Shana Karnes

Writers Workshop at the College Level

I have had so much fun reading student work this week.

There. I said it. I actually ENJOYED grading…for once!

Like Amy, I learned about the world, my students, and their funds of knowledge. Grading has been going well for me this week.

Well, I wasn’t really grading so much as giving students feedback on their final papers, which are due on Monday. We’ve been engaging in a virtual writing workshop, in which I start a dialogue with students about their writing via comments on their Google Docs, and they reply, revise, and we re-read.

I taught a mini-lesson via email on what I noticed the whole class might need to know (shorter paragraphs, most recently, as well as the power of the single-sentence paragraph).

In class, I’ve taught mini-lessons on seamlessly weaving in references to outside texts, developing a writing voice, and crafting an “I believe” credo statement. We’ve read each other’s writing, as well as our course readings, not just for content but for craft.

Students had choice in their topic, genre, and process. They described their teaching philosophies, educational experiences, and literacy histories through cartoons, lists, stories, essays, pictures, and poems.

We worked for about six weeks this semester on this writing, all of which was ungraded. It will eventually constitute 10% of their course grade, and when I calculate that number, I’ll factor in student growth, effort, and style–not just the final product.

With great success, my students engaged in writers workshop–at the college level.

I knew that this was a new experience for them for several reasons. Many students emailed me to ask if they could send me extra drafts, or began their pleas with an apology for being a bother, or panicked when they first saw the sheer volume of my comments.

But when they realized my feedback was a balance of suggestions, praise, or exclamations of delight, they relaxed.

When they realized that I would read as many drafts of their writing as they wanted, and that we had built-in class time for peer review, they relaxed.

When they realized that questions were welcome, and not an indication of ignorance or a lack of preparedness, they relaxed.

They relaxed into becoming teacher-writers, which is something we all believe every teacher should make a part of her practice.

Writing–at every level, from kindergarten to college and beyond–should be therapeutic, pleasurable, engaging, challenging, and every bit of the art form that it is.

Writing should not be painful, terrifying, or crippling. It should serve as a way for our students to continue their learning, rather than as an end measure of what they know.

By keeping these values at the heart of my teaching, I’ve felt like I was back in my high school English classroom for the past few weeks. There was fun, noise, creativity, debate, and even dance parties and craft supplies when we assembled portfolios, in my college classroom. In addition to being enjoyable for everyone, this workshop mentality helped produce some outstanding writing that I’ll be so proud for my students to showcase in their final admission portfolios.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader.

What We Teach vs. How We Teach

Pedagogy, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes March 31, 2017 Comments: 2

We all struggle constantly to find balance in our classroom. The demands of our students, our workplaces, our curricula, our standards, our colleagues, and ourselves are all but impossible to manage.

Generally, as a teacher, when I struggled with that balancing act, it looked something like this:

Yeah. It wasn’t pretty.

Although I’ll probably never manage the perfect balance, I think I’ve edged a little closer to some sort of evenness through the process of tweaking, refining, revising, and rethinking how and what I teach.

I primarily do this by considering all things through the lens, first, of who I teach.

But I don’t think it’s enough to just say, hey, I know my students really well through lots of conferring and they know my expectations really well through lots of modeling and boom! learning occurs!

I think it’s really important to consider how and what we teach, too.

As a new teacher, I spent AGES pondering what I’d teach. I was manic about designing thematic units, creating a complicated web I’d fill in before I introduced each central text, whether read or written. I’d make sure I had some contemporary stuff and some old stuff, some poetry and some music, some fiction and some nonfiction.

My units were full of variety, that was for sure, but they all centered on classic books and pretty classic compositions, too–The Catcher in the Rye, a literary analysis; A Separate Peace, an argument essay. I didn’t understand why students weren’t engaging with what I was teaching. I mean, it was awesome!

Then I happened upon Alfie Kohn’s excellent article in Education Week, It’s Not What We Teach, It’s What They Learn. I felt a little stupid, as I often do when I read Kohn’s matter-of-fact words–I picture him saying, duh, Shana. What you’re teaching doesn’t matter. You have to change how you teach it.

So, I threw myself into a focus on my methods. How were students supposed to thrive if everything we did was so high-stakes? How were they supposed to feel any agency or empowerment if they didn’t have as much choice as I did in their curriculum?

I did a lot of reading about the importance of how we do things. Penny Kittle mentioned Dov Seidman’s How at NCTE, and I jotted the title down, thinking it was one my husband would enjoy. I bought it for him, but ended up devouring it myself. Thomas Friedmann applied Seidman’s principles to the economy; why couldn’t I apply it to teaching, too?

That was when I committed to full-on workshop teaching, and that was the year I experimentally abandoned teaching whole-class novels, too. I liked a lot of the changes I saw in my students, but with my focus on how I was teaching, I felt that my curriculum began to weaken. Units felt disjointed since I wasn’t spending as much time obsessing about what to teach. Something intangible felt lacking.

I had to move back toward strengthening my curriculum, while maintaining the benefits of an added focus on my methods, in a new kind of classroom.

I realized that I needed to combine all three of those things to get closer to achieving a good balance: knowing who I taught, thoughtfully considering how I taught, and carefully selecting what I taught.

It wasn’t enough to teach with a pedagogy of engagement if what I was teaching didn’t match who I was teaching. Similarly, it wasn’t enough to design layered, high-interest units of study that featured reading and writing and talk and practice and joy if the things we read and wrote and talked about and practiced didn’t match what my students cared about.

With every lesson and unit I design, I struggle to find the sweet spot that balances who and what and how I teach. Like all teaching, it will always be a great deal of work to find that balance–but being aware of the necessity of all three of those factors has without a doubt improved my practice.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

A Pedagogy of Engagement

Readers Writers Workshop March 24, 2017 Comments: 8

Several weeks ago, I saw that many of my teacher friends were sharing an article on Facebook.

The title? “Your kids bored at school? Tell them to get over it.”

Oh boy, I thought, and clicked on the link to see what it was that so many of my friends seemed to agree with.

This author’s argument is that student apathy is one of the biggest problems plaguing education; that teachers cannot be expected to “dazzle and awe” their students for fear of burnout; that students are now consumers and education is now a product, and that if students “aren’t impressed with how it’s packaged, they’re not buying.”

Hudgens–a high school teacher herself–thinks students shouldn’t be such choosy consumers, but should rather be self-motivated to find their own success at school. “It’s a teacher’s job to make learning exciting,” she laments, but, “the world isn’t a video game…and doesn’t always offer fun and exciting paths…through life.”

While I agree with some of this author’s points, such as her goal for students to feel passion toward education and a motivation for life-long learning, I think her writing reflects a trend I’m seeing lately when it comes to the imprecision of language educators use when we talk about our goals for students.

There are a number of things Hudgens seems to conflate. The first is that “this is hard” and “this is boring” are the same thing–and they’re clearly not. When students are disengaged, either something is too hard, or too boring–not both. When they’re not in the zone of proximal development, students are not in a place for learning.

So whose job is it to get them there?

In my view, it is mine–a great principal once told me that “you are the only factor in the classroom you can control.” This is true, and if you’ve ever been in front of 32 teenagers in 8th period, you know you can’t control much of anything in that scenario.

I believe fostering engagement is my job. Once I can get kids hooked on a just-right book, or writing fluently in the zone of proximal development, and they catch the bug of feeling successful in their learning endeavors, engagement is self-sustaining.

The second part of this author’s argument that I disagree with is her belief that students’ rejection of how education is “packaged” is due to their lack of self-motivation. Research on Generation Edge shows that this just isn’t true–Gen Edgers reject standardized education and embrace progressive education because they find more value in the latter. This means that one commenter on the article hit the nail on the head:

I have to agree with this reader. Students recognize, and reject, an old-school emphasis on sit and get. In contrast, they embrace engagement when work is appropriately challenging and authentic.

My final issue with two ideas Hudgens seems to muddle is this one:

Unfortunately in a consumer-oriented educational system, words such as habit and discipline have all but gone by the wayside. We emphasize concepts like differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning and data-driven instruction over student responsibilities like organization, perseverance and hard work.

In no way would I ever believe that differentiation, higher-order thinking, cooperative learning, or data-driven instruction are not good practices for student learning. Why are those placed on opposite ends of the spectrum from habit, discipline, organization, perseverance, and hard work?! All of those things have a valuable place in our instruction.

Habit and discipline are concepts teachers should be teaching–I spend time with my students helping them to learn habits that will develop fluency in reading and writing, and once they feel empowered, they build their own habits of discipline and perseverance when they attempt to read challenging texts or write complex compositions of their choice, spurred by intrinsic motivation when they see what’s possible.

These are authentic habits of engaged students, not arbitrary habits of compliant kids pushing through things that are boring or meaningless like rote instruction often is. The opposite of rote instruction is engaging, student-centered learning—not “fun” or “exciting” teaching whose purpose is to “dazzle and awe,” in the words of Hudgens.

To create self-motivated, lifelong learners, our goal must be engagement. And a pedagogy of engagement is not the same thing as teaching that is “fun” or “exciting.”

The bottom line is: when we design instruction with a pedagogy of engagement in mind, student self-motivation is the result. Students do not need to “get over it” if they’re bored in school. This is outmoded thinking. Our learners have every right to reject the asymmetrical and arbitrary power imbalance of teachers over students, and demand high-quality instruction that is challenging, personal, and individualized.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

Reframing Independent Reading: We Can Start By Not Grading It

Classroom Library, Grading, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes March 17, 2017 Comments: 28

All week, I’ve been thinking about Pernille Ripp’s exasperated plea, “Can we please stop grading independent reading?” (I imagine that she initially had an exclamation point at the end of that post, like, COME ON, people, but then deleted it to be nice.)

Still, I am one of those people she is exasperated with. Or I was while in the high school classroom, dedicatedly printing log sheets and grading reading every week for three years, using a complicated system of reading rates and conferences to give a number grade that reflected reading growth and sustained progress.

One year, I abandoned this system in the third quarter, just to see what would happen–would kids stop reading if I removed the accountability of a weekly reading grade?

Yes, yes they would–and they did. So I re-instituted weekly grades, which, combined with a quarterly assessment, combined to 20% of my students’ total grade. I was happy that this much of my course grade was dedicated to independent reading, but I didn’t realize that the grades I was mandating weren’t really creating independent readers at all. (In hindsight, I should have begun the year without reading grades and created an authentic community of readers who weren’t motivated by reading logs.)

After I read Pernille’s post, while thinking about this idea (read: beating myself up for slaughtering kids’ love of reading), I pulled out one of the most memorable texts I read while in college–Janice Pilgreen’s The SSR Handbook. In the foreword, Stephen Krashen writes:

Free voluntary reading means reading what you want to read, with no book reports, no questions at the end of the chapter, and not having to finish the book if you don’t want to. Sustained silent reading provides children with an opportunity to do free voluntary reading in school. Is this a good idea? Yes.

Pilgreen lists eight components of a successful SSR practice:

Access – to many reading materials (books, newspaper, magazines, comics)
Appeal – the materials are interesting and appropriate for the students
Conducive Environment – the space in which students may read is comfortable and welcoming
Encouragement – teachers and peers encourage students to read through discussions, modeling, and more
Staff Training – teachers should have practical approaches in place for helping kids become readers
Non-Accountability – no records, no monitoring, no “task-oriented” attitudes toward reading
Follow-Up Activities – thoughtful, creative, interactive ways in which students discuss their reading lives authentically
Distributed Time to Read – a volume of time that consistently occurs during which students read freely in school

When I think now about these eight simple factors, I see them clearly through the lens of workshop teaching. To me, the components translated to my real-world readers workshop classroom look like this:

a classroom library brimming with high-interest books;
a reader-friendly community built not only into a welcoming physical space, but one in which daily reading, talk, conferring, and encouragement happen;
a teacher-leader who is the best reader in the room, who can model fluent reading and recommend a wide volume of books to students;
a lack of graded formative assessment and an emphasis on summative assessments for learning, not of learning.

This means no reading levels, no required number of books per year, no structured programs in place, no minimum number of minutes of reading done per week. This means relinquishing control. This means a lot of modeling, conferring, and progress monitoring to encourage student growth and lifelong learning.

This means thinking about independent reading as truly independent–independent of grades and of accountability. This means reframing independent reading in school as an authentic, student-centered activity in which the readers take the lead and teachers merely help provide coaching and guidance.

If these ideologies are in place, teachers will know if kids aren’t reading (by simple observation and conferring). We can adjust our instructional practices from there, without the damaging effects of punitive grades. We can still give a grade for summative student self-assessments of independent reading growth (student-led is the key, here) to satisfy those mandatory gradebook updates, but if students are to become real readers we, as teachers, cannot be the ones holding them accountable for their progress.

There are many other kinds of reading that happen in language arts classrooms in addition to independent reading: whole-class study of texts; small-group book clubs; close reading studies of poetry, articles, essays; explorations of mentor texts; analyses and syntheses of plays and novels and writing of all sorts. This is where the work of learning to become a better reader can come in (which can be very enjoyable!), which lends itself to skills-based reading assessments.

In contrast, independent reading and all its many joys and struggles and spaces for success and failure are not, as Pernille says, “gradeable skills but instead a child practicing habits to figure out how to get better at reading.” If we want to nurture this practice, we cannot keep grading it–and that’s the first step to reframing our thinking about independent reading.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

Beyond Hillbilly Elegy: Books for Country Boys

Books, Boys & Literacy, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes March 14, 2017 Comments: 10

Bull with a few of his favorite books

I’ve been thinking about one of my former students recently, wondering how he’s doing. His name was Logan, but everyone–his family included–called him Bull.

I’ve been thinking about him because I had him in class for two years, and it took me a long time to realize I’d been recommending all the wrong books for him.

With the recent popularity of a book like Hillbilly Elegy (which has caused quite a stir here in Appalachia) I’m reflecting on how it’s a book I probably would’ve recommended to Bull. Like the many other “country” books I’d offered him, figuring the text had a character he could actually relate to, I think Bull would’ve hated it, as many of my friends here in West Virginia have. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but my peers and students alike who have say it’s too much of a stereotype of Appalachian culture, that it paints Appalachia much too negatively, and that it in no way captures the beauty of our mountains, music, or lifestyle.

I had a hard time getting Bull interested in reading, but boy, he’d write. He wrote beautifully about the country he lived in, the simplicity of his family life (he showed me videos of teaching his barefooted three-year-old brother how to operate a push plow on their farm), and his love of hunting.

I think no book can capture the kind of love that a kid like Bull has for his own heritage, and I didn’t realize that when I offered him book after book that I thought had a “similar” kind of character for a protagonist.

But, in his reading life, Bull was a different kid last year. He was a senior, about to enter the real world and acutely aware of his need to be prepared for it.

When I talked to him at the end of last school year, he described his junior year reading life as “shitty.” I asked him why, and he said, “cuz I was lazy.” He read two books all year, and when I talked to him about this, he laughed sheepishly.

Last year, he’d read 13 books and was in the midst of his 14th–Monuments Men by Robert Edsel–when I went on maternity leave. I think he read 17 books by the end of the school year. Before I left, I talked with Bull about his reading life. We’d discovered his love of war books with American Sniper. “My great grand-pap was in Vietnam, and I want to read about what he went through,” Bull explained, gesturing to his stack of books.

I also asked him how he felt about reading. “It calms me,” he told me. “It gives me something to do.”

It calms me. I still remember him saying that to me, sitting in my classroom with the back door open, where a spring breeze wafted in and the sounds of kids eating lunch outside could’ve been a huge distraction. But as Bull reflected on what reading did to him, the act of thinking about books took him away from our classroom and into a place of relaxation.

I loved watching reading transform Bull.

From war biographies, Bull moved to war fiction, then to books in verse, then to graphic novels, then to a variety of nonfiction titles. He eschewed books about country life, popular fiction, and YA novels all year.

I’m thinking about Bull now as I reflect on the mirrors, windows, and doors we ask students to walk through in their reading lives. I’m thinking about him as I reflect on Pernille Ripp’s plea for us to stop grading independent reading. I’m thinking about how I approached Bull first with books I thought of as mirrors, but he was craving windows and doorways all along. I’m thinking about how his whole junior year, he got 2/10s on reading logs, and I’m thinking about what a colossal mistake that was on my part.

So, last spring, I asked Bull to compile a list of his favorite books, and the draft has been sitting in my WordPress sidebar ever since. I share it with you now to remind you that this list, a list for “any country boy,” in Bull’s words, is a list of books set far beyond the mountains of Appalachia–and represents a story that can never be told with an independent reading grade.

Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell – “This was an amazing book. It was a true story of a Navy SEAL, and his whole team got attacked in an ambush and he was the only one that lived. Just the things that he gives you is like standing in war–it’s just amazing how something can give you so much detail that it seems to be real.”
Article 5 by Kristen Simmons – “It was the end of the world basically, and there are a few kids running away from the people who were going to kill them. It was also a really detailed book so I could imagine what the new world looked like. I liked that book a lot.”
Perfect by Ellen Hopkins – “This book was all about everything people give up to be perfect. The whole time I was reading it, I just thought, nobody’s perfect–what is wrong with these people? But it made me understand everybody else better.”
The Auschwitz Escape by Joel Rosenberg – “Hitler ruled this book. It was about war from a prisoner’s point of view, and it gave lots of detail about what he went through and what Hitler forced him into. I would never have wanted to be part of World War II as a soldier or a prisoner. That was some crazy shit.”
Symphony for the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson – “This one was really hard to understand compared to the other WWII books I read. I picked it for my challenge book, and it was about what happened in Russia during World War II. It taught me more about writing than about war, honestly.”
Watchmen by Alan Moore – “This was my first graphic novel and I liked that it was and was not about war, at the same time. It was kind of about the cold war, but through the fighters’ eyes and not the politicians or the history books.”
The Blind Side by Michael Lewis – “Well this book was nothing like the movie, but I wanted to read the book after I saw the movie. It’s about a football player that came right out of the Bronx, basically had no mom, and he just went from clear down to about nothing to making millions of dollars a year playing in the NFL. I got inspired by him how you can come from nothing to the NFL and you can do anything you put your mind to.”

Bull now works for the water company here in West Virginia, still lives on a farm…and still reads. And the song of his reading life is so much broader than a hillbilly elegy.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

Why I Returned to Hard-Copy Grading

Grading, Professional Learning Community, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Talk, Writers Workshop March 10, 2017 Comments: 11

Grading, grading, grading.

Sigh.

As the kids say, I literally cannot even.

Where do I begin?

Grading, to me, is one of the necessary evils of education–along with mandatory monthly fire drills, whole-building staff meetings, and standardized tests. I have disliked it for the duration of my teaching career, as I have disliked all of those things, but I still have not found a way to avoid it.

When I left the high school classroom last May, one of the things I was happiest to let go was grading. (That and those damned fire drills.)

But I didn’t expect to come to loathe grading even more when I began teaching college students.

There were a few reasons I disliked grading in my new job: first, I found that, by dint of the course designs I inherited, that the only “grades” given were at the very end of the semester. This meant that what little formative feedback was built into the course wasn’t seen as valuable–by the students nor the other instructors I was working with. I sat in meetings where a colleague complained about “having to do all that reading and write all those comments for nothing” (“nothing” being no grade). I thought to myself, wow, you’re missing the whole point of formative feedback.

Another thing I loathed was that most everything was electronic. Any assignment due was expected to be turned in via email/eCampus/Google Drive two days prior to the class meeting, and the instructor was to give feedback and a grade before class began on Friday. This meant that the only feedback about a student’s work was always only given by the instructor, and that students never saw one another’s work.

So, as the semester moved along, I began to make some changes to the course design: more formative feedback, more frequent turn-in checkpoints for large assignments, lots of ungraded, low-stakes drafting of ideas in class. We all hobbled to the end, adjusting assignments and expectations as we went.

But over the winter break, as I reflected and gathered the many post-its of ideas I’d stuck here and there, seeking to refine our syllabus and clarify our goals, I thought of one major change I could make that would solve a lot of my problems with the course.

Return to paper.

Good, old-fashioned, print-it-out-and-bring-it-to-class-and-turn-it-in assignment submission.

This practice has had a few key benefits for me so far this semester. First, I am seeing much more clarity of thought in my students’ talk in class–I suspect because they’re treating their weekly one-pagers as first drafts of their thinking, and then re-reading them, as evidenced by their frequent typo corrections or asides to me in the margins.

Second, the issue of opacity between students’ assignment submissions is gone. Each class meeting, I try to build in a time to share our writing, whether by trading papers, using our papers as an artifact to support some talk, or asking students to comment on one another’s work. I ask students to read not just for content, to glean multiple perspectives, but also to read for structure, to see how other writers think through the issues we’re grappling with. As a result, I’ve seen a great deal of growth in how students structure their writing, as well as a transformation in the confidence of their writing voices as they engage with (and often question) the ideas in the texts we read.

Third, we’ve been reading Visible Learners this semester, which encourages the practice of documentation for the purpose of reflection. By having concrete documentation of our thinking in the form of hard-copy papers, as well as hard-copy documentation of responsive thinking in the form of my comments or their peers’ in the margins, it is much easier to trace patterns and progress in our thinking.

Fourth, I’ve found that removing laptops or tablets from the equation when students share work actually improves the quality of their conversation. I’ve been reading widely about how detrimental our devices can be to our talk, so I’ve made a conscious effort to reduce our screen time in class. Fewer devices lead to more robust dialogue, which leads to better thinking and writing and time together overall.

Finally, my students are now accustomed to receiving frequent formative feedback and have come to expect and welcome it. Initially, the students were a little wary when they saw my scribbles, assuming they were all corrections, but then were delighted when they actually read the feedback a peer or I had left. Now, they hunger for the moments when a friend hands them back their paper with a handwritten note, or I return assignments the next class.

Switching to hard-copy grading has improved a great deal of my work with my students, and although I still haven’t come to love grading, I am enjoying it a lot more this semester.

Now to tackle that huge stack of one-pagers that’s been staring at me all morning…!

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

4 Ways Teachers Can Be Kinder–To Our Students, Ourselves, & One Another

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes March 3, 2017 Comments: 11

Last week, my students finally hit the breaking point.

Maybe it was knowing that my stressed-out little preservice teachers had just one more week until spring break. Maybe it was the fact that Betsy DeVos had just said or done something stunningly idiotic. Maybe it was the fact that we were reading and thinking and writing and talking about yet another heavy topic.

Whatever it was, as we discussed the futility of policy changes in education, one of them burst out, “it’s hopeless! We’re just teachers! There’s nothing we can do!”

Channeling my inner Pam Allyn, and directly quoting her, I exclaimed, “Yes there is! Teaching IS social change!!!”

And by exclaimed I really mean shouted.

My students sat up a little straighter, possibly slightly afraid of me at this point. But I was not deterred–I opened a google doc they could all access, put them in groups of three, and asked each group to come up with one actionable change that teachers could do in class tomorrow that would address some of the issues in our readings.

Ten minutes later, they’d created a pretty nice list.

As I re-read it this morning, I’m thinking about the patterns I see in these actionable changes. The overarching one: kindness.

Kindness requires thoughtfulness, which in the fast-paced world we live in can actually be quite difficult to enact. I think that, if we can slow down for just a moment, we can enact social change in our classrooms by modeling, teaching, and living simple kindness. Here are four ways to think about that.

Teach who matters, not what matters.

My fellow 3TTers and I had a pretty robust conversation the other day on Twitter about the merits of the “AP list” and limiting kids’ choice to it in AP classes. After much wordsmithing and hashtaggery, our basic conclusion was that it doesn’t matter so much WHAT we teach as it matters WHO we teach, and how. (Because we’ll never agree on what matters, anyway!)

We teach readers, not books. We teach writers, not five-paragraph essays. We teach wordsmiths, not grammar. When we frame our teaching like this, we remember why we got into teaching in the first place: because we love kids and want the best for them…and what’s kinder than that?

Be kind to other teachers.

I recently spoke with our NCTE student affiliate about why it’s beneficial to be connected to a larger teaching community on Twitter. During our conversation, I loved watching the students’ faces as they saw the likes of Tom Newkirk, Penny Kittle, and Chris Lehman come alive on the screen. These weren’t just mysterious high-tower authors who wrote the books they read–these were real people.

Their eyes were bright with wonder as they realized that they, too, could join that community of teacher-writers whose thoughts and opinions were valued, no matter how new or old one was to the profession. And that’s compelling evidence that we need to build a kind teacher community–because it ushers practitioners into the world of research-based best practices and creates a safe space for trying new things. Teachers can be mean. We need to stop. Cover a colleague’s classes. Nurture them when they need to grow as practitioners. Join them in their classroom. Smile at them during staff meetings. Try not to get frustrated, and apply the previous strategy–work with the person, not the teacher of Beowulf.

Allow yourself some freedom and autonomy as the teacher.

Standards are standards. But as Louise Rosenblatt says, they’re just ink on a page until you bring meaning to them. If we apply the transactional theory of reading to the Common Core, or any other set of standards, then they’re really not so bad. When I read a standard like this…

…I get excited. But many teachers don’t. As a high schooler, my teachers generally addressed this standard by assigning literary analysis papers. It doesn’t have to be that way!

For example, my fellow WV teachers Karla Hilliard and Jessica Salfia recently addressed this standard by having a #CrossChat on twitter after their students read Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover.

A twitter chat. As an assessment.

WHAAAAT??? HOW AMAZING IS THAT?!

But hey–if you can teach a rockin’ literary analysis, then by all means, do it. The point is that we have more freedom and autonomy than we often allow ourselves–whether because we’re pressured to conform to a school culture, or offered a prescribed curriculum, or confined by a set of district-wide initiatives. So be kind to yourself. Stretch those boundaries however you’re comfortable and be yourself, teach to your strengths, and make your job fun.

Forgive.

None of us is perfect, not any day, not any week, not any school year. We hear constantly about being reflective and reflexive practitioners, and we can be hard on ourselves when we reflect on our teaching or respond to our students’ confusion. It’s when we do not forgive ourselves for those imperfections that we become resistant to change.

We can never grow if we aren’t comfortable discarding our old skin, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of doing that. Forgive yourself if you, too, started your career by alienating kids with pop quizzes. Forgive the kid who called you a rude name yesterday, because hopefully he was having a bad day and isn’t just a jerk. Forgive the 9th grade teacher who slaughtered your students’ love of reading by giving 83 tests on TKAM. Teach your students to forgive the crappy first drafts of their narratives.

If we forgive, then we open the door for growth. And that’s the kindest thing of all.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or join her for the Slice of Life Writing Challenge here.

Readers-Writers Workshop: But, Does It Work? by Jessica Paxson

Guest Post, Jessica Paxson, Readers Writers Workshop February 3, 2017 Comments: 9

There are many things that are frustrating about teaching in general, and teaching SENIORS. They are almost adults who think they are already adults, and say they want to be treated as such, but show that they want to be treated like a child for just a little while longer.

Me too, guys. Adulting is HARD.

This makes for quite a few venting sessions during our PLC time. A few days ago, a fellow teacher was venting about our Shakespeare unit. She and another colleague noticed that the feedback from walkthroughs seemed to be nudging us more toward skill teaching rather than teaching whole works, especially in Shakespeare. She then began to vent about college readiness. They will HAVE TO read whole works in college. If they’ve never read anything cover to cover, they will never survive in college!

Obviously I began to feel my Reading/Writing Workshop senses going off. They’re much like Spidey Senses, but possibly even more dangerous. These topics are often thin ice with teachers, and if you stomp too firmly into the conversation, you’ll break right through and be left to freeze on your own in the frigid pool of, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T WANT TO TEACH SHAKESPEARE? In an effort to be heard and not misunderstood, I gingerly began to ask questions.

But will they need to have read THESE works, specifically?
Do you think non-liberal arts majors will encounter an entire work of Shakespeare during their time in college?
Do you think what they need to know is the stories of Shakespeare, or how to parse difficult language in general?

Then, finally, quietly, with the shaky hands I often get when I’m about to make something dear to me vulnerable to scrutiny, I asked: Have you ever read Book Love by Penny Kittle?

I’m surprised how many issues have come up this year during PLC to which the best solution would be, emphatically, give them choice on what they read; write more than you can grade; give them choice on what they can write; start where they are and gradually encourage more challenge and nuance.

I thought it would be helpful to write about some of the most Frequently Asked Questions I’ve received about RWW, even with less than a year under my belt of these practices. Here they are, in no particular order:

How do you make sure your students are reading challenging books?
How do you test their knowledge?
What if they lose your books?
What do you mean, use mentor texts? Are you talking about your Creative Writing class?
How do you grade if they all do different stuff?
Why are you making this so hard on yourself?

I have to tell you, I don’t know a definitive answer to all these questions. By no stretch of the imagination have I perfected Reading/Writing Workshop. (If you have, I’d love to borrow your brain for a day or five.)

What I do know, is that it works.

Don’t other things work, too? Maybe, but it depends on your goal. If the goal is for students to know facts about the plot of a handful of works, and know how to fill in a graphic organizer, sure.

Now, if only I could figure out how to answer questions on the spot, we might be in business!

Jessica Paxson is an English IV and Creative Writing teacher in Arlington, TX. She also attempts to grapple with life and all of its complexities and hilarities over at www.jessicajordana.com. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram @jessjordana.

Mini-Lesson: The Simultaneity of Instants by Jessica Paxson

Guest Post, Jessica Paxson, Modeling, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Writers Workshop January 27, 2017 Comments: 4

I am an anti-bandwagon jumper. I tend to think if everyone is flocking toward something, I’m likely too cool for it. I attribute that to my father, and I’ve discussed it before, but that’s beside the point.

This year, as I made the venture to RWW, I knew I would need to read lots of buzz-worthy books, simply for the purpose of recommending. Needless to say, I have slowly been broken down from my rigid ways. It’s because of this anti-bandwagon mentality that I am so late to the Anthony Doerr party, particularly in respect to All the Light We Cannot See.

I decided to tackle this novel over Christmas break because of how many people had recommended it to me. I was reluctant, but of course, Doerr drew me in with his utterly gorgeous descriptions of difficult cultural situations, the relationships between characters, and the flawless knitting together of a nonlinear storyline.

So. I’m a fan. Likely at least two years after everyone else, but better late than never, right?

I was specifically intrigued by one of the chapters near to the end, entitled, “The Simultaneity of Instants.” This chapter reminds me a little bit of the montages that occur at the end of a movie or a season finale in which all characters come together for a final appearance. The only difference with this chapter is that they did not come together in the same place, but simply in the same moment. I thought this would be a great way to coach my students through describing an important moment with a bird’s eye view.

Objective: Students will describe an important moment in their life by also providing a glimpse into that same moment for other “characters” in their story.

Mentor Text

Lesson: First, students will begin by writing about a specific moment that they remember vividly. You could draw from many different forms of pre-writing for writing about memories, but a few of my favorites are Writing Territories and Blueprinting. After students decide on a moment that was important to them, we will do a quick draft for about 10 minutes.

Next, students will begin to brainstorm about what other people might have been up to at that very moment. The key here is for students not to get hung up on what actually happened, but to simply imagine that moment in time from a broader scope.

Finally, after brainstorming simultaneous instants, it’s time to weave them together. This is the moment in which Doerr’s writing as a mentor text will be unequivocally valuable. Students will ask, “Well, how do I know which moment to put where?” And I’ll say, “What does the mentor text do?” And on and on until we have pieces of writing of which the students never imagined they would be capable.

I hope to do this along with my students, and I’m particularly imagining a Simultaneity of Instants starting with the Presidential Inauguration, or Obama’s farewell wave, or something to that effect. I may already be blubbering as I brainstorm.

Follow Up:

I teach Seniors and Creative Writers. While my CWers will work on this concept soon, I may save this for my Seniors until their end of year MGPs (anyone want to help me plan?). I think an imaginary Simultaneity of Instants as they walk across the stage. This will end up resembling an end-of-an-era-montage, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Jessica Paxson is an English IV and Creative Writing teacher in Arlington, TX. She also attempts to grapple with life and all of its complexities and hilarities over at www.jessicajordana.com. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram @jessjordana.

Remembering Why We Become Teachers

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes January 17, 2017 Comments: 5

Last week, when I met with my new crop of Spring semester students for the first time, I asked them to write one sentence that told me how they’d come to teaching.

Do you know what almost every single student wrote?

“Because I love working with kids.”

It was a reminder, for me: these young, idealistic, preservice teachers, on the very cusps of their careers…were here because of LOVE. For children, for learners.

We will spend the next three years with them working on their teaching craft, their pedagogy, their educational philosophy. We will offer classes in professional inquiry, classroom management, instructional design, content area methods, technology integration, special education, and more.

But we do not offer a class on why most of these students become teachers: a class on caring for kids.

We cannot offer such a class, because what would we put in the syllabus? It’s very simple: just remember to love and care for each of your students, day in and day out.

And that, for me, is the key. To remember we care for kids. To keep our students at the center of our classrooms.

I don’t believe anyone can be a good teacher if they merely love their students. Good teachers must, in addition to caring for their students, have mastery of content, pedagogy, and methods.

67685151d15291cb47b599262f7625a8 Whether or not our instructional practices show our care for our students is a good acid test for teaching reading and writing. Does assigning a book and then creating fifteen “gotcha” pop quizzes make students feel competent and confident as readers? No. Not a good practice. Nor are so many of the worksheets, textbook curricula, or 1990s-designed unit plans I’ve seen employed by some teachers.

But those are boring, you say. Well, what about something more fun? When teaching high school English, does assigning a reading project of tracing your hand and making it a turkey on which you list five books you’ve read make students feel competent and confident as readers? No. Not a good practice, either.

You’ll notice I’m measuring good teaching and good learning by student competence and confidence, and not by some other measure of “students are having fun,” or “students enjoy themselves.”

There are five core human drives that apply across all societies, all classes, all ethnicities, all ages, all genders. One of them is the drive to learn. All students want to learn, to satisfy curiosity, to demonstrate mastery–both to themselves and to others. Offering them learning opportunities to achieve and demonstrate this mastery show our love and respect for students, not our supreme wisdom or sublime control or smart strategies as teachers.

I’ve been troubled, lately, by how much talk there is in education about “fun” in the classroom, about how “students wouldn’t need grit if we made learning more fun,” and so on. When we make things too easy on our students (and too hard, or too meaningless), we aren’t showing our love and respect for our students.

Teaching and learning are difficult, complex things. They can rarely be boiled down to an algorithm, a strategy, or a single method. Carol Dweck, coiner of the phrase “growth mindset” (the foundational principle behind books I’ve loved like Peter Johnston’s Opening Minds and Choice Words), recently gave an interview in which she expressed heartfelt regret that her work was being turned into an easy and fun strategy for teaching. This “false growth mindset” essentially says that all you have to do to foster learning is praise kids for effort, whether or not that effort was successful.

When we focus too much on praise, or effort, or one simple strategy that will solve everything!!, we run the risk of teaching the strategy rather than the student. Amy recently shared with me a piece that it took me about four reads to unpack: “On Writing Workshop, Cognitive Overload, and Creative Writing.” This excellent blog post reminded me that when we do something like book clubs, if we spend too much time teaching students how to do book clubs, we aren’t spending enough time getting kids to actually do the work of literacy.

That’s not to say I don’t find value in book clubs, or the multigenre project, or any other lens through which kids might read or write. There is great value in using a few core strategies, again and again, to help students make sense of what they’re trying to understand. The key word is a few–so that students keep their focus on literacy, not the strategy or the project or the assignment. Keep it simple: quickwrites, book talks, constant revision, constant talk, and a high volume of diverse reading and writing. Period.

When we keep our classrooms simple, doing more with less and simplifying our instruction to include mostly reading, writing, and talk about reading and writing, we are keeping our care for our students at the forefront of our work.

As we launch into 2017, let’s remember why we became teachers in the first place: because we care about our students. Keep that love for learning at the heart of your work, and growth, competence, and confidence will be your rewards.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia and teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader.

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Author Archives: Shana Karnes

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A Pedagogy of Engagement

To create self-motivated, lifelong learners, our goal must be engagement. And a pedagogy of engagement is not the same thing as teaching that is “fun” or “exciting.”

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