Month: April 2015

Facilitating the Writing Process in Early Career Teaching: When Students Lack Confidence

~ Katharine Atkins-Pattenson ~ Leave a comment

I will never forget the first major writing assignment I gave back to my 7th grade history students. It was late September, and we were mid-way through a unit on the local election for the new mayor of Boston. Students had drafted a letter to the new mayor presenting their concerns for their communities. They had spent several days typing letters full of passionate ideas and suggestions for the new mayor. I burned the midnight oil to return their drafts promptly so we wouldn’t lose momentum in our unit. I wrote all over their papers in brilliant fuschia, mint, teal, and tangerine hues, thinking these colors would evoke more positivity than the dreaded red markups I remembered receiving from teachers when I was their age. I underlined persuasive phrases and wrote encouraging comments like “Wow! This suggestion is so innovative!” and “What an awesome insight into your community!” I also looked for places where students could elaborate on a need in their community and inserted questions to prompt further explanation.

Sleep deprived from staying up so late providing written feedback, but excited to give them my thoughtful suggestions, I stood at the door, smiling, and enthusiastically welcomed my students into class. What transpired next could not have gone more differently than what I had envisioned. I handed back my students’ work, and even before I could utter how proud I was of them for producing their first draft of the year with as much creativity and passion as they had, one of my students threw her paper on the floor, pushed back her chair, and with a large “humph” sound, buried her head on her desk under her arms. This young lady’s response to receiving her work knocked the wind out of me for a moment. And she wasn’t the only one! Looking around the room, I saw many faces fall, a few students began to well up with tears, and some students tore their papers into confetti sized pieces, scattering them across the floor in their haste to get rid of the revisions. In hindsight, handing back student work without prefacing my takeaways, process for providing feedback, and introducing what we would do with the feedback, was a “rookie” mistake.

I was confused by their reactions, given that much of what I had written on their papers was positive acknowledgements of what they had done well as writers. When had their relationship with writing gone wrong? Was this developmental? Did they take feedback as a sign that they were poor writers? Did they know how to respond to or implement feedback? Was this my fault? All of these thoughts ran through my mind, as I quickly strategized to salvage the block of time and also their fractured scholarly egos in that moment. I told the students to put their papers in their desks for a moment, asked each of them to look at me, and told them how proud I was of them. I also told them that we all need at least a second set of eyes when we are publishing work. I said something like, “We want the Mayor to respect our voices when he receives our letters and thus, we need to make sure that our voices are as professional and polished as possible.” I told them that we would spend the next day working on revising our work. I told them to read my comments and circle three comments of praise they agreed with and two revision suggestions where they were going to further their work.

Once the majority of the room was focusedon the task I had given, I was able to work on soothing the few students who were still visibly upset. In talking to the young lady who physically shut down when she received her work, I realized that she had been unaware there would be more than one draft of the writing assignment. She had panicked when she saw all the writing on her paper because she thought it meant she had done lots of things wrong. She couldn’t remember ever writing more than one draft of a piece of writing. As a side note, it should be acknowledged that this cohort of students experienced a lot of schooling disruptions during their 6th grade year. I know from cross-grade collaboration with herprevious teachers however, that she and her peers had experienced the steps of the writing process in earlier grades. The more students I talked to, the more a trend began to emerge. Although students had completed steps of the writing process in previous grades, the majority had not internalized or engaged in metacognitive thinking about the steps in the process enough to implement them with independence and confidence.

Over the course of the remainder of the year, I tried different peer and teacher feedback protocols. I tried a 3, 2, 1 peer revision protocol where students use the rubric to choose three things their peer writer did well, two copy edits, and one suggestion to add or delete a piece of their writing. I used different types of rubrics, both teacher generated, and student created through examination of mentor texts and class discussion. I ended the year with one major question: How could I build a classroom culture where students had confidence in, internalized, and were able to apply the steps of the writing process to a myriad of content related writing tasks? Experiencing moments of frustration, confusion, and struggle are essential for student growth, academic confidence building, and transference of skills. I wanted to ascertain how to provide the conditions for productive struggle, not defeat.

Example of feedback provided for student on assignment rubric.

 

This article is the first in a series of articles that will address facilitating the writing process in early career teaching.

Writing in Science: Persistence Makes Perfect

~ Marcus Penny ~ Leave a comment

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.  That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”  –Octavia E. Butler

Writing is an integral aspect of Science. It is embedded within the Scientific Method and the Engineering Process. Like experimentation, writing requires precision, organization, and perseverance. Whether crafting research papers, observations, or lab reports, scientific writing

This is a look at the Scientific Method through a writing lens.
This is a look at the Scientific Method through a writing lens.

requires students to demonstrate a deeper understanding of many complex procedures and phenomena that people often take for granted. Examining an idea as simple as breathing can lead to an exploration on the human respiratory system, the molecular composition of gas particles, or the interaction between humans and the environment. This curiosity and exploration is a  key element of learning in the Science classroom, as it is imagination that drives Science beyond it’s limits.

Students are naturally curious, and a in my classroom I find that the more knowledge they acquire, the more questions they have. My role as a Science teacher is to bring context and structure to questions students have about the world around them.  The payoff is found in the “Eureka!” moments that students experience during a carefully planned experiment. However, once these students experience these moments, they must be able to go beyond experimentation and explain what it is they learned. This is where the scientific writer is born.

Scientific writing requires students to ask questions and use experimentation, prior experiences, and content knowledge to develop claims that answer the questions. This is a messy process that requires in-depth research, proper tools, and willingness to engage in trial and error to get the desired results. But while students are eager to “get their hands dirty” with Science experiments, they are paralyzed with anxiety when asked to write about them. As many middle school teachers can attest to, this anxiety comes in form of perceived apathy and work avoidance.

Students writing observations as they simulate human digestion in test tubes.
Students writing observations as they simulate human digestion in test tubes.

My philosophy on writing in my classroom is as follows: Question everything, persevere until you find an answer, and record every step of the journey. At the heart of all we do, I want to them to embrace the curiosity of the world around them and articulate the discoveries that they work so hard to reach through experimentation. This is difficult, however,  as the Boston Public Schools’ middle school science curriculum does not have many lessons on explicitly teaching writing.  There is a discrete set of science content standards that I must teach in my subject area, and I struggle with balancing reading, writing, and content specific concepts. Add in the fact that when implementing any new protocols, I also need to differentiate for English Language Learners and students with disabilities, and, as a second year teacher, I feel the same paralyzing anxiety around writing as my students. This has required me to look outside of my curriculum, and seek the guidance of colleagues.

In the upcoming weeks I will be working closely with a team of teachers to document my experiences with teaching writing across the curriculum. I will be guided by the principle theories presented in the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) model in which classroom writing tasks can be presented through two lenses: writing-to-learn and writing-to-demonstrate-knowledge. When writing-to-learn, students will focus on key concepts ideas as opposed to grammar, spelling or style elements of writing. In Science, this form of writing can be used during quick-writes in a lab notebook, observations during an experiment, or sorter vocabulary-driven writing assignments. Other times, students will be asked to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of concepts covered over the span of several weeks. When preparing these formal writing assignments such as research papers, lab reports and informational papers, students will be employing strategies focused on writing-to-demonstrate knowledge.

Clearly, anxiety is not an issue for this student when examining different types of rocks.
Clearly, anxiety is not an issue for this student when examining different types of rocks.

It is my hope that utilizing these targeted strategies will help to lessen the anxiety many students feel around writing, resulting an ability to persevere when tackling  complex subject matter. I want my students to see that writing is nothing more than thought manifested into a physical form.  If they can think it up, then they can write it down.

Teacher Leadership In Action

~ Katy Ramón ~ Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2015-04-04 at 9.09.01 AMThe Writing Is Thinking team is a group of dedicated teachers who deeply wish to help our students express their incredible ideas, thoughts, and opinions. We want our students to have a voice and to be heard through writing. When our team arrived at the 2015 Teach to Lead Summit at the Wharf Marriot in Boston, we only had a rough question: How can teachers systematically support English Language Learners and students with disabilities to express their understanding by thoughtfully implementing writing across the curriculum?

This question has transformed into an exciting project in which the middle school teachers at two schools in Boston Public Schools, representing multiple contents, are collaborating to design thoughtful Writing Across the Curriculum strategies and artifacts. In this way, we seek to accomplish two main goals: increase teacher capacity to implement WAC and increase the capacity of all students to express their understanding. Despite the fact that we represent different contents, we do share one common belief:

All teachers are writing teachers; all students are writers in all content areas. Writing experiences and opportunities must be deliberately planned in all content classes.

In addition to refining our idea, during the summit I had the opportunity to attend seminars focused on teacher leadership. It was during this time that I had a career changing realization: I need to aspire to be more than a great teacher; I need to aspire to be a great teacher leader. Not because I crave power or want to be in a leadership role. For me, teacher leadership is not done for power but for our students. Our collaboration with colleagues, quest to improve our practice, and influence on educational policy and instructional decisions are done, first and foremost, with our students’ best interests at heart. And who better to know the best interest of our students than us teachers?

Screen Shot 2015-04-04 at 9.13.39 AM

Our project WritingIsThinking.org is ultimately for our students but it is inherently teacher leadership in action. In the September 2007 issue of Educational Leadership: Teachers As Leaders, Cindy Harrison and Joellen Killion list and explain the “Ten Roles for Teacher Leaders.” The ten roles include:

  • Resource provider
  • Instructional specialist
  • Curriculum specialist
  • Classroom supporter
  • Learning facilitator
  • Mentor
  • School leader
  • Data coach
  • Catalyst for change
  • Learner

Screen Shot 2015-04-04 at 9.06.24 AMWhat I love most about this article is that teachers are providing these resources and services for teachers. These roles can occur organically, through the collaboration of colleagues or they can be formally implemented. We as teachers need to share the things we do and open our classroom doors; we need to make it a point to go into our colleagues’ classrooms, notice what they are doing, and learn something new. This action will help to shape our school and professional culture, it will positively affect student learning, and we will share practices among colleagues. WritingIsThinking.org is inextricably connected to teacher leadership. We are sharing resources with each other, colleagues, and the community by starting a blog. We are affecting instruction and curriculum by planning WAC in our classrooms and sharing our work at conferences. We are learning from each other by meeting once a month at each others houses, reading books together, looking at student work together, and video recording each others’ classes and practices. Most importantly, we are doing this to ignite student learning and expression in classrooms across Boston.

But How Long Can YOU Write For?

~ alicelaramore ~ 1 Comment

In the most recent publication of the American Educator, Daniel T. Willingham’s article “For the Love of Reading” explores several methods for engaging students not only in moments of reading, but in a life-long love of it. I was struck particularly by a section of the article called “I’m Bored. Fix it.” in which Willingham offers:

“The consequence of long-term experience with digital technologies is not an inability to sustain attention. It’s impatience with boredom. It’s an expectation that I should always have something interesting to watch, read, and listen to, and that creating an interesting experience should require little effort….we just have a very low threshold for boredom.”

As an English/language arts teacher, I see my students struggle to sustain focus while reading. Each day, we chart the amount of time we read on a line graph, one color per class. The hope is that if students are aware of good reading habits and have the incentive of seeing the line graph trend upward (perhaps faster than the other classes), they will build stamina and a love of reading will follow. The graph does not motivate students for the entire school year, but at the beginning of the year especially, it incentivizes focus and sustained reading. After the habits are solidified, the graph becomes less important.

I began to ponder how to support my students as they built that same stamina as writers – how could I structure an activity varied enough to hold interest and generate content, but consistent enough that students can recognize progress over time?

My conversations with mentor teachers about that question landed me in the pages of Rain, Steam, and Speed (Gerald Fleming and Meredith Pike-Baky), which offered many ideas about how to build writing stamina in a middle school classroom. I read them, as teachers do, with my own students in mind, and took off running.

The premise was to give students a consistent atmosphere for writing, a clear expectation for what the writing should look like and how it would be graded, and engaging prompts to hold student attention and inspire thoughtful responses. The set-up also includes incremental increases in the time limit as students get more accustomed to the task.

To generate interest, I started off, as suggested, by having students personalize their journals. They spent a class period collaging, sketching, and markering their identities onto manila folders. The next day, I gave them a long spiel about the procedures for writing—the “how it works” talk—and then we gave it a go.

Scooby Journal      Carl B Journal

The consistent atmosphere for writing mirrors the consistent atmosphere that I build in my classroom for reading. The routine that Rain, Steam, and Speed suggests is that when students arrive, the prompt is written on the board. The same student passes out the journals each day. Before writing, one student reads the prompt aloud. The teacher, after thanking the student for his/her bravery, rephrases the prompt and checks for understanding. Then the music starts, and students write. I followed that routine, though I found it was easiest to project the prompt rather than write it long-hand because students had an easier time deciphering it.

As the year went on, I watched my students compete with and best themselves. Several students who started the year with only a few sentences per entry ended the year writing several pages on a single topic. This effect, which Fleming and Pike-Baky call “Writing Fluency,” normalizes the development of ideas while writing. A student does not have to be sure that an idea is “right” before adding it to an essay, nor does the student need to check in with a teacher about grammar and spelling before putting a sentence on the page.

As a result of this practice, students develop a confidence in their own work, and especially an ease to getting started that I had not seen before. This is not to say, however, that we did not hit road bumps. It took a lot of convincing for some of my students to pick up their pencils, and some of my prompts fell flat. But one of the most frustrating parts of this experiment for me was that the positive results that, though students were becoming more fluent writers in my E/la classroom, they were not applying that fluency in their other content classes.

As any teaching team begins to see students as writers in all contents, it seems that conditions, expectations, and engagement can be handled similarly across content classes to trigger that same confidence and stamina. Normalizing writing as a method of thinking and giving students practice helped them through boredom and exhibit their thought processes through writing. For example, I can see students writing in the same conditions that I used in my classroom on the many possible outcomes of an experiment before trying it out in a science class or explaining the best way to approach a thought problem in math. Once students find value in thinking through writing, they can use it as a tool to deepen their understanding of content and concepts.

Near the end of that school year, I overheard one of my students talking with an eighth grader (one year older) about high school. The conversation got a little competitive, and after the eighth grader elaborated on all the high schools where she had been accepted and the grades she had gotten that year, my student looked at her and asked, “But how long can you write for?”

Internalizing the Writing Process: The Planning Phase

~ Jennifer Dines ~ 1 Comment

How can educators ensure that students internalize the writing process? High quality writing instruction provides students with not only compositional skills, but also teaches writers a process that they can use to complete any writing project from the blank page to a published work. Internalizing such a process empowers students to complete any type of assigned writing tasks as well as how to begin their own writing pieces – allowing students to independently write about whatever they might choose and to transform into authors, journalists, poets, and bloggers outside of the classroom.

boy writing
A sixth grade student at the Gardner Pilot Academy reads and takes notes during the planning stage for an essay contrasting a police shooting in Boston to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

I have adopted the mnemonic P.O.W.E.R., and I find it  extremely useful as a memory aide for the writing process. P.O.W.E.R. stands for Plan, Organize, Write, Edit and Revise, and Rewrite. This mnemonic is introduced to the students during the first weeks of school, and it used for all of our process writing work throughout the year.

I usually select a project centered around the theme of identity for our first process writing piece of the year. As I model writing about my own identity for my students, it allows them to get to know the human side of their teacher, and their published pieces serve as a platform for sharing their own identities with their classmates, myself, and the wider school community.

WRITING
Seventh and eighth grade students from the Lilla G. Frederick Middle School plan for script writing at local writing center 826 Boston.

As I guide the class through these initial writing process pieces, I explicitly teach lessons around each step of the writing process. I begin by assigning a quick write focused on the following question: How do people who can write have an advantage over people who cannot write? Student thinking and responses to this question inform a class discussion focused around the essential question “How can writing give you power?”.  This initial discussion tends to focus on practical examples from students’ personal and family experiences, such as being able to write a note to a friend, a job application, a check, or an e-mail to a teacher. However, as the year progresses, this question is revisited in the context of reading, discussing, and writing about current and historical news articles, ancient and historical texts, and class novels.

As we progress through each stage of the writing process, I offer explicit lessons that unpack each stage from Planning to Rewriting. Two years ago, the assigned identity piece was writing a “This I Believe” essay. During the planning phase, students listened to, read, and took notes on “This I Believe” audio and writing examples online. Then, the class and I discussed the characteristics of “This I Believe” pieces.

I explicitly unpacked the planning stage by ensuring that each student understood and was able to complete the following sentence stems:

  •   I am writing in the following genre: ____________________ ____.
  •   I am writing this (genre name) so I can ______________________.
  •   I am writing for an audience consisting of ____________________ .

At the end of the planning stage, I ensure I have received each students’ Planning Statements. They tend to be more or less the same for each student:

I am writing in the following genre: “This I Believe” essay. I am writing this “This I Believe” essay so I can express how a life experience shaped my beliefs. I am writing to an audience consisting of my classroom and school community.

Knowing that students have participated in the planning process ensures that students begin their work with the end product in mind.The sentence stems for planning are posted on a chart paper in a classroom, and we refer to them throughout the year as students move through writing projects across a variety of genres. This practice and repetition allows for students to internalize the writing process, committing the steps to memory, so more attention can be given to the finer points of their words as opposed to the steps they take to get them on paper.

This article is the first in a three part series on the topic of “Internalizing the Writing Process”.