olympic Creed and then all of your students’ versions to invite folks to see the Olympics in a new and refreshing way.

This writing and reading experiment is beautifully simple and wonderfully deep in terms of the literacy skill development and learning that happens. As noted above, through this writing game, similar to Burrough’s cut-ups or Tristan Tzara’s Tzara’s Hat, your students will scrutinize individual words, interpret word pairings for below surface meanings, read what they put together many many times, work to convince others that their construction is the best, surprise themselves with what happens when seemingly disparate words are connected, and be ruthless in their editing. When they see the original creed, they will then be encouraged to do some pretty sophisticated comparing and contrasting. They will revisit their own piece and evaluate it for its effectiveness, its uniqueness. They will also come to appreciate how words and phrases can have multiple meanings, depending on how you use them.

If you give this a shot with your students, please leave a comment and let me know how it goes. Better yet, leave me a comment and share one of the poems created. I’d love to see it. Here is a version I came up with:

But well-conquered Olympic struggle?

Not important

But is the most essential triumph fought to win?

Not important

Take the life games

as not just to have

the most in the thing

But have

the thing in part is

the is

Category: General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing poetry, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: elementary, English, experiment, high school, high school students, Language Arts, literacy, middle school, poetry, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

Writing Fairy Tales with Third Graders

Posted on November 7, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

Fairy Tales. What a cool form to explore with third graders. Magic. Good vs. Evil. A terrible problem that works out in the end. Right up the alley of 8 and 9 year olds who are more than willing to live in secondary worlds. I recently had the chance to open up the idea of writing fairy tales with a third grade class. The class was in the midst of writing various forms of short stories involving a classroom character that they had developed by the name of Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The teacher wanted to challenge the students to write their own fairy tales involving Kaitlyn Rose, thus transferring what they know about the character into a completely new context – lots of potential for convergent and divergent thinking and writing to happen.

We started our exploration by doing a quick writing warm up: Make a list of names you’d like to be called. Here’s mine:

Frankenleif

The Stitler

Goose

Das Leifster

Foam

Nutty Nut

Longenfreugen

Nipsy

Stinky the Nudge

Partical Man

Pentagon

Limpy

Salty

Nimble Thimble

Of course, some students made a list of a names they don’t want to be called. Always good to break the rules in meaningful ways! Here are a few that made me pause:

Stupid

Unpopular

If that isn’t a window into where the third graders are right now, I don’t know what is!

After we wiggled our elbows for a good three or so minutes, I asked the students to pick their top three names off the list and to share those names with the person next to them. Laughter ensued along with many students saying how much they liked a name that was offered. We were definitely headed in the right direction. Our minds and hands were warmed up, and we had a good laugh. Once students shared their top three names, I mentioned how writers will often make lists of potential names for characters in their stories. I hinted that they may want to use some of these names in the story that we were going to write.

From there, we moved into exploring fairy tales specifically. I asked them what a fairy tale was, and with very little hesitation, hands raised. Through this conversation, we came up with a pretty sophisticated list of fairy tale characteristics.

I then asked them to come on over to the rug so that I could read them a fairy tale. They all scrambled over and we strategized together how to sit so that everyone could see – a classic challenge for young kids. Once folks were settled, I asked them to listen closely to the story to see if our list of characteristics stood up and to see if we needed to add anything to the list. I picked up Rumpelstiltskin by Paul O. Zelinsky, showed the front cover, read the acknowledgement, and began the story. The students loved it. I got the sense that several of them had never heard Rumpelstiltskin before. They pleaded with their classmates to not give up what happened next. They identified the king as a bad man but then wondered if the beautiful daughter would be able to change him over time. The room was mixed in terms of whether the daughter should marry the king. The students thought Rumpelstiltskin was pretty scary.

With a turn of the final page and a show of the back of the book, I then asked them if there was anything that we wanted to add to our list of fairy tale characteristics. The students identified two: The challenge or problem grows, and there is repetition. One student pointed out, “And the repetition can be things that characters say or do.” Good point. I added those two important qualities to the list.

I could tell that the students were itching to get started. Before we could jump to writing our own fairy tales, though, we needed to spend just a few minutes talking about this great classroom character that they had created. I wanted to make sure that she was in the front of their minds as they took on the challenge of writing their own fairy tale. We put the classroom character up on the smartboard, and I asked them to tell me a bit about Kaitlyn Rose Anderson. The students shared particular character traits that stuck out. They talked a bit about the stories that they had already written. I asked them to tell me the names of some of the other characters in those stories. The students mentioned Kaitlyn’s sister. I suggested that they may want to include these characters in the fairy tale. I also suggested that they may want to take a fairy tale that they know and write Kaitlyn into it. I posed the question: What would happen if Kaitlyn was in Rumpelstiltskin? There was a buzz. One student asked, “Can I write the next chapter of Rumpelstiltskin?” I nodded. Another student clapped her hands together, “Can I mash a bunch of fairy tales together and see what happens?” The class loved that idea. And with that, I sent them back to their writing tables.

Just before we got started, the teacher piped up, “What other fairy tales do we know?” The group came up with a long list. Fairy tales were definitely in their minds. They were ready to write.

I posed the challenge to them: write a fairy tale that involves Kaitlyn Rose Anderson as a main character in the story. Before I sent them off to their writing spaces, I mentioned that one of the great things about fairy tales is that they kind of supply the opening line for us, so we don’t need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to start. I encouraged them to literally take the first line out of Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, or Kate and the Beanstalk, and see where the writing takes them.

Once there was a poor X who had a beautiful X.

Long ago, a girl named X lived with her mother in a X.

In a time not too long ago and in a land much like our own, there lived a X and a X.

Students were already scribbling away, so I stepped aside, got out my own pad of paper, and let them write.

At first there was a bit of chatter. Students were looking at each other’s writing, pointing out how to spell a word, asking a question, flipping through the pages of Rumpelstiltskin for inspiration or just to figure out how to spell the name. After a bit, I coached, “Let’s put all of that talking energy down on the paper. Work to answer your questions through the writing. See if you can fill a page.” The room quieted down, and you could practically feel the focus in the room.

About ten minutes in, I broke the silence, and suggested some ways to keep going: “If you are finding yourself thinking a lot instead of writing, take a look over here at our list of fairy tale characteristics.” I pointed to the list. “They might give you some ideas on where to go next. For example, is your problem growing? Where is the repetition? Do you have a bad character? Another thing to do is to read what you have written. Just by doing that, you will probably find what needs to be written next.” I looked out over the group, “I also like how some of you are going back to your first story and reminding yourself of what you wrote. I can see how that might trigger an idea or two as well.” I clapped my hands, “Alright, back to it. Let’s see if we can write for another five minutes or so.” The students put their heads back down and went back to writing.

Before we knew it, the time was up. I needed to leave, and the kids needed to go to lunch. On the way out, I touched base with the teacher, and the plan is to give them a chance to read what they had written so that they can immediately hear the possibility in the writing. Looking beyond that, the students will get a chance to choose one of three drafts of different stories involving Kaitlyn Rose Anderson that they will get the chance to revise, edit, and publish. Not a bad use of an hour of class time if you ask me!

Category: General Writing Ideas, Teaching, Writing-Based Curriculum | Tags: elementary, English, fairy tales, Language Arts, literacy, School, students, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

The Tenets of a Writing-Based Curriculum

Posted on September 10, 2013 by admin

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.

What 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?

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

When 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: English, high school, Language Arts, literacy, middle school, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum

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

Posted on June 1, 2013 by admin • 0 comment

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: critical reflection, elementary, teaching, writing

What is a Writing-Based Curriculum?

Posted on May 9, 2013 by admin

At 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.

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.

In 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: English, Language Arts, literacy, teaching, writing, writing-based curriculum