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Uncovering the Bonds We’ve Built With Books – A Guest Post by Karry Dornak

I live for a good mentor text, and I have started to experience somewhat of a “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon” because I find them everywhere.

Most recently, while scrolling through Facebook.

An article titled, “Dying, with a Lifetime of Literature” sounded powerful, so I clicked the link.

I immediately knew this piece would appear in my classroom.

The piece, written by Lynette Williamson, a former English teacher of thirty years, documents her diagnosis with ALS while sprinkling in allusions to literary works that stuck with her and appeared at various times after her diagnosis: quotes from Toni Morrison, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even a connection to Kafka’s cockroach from The Metamorphosis.

I wondered, about myself and my students, “If we dug deep enough, which literary scars would we find hiding in our own skin?”

To start this excavation process, we created our own “ideal bookshelves” (based on the book My Ideal Bookshelf by Jane Mount and Thessaly La Force and referenced in Book Love by Penny Kittle). I get overly and outwardly excited when we talk books in our classroom, so, to spare my students another one of my emotionally-charged nerding-out moments, I stifled my excitement when I overheard their conversations about books! “Oh, remember this book?” “Oh yeah, that’s a good one – I need to add it to my shelf, too!” “You’ve never heard of this book? It’s so good! It’s about…”

And sure enough, at the end of the period, students were handing me their ideal bookshelves, my first peek into the connections they have forged with books.

The next day, we read “Dying, with a Lifetime of Literature,” together. I asked, “What is she doing as a writer?” And we agreed that she is referencing pieces of literature to tell her story. Then, to press the issue, I said, “We all superficially agree that books teach lessons (hello, thematic statements), but have we looked at that personally?” I told my students to visualize two timelines: one is everything they’ve read in life. The other runs parallel and is their life story. Where can we make connections or intersections between these two parallel timelines? What has happened in your own life that you could connect to a character’s?

To support this idea, I shared with my students the part of Mechanically Inclined where Jeff Anderson explains the “linguistic data pool theory,” where “all of a student’s visual and aural language experiences flow into that student’s personal pool of data” (17). I thought it fascinating to consider that what we read leaves marks on our schema and manifests itself at times and in ways that we may not even be aware.

At this point I’m sure my students are thinking I’m taking this idea way too far. So I snapped out of it, and we got to work.

And, true to my “Baader-Meinhof” tendencies, when I start thinking of an idea, possibilities appear everywhere. My instructional specialist, Stephanie, had recently shared with our grade level team an idea from Cult of Pedagogy (“16 Ways to Use Google for Student Projects”).

One idea is the e-book, which had just the right amount of simplicity and polish for our needs. I instructed my students on how to set up their e-books (using Google Slides, go to File, Page Setup, then change the dimensions to 8.5×11). Once the Slide is the right orientation and size, students can add images of books plus insert text boxes to type their own versions of Williamson’s writing.

For students who struggled to get started, I encouraged them to start the same way she did.

Hers: “When I was diagnosed with ALS….”

Mine: “When I lost my mom in 2009…”

A student’s: “When I heard the news that I would be going to study abroad in the States for 6th grade…”

I continued drafting my own “literary touchstone,” as I was now calling the assignment, in front of my students while they, too, drafted theirs. Writing together is powerful – students are able to see both my thoughts and my emotions while writing. The best writing is raw, real, and should be shared. After all, if these books had never been shared with us, look at all of the touchstone moments we would have missed out on.

To foster sharing, I created a Padlet. Students were able to share the link to their Google Slides presentation directly to that Padlet for other students to see. I make all of my Padlets require moderator approval, which means I have to approve the post first. This feature also allows me to not approve posts whose authors wish to keep their work private. I can still see the post, but others cannot.

This experience (the words “activity” or “assignment” just don’t do it justice) touched on so many things I hold valuable in the classroom: conversation, nurturing book love, experimenting with writing, sharing, and publishing.

Experiences like these don’t happen in my classroom every day, but I hope that now that I am seeking them out, the Baader-Meinhof effect will continue to work in my favor.

Karry Dornak is living the dream teaching sophomore English at Klein Collins High School in Spring, TX. She is energized by research-based practices, innovative ways to teach and learn, and coffee.

Care to join the conversation? We’d love to add your voice! Please email guest post ideas to Lisadennibaum@gmail.com.

Thinking Differently to Do More Thinking

Amy Rasmussen, AP Language, Inquiry-based Learning, Pedagogy, Readers Writers Workshop May 30, 2017 Comments: 3

I think most teachers would agree, no matter our content, our number one goal is to help students develop as critical thinkers. And in a world where technology rules much of their lives, impatience governs their actions, and emotions overcrowd the adolescent brain, this can be daunting.

We must keep trying.

Every day we see see headlines spouting fake news, and more and more we see headlines shouting “This news is fake.” We see sites on how to spot fake news, and analyze fake news. We have access to lessons on fake news — Google “lessons on fake news, and you’ll find 5,250,000 resources. We even see the hashtag #fakenews (a fabulous lesson on paradox btw).

A few months ago I read this article at Forbes. Then clicked through and read this one at BuzzFeed. I shared them with my students. We had an interesting discussion, but one comment left me thinking: “So, basically, everyone’s making stuff up. How are we supposed to believe anything?”

If we are not helping our students find answers to this question, we are doing a disservice to our students — and by extension a disservice to ourselves. What kind of world will we grow old in if we do not help the students in our classrooms today, determine fact from fiction, identify bias, value diversity of thought, be open to new ideas, support their opinions, and seek to understand before passing judgment?

First, we have to be willing to step outside our comfort zones and seek to understand other perspectives. (If you haven’t seen Outside Your Bubble, it’s an interesting starting place.)

Next, we must school ourselves on rhetoric. And then, we must weave it more overtly into all aspects of our instruction.

As English teachers, we have a prime opportunity: let go of the nine weeks novel study where we focus on characters, conflict, plot, and theme. Bring in speeches and essays and news articles that invite discussion about the use of language. At the very least balance the study of both.

A few weeks ago a group of teachers from a neighboring district visited my classroom. They observed as my students and I read two blog posts about the Fearless Girl and the Raging Bull statues: Seriously, the guy has a point, and an opposing view, No, the Wall St. Bull Sculptor Doesn’t Have a Point. The discussion was rich. The thinking was richer.

At the end of the class, I chatted with these teachers. We talked about the routines in my workshop classroom, the book talks I conducted, the way I transitioned from one thing to the next. Then, the conversation turned to novels. One teacher asked how long I spend on novels. I don’t. I responded. My students read novels in book clubs where they facilitate the discussion. They talk of plot and themes and author’s craft. They bring meaning to the text, based on their experiences reading the books. (I am not opposed to novels. I am opposed to spending too much time on them.)

I hesitate to challenge anyone on what they do in their classrooms. I do not know their students. I do not know their routines or their motivations, the goals they hope to accomplish as they instruct their students, or the limitations put on them by mandated curriculum.

I do challenge the idea that studying a novel for “a long time” like this teacher told me, is a valuable use of the limited time we have with our students. Our students’ need to navigate the language of their world is too great to spend week after week with a book “they really like” that “I read to them.” We must put the focus on the needs of the reader and not the book.

What our students need right now — what our country needs right now — is critical thinking around a wide variety of texts. We need a focus on how language works to persuade and to manipulate and to cause outrage. Really, that’s our best, and maybe, our only hope.

As we go into summer (I’ve got three days left), I hope we will think about how we might shift our thinking about the needs of our learners. As we read by the pool, vacation with family, attend conferences and trainings, work our part-time jobs, I hope we will think about language and how it can either make or break the communication that is so vital to a society, a society that will thrive on diversity, respect individuality, and foster empathy and productivity.

Teacher friends, that is our job. And I think it’s our duty.

Amy Rasmussen lives in north Texas and teaches AP English Language and English 3. She loves talking books, daughters’ weddings (two this year), and grandbabies. Facilitating PD for other teachers making the move into a workshop pedagogy keeps her focused on her own learning. Amy adheres to the words of Emerson: “We aim above the mark to hit the mark,” and Jesus: “Love one another.” Imagine a world if we all aim higher. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass.

Stop Teaching. I’m reading.

Amy Estersohn, Boys & Literacy, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop May 29, 2017 1 Comment

SCENE: My classroom

AMY is holding onto a clipboard and attempting to drink from a thermos of coffee while still Looking Important. She surveys the room of readers and stops at a student who has read an uncharacteristically large amount from the past day. She stops at the student’s desk.

AMY: How’d you do that?

STUDENT looks up from book.

STUDENT: Do what?

AMY: You know, how did you read 50 pages since the last time I saw you?

STUDENT (shrugs): I don’t know. I just did.

STUDENT returns to book.

Some teachers might find exchanges like these evidence of an unsuccessful conference with an uncommunicative student. Some teachers might want to go into further questioning: “Well, when did start reading? How long did you read? Where were you? Are you on your way to achieving a reading goal?” but it’s easy for that kind of reading conference to quickly turn into an episode of Law and Order: Minors After Midnight pretty quickly.

Instead, I tend to find conferences like these home run victories. This student is looking to end this conversation so that he can get back into reading. Isn’t that the best compliment of all?

When-do-we-need-to-stop

Granted, if every interaction with the student went like the above, I’d probe further. However, I look for three key ingredients when I evaluate these kinds of exchanges:

Is this student reading at an increased volume than he or she usually does?
What’s the student’s body language like before the conference? Is it a “please don’t talk to me right now” vibe?
Does the student act unsurprised by the idea that he or she read a lot?

If the answer to the three above questions is “yes,” I score that conference as a major reading victory, because:

I already de-incentivize book volume and page count. Students gain no reward for claiming they have read 20 pages when really they have read 2. This way, I trust when I see students reading more that that reading is their honest performance.
Students should like reading more than they like talking to us.
The student might not be able to accurately recall his or her extended reading period because he or she entered a state of flow. I don’t know how I managed to watch three episodes back-to-back of Survivor over the weekend. Students who don’t know how they managed to read a lot might not know because they entered a state of flow.

Okay, so where do you teach this reader in future conferences? They can’t all be this non-verbal.

Use this book as a benchmark of reading excellence for that student. Ask that student in a few months, “How does the book you are in right now compare to your experience of reading book XYZ?”
Help the student find more books like it using tools like Amazon.com, goodreads, or by talking to other readers. I am always amazed at how few students know how to look up another book by the same author.
Ask the student what mattered to them most about the experience of reading the book. Ask about the book, but ask about their feelings while reading, too. Keep in mind that for some readers a distinctive literary pattern emerges across their reading — say, books about kids with cancer, books about troubled homes, books about the apocalypse, books with strong female characters battling high school drama. For others, it might be about feelings — they liked or disliked a character, they enjoyed the world the author built for them, etc.

Amy Estersohn is a middle school English teacher in New York and a 2016 recipient of the NCTE Gallo Grant. And she hates being interrupted in the middle of a good book. Follow her on twitter @HMX_MsE.

5 Lessons from Public Teaching

Affiliate links, Books, Readers Writers Workshop, Reflection, Shana Karnes May 26, 2017 1 Comment

51A2WRYQAZL._SX312_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg This week I tackled a title that’s long been on my to-read list: Public Teaching: One Kid at a Time by Penny Kittle. Published in 2003, it’s Penny’s first book, and has a foreword by Don Graves and an afterword by Don Murray.

(Yeesh…no pressure for when the rest of us thinking about writing our first books, right?!)

I loved this book, a collection of short essays plus an interview with Penny at the end. It was readable, honest, and spectacularly well-written, as everything by Penny is. I smiled as I read every page–except for the pages where I was crying. Even in those essays I found myself impressed by the cleverness of Penny’s craft, both in her teaching and writing.

I bookmarked lots of pages and quotes to share with my preservice teachers this fall, but here are five lessons I took away from the reading that I believe are relevant to teachers of all content areas.

No one is perfect.

Penny begins her book with several amusing essays on mishaps from murderous crickets to accidentally-transparent skirts. She eases us into the notion that even she, the great Penny Kittle, has had some missteps in her career, then launches into a few gut-wrenching essays on what she reflects on as her more weighty teaching failures: a student we never say the right thing to, one we lose patience with, one we never teach to love learning or reading or writing.

We all have memories of those students, and Penny honors this with her writing. I loved these vulnerable, humble essays that remind me we all ride a rollercoaster of success when it comes to our teaching.

Classroom management is a myth.

Penny tells the story of a novice teacher, struggling to manage her classroom, making wrong turn after wrong turn as a battle with her students escalates. She has this to offer:

“Classroom management is really about the management of the heart and soul of your students. The only ‘technique’ that works is a full-hearted human response to their lives, and to the conditions of school. In some schools students sit in rows and listen, then rush to their next class, to sit and listen even more. Try to understand the conditions in your particular school and view the entire day through their eyes. … You aren’t bad. Your students are children, preoccupied with myriad distractions. It is a natural state. School is often the unnatural one.”

This advice was so much better, for me, than the age-old wisdom I got from mentors when I first began teaching and a lesson would crash and burn: “don’t take it personally.” I did take it personally, and still do, when I lose a class’s attention or a lesson falls flat. When I learned the lesson Penny teaches here–“You must teach the students, not the content. I want every student in my class to know that he or she is more important than what I am teaching”–I had far fewer of those flat moments and many more roundly satisfying ones.

Novice teachers need mentors, not critics.

We’ve all heard the statistics that half our teachers will leave the profession within three years. As Penny says, “teaching, like marriage, is best when you make it past the courtship.” The first few years are hard, and what makes them easier is exactly what improves my marriage: talk. As a young teacher simultaneously full of ambition and anxiety, I became more even-keeled when I found mentors. I talked with them, they empathized, they advised. I felt more prepared for my work, but I also felt less alone when I found a group of peers to encourage and support me. “We have to mentor new teachers, listen to them, and I guess, hold hands once in a while,” Penny remarks.

Less is more.

“Somehow we decided that four short stories is better than one rewritten four times, and it’s a huge mistake.”

Penny’s assertion about the way many teachers conceive of writing is so true to my own learning experience, and as a result, my own early teaching experience. I’ve been interested in the idea of simplifying my instruction for a while, and of course, Penny helped me see more clearly how to do it–with revision.

“I needed to have them linger longer over less,” she says, then backs it up with stories about an entire day’s work spent on fragments, the slow process of discovery learning, the work and power of weeks of revision on one genre of writing. We have to jettison some things if we really want students learning, to keep it simple, to remember that less is more.

Teachers need to write.

By joining a writer’s group of teachers at her school, writing an essay for the local paper with her students, and carving out the time from motherhood to write, Penny learned to be a much better teacher by writing. Her peer and student readers, as well as her editors, taught her to “be positive. Encouragement works; criticism hurts. Be careful with words.”

It’s hard to learn this lesson if you’re not a writer yourself, and Penny shows us her journey to becoming one throughout her essays. She describes the early days of her writing group this way:

“Their criticism stung. I didn’t like it. You have to be careful when you’re correcting someone’s work. I don’t think I was careful enough with my students all those years before. It was so easy to just tell them what wasn’t working and think that was helping. In writers’ group I learned quickly that compliments showed me what I could do and gave me confidence, criticism confirmed my fears and left me frustrated. When I confidently approached a piece to revise it, I was playful. When I went back to one in frustration, I usually made it worse.”

We become better teachers when we do what we’re asking our students to do–it’s only then that we can really know what we’re asking of them. I highly recommend reading Public Teaching, doing some writing (how about with us?), and reflecting on your teaching by doing both.

As we near the end of the school year, I hope you can find truth in one of Penny’s final statements: “In my experience, it isn’t the stress that’s left the greatest mark, it is the joy.”

Shana Karnes 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.

Author Bios – A Follow-up

AP English, Community, Lisa Dennis, Modeling, Readers Writers Workshop, Writers Workshop May 25, 2017 Comments: 9

I collected these papers 20 minutes ago, and I am smiling so hard that my second period class coming in asked me what was going on.

A few days ago, Amy wrote a post about students writing their own author bios. It was an idea that snuck up on me a few weeks back when Amy Poehler’s author bio made me laugh out loud.

Following much the same format that Amy detailed earlier this week, I introduced the idea to my students of writing our own author bios by reminding them of what they have heard from me one thousand times before over the course of this year:

“We are readers and writers.”

To reflect this persona, I shared with my AP Language students a quick writing prompt that is turning out to be one of the best writing assignments of the whole year.

When Brianna turned her piece in this morning, she had a huge smile on her face. “I had SO much fun doing this.” Brianna, as studious, driven, brilliant, and stressed out as they come, was beaming ear to ear. What a testament to the power of writing with self reflective purpose.

To facilitate this assignment we:

Looked over several sample bios from our book club books, some texts off my shelves, and a few internet suggestions.
Students talked at their tables and came up with a list of “look fors” in this type of writing. I was impressed by not only the length of the list, in terms of what they noticed, but some of the insight. “If you are going to write a funny book, be funny. If you’re writing about the Nazi’s, that’s not a good idea.” True, true. Style and form must match purpose. I love it.
Students then drafted both a current and a future author bio. The future bios were far and away the best. Students really embraced how wildly accomplished they will be as readers and writers after college. Additionally, this group is apparently going to rule the world.
Peer feedback came next, with an inclusion of Shana’s “Push and Pull” feedback strategy. It was wonderful to see the details and voice emerge from their pieces. Celina had a line about winning the Nobel Prize, an Oscar, and a Grammy. I suggested she tell us what she won the Nobel for, who she co-starred with for her Oscar win, and how many albums she sold for the Grammy. “Oooo! I helped kids in the Sudan by supplying them with books (Mrs. Dennis swoons), Brad Pitt came out of retirement to play my dad in the movie, and I sold a record to every high school student in America, Spain, and the Ukraine.” Yes, yes, yes!
Students took the peer and teacher feedback, went off to polish one of their bios, get an author picture, and turn in a final draft.
These are HOT off the presses and I am so proud of their voice and creativity.

If you only look at one example, check out this first one. Brianna had me laughing out loud. No wonder she was beaming ear to ear.

From line one, this piece had me laughing out loud. Brianna could not be a more serious student, but this work let her voice shine. I LOVE it from start to finish.

Connor is a pretty quiet kid in class. His writing fluency has improved A LOT this year. And look at that smile!

Charlie just won the most prestigious scholarship Franklin offers, because of his service, incredible heart, academic achievements, and being an all-around amazing person. He really opened up in his one pagers this year. I could not be more proud of this young man.

Tahseen is a very serious young woman, but the little quips in here brought out her true voice.

JJ too had a ways to go with his writing fluency and voice development. I’m seeing it now!

Errin is a young woman whose name you will know someday. I am SURE of it. She had this shirt on in class this morning. The picture was taken before 7:00am.

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. She delights in writing in the third person, claiming it’s akin to an existence in parallel universes. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum

Book Clubs Save Lives (and Sanity)

Readers Writers Workshop May 23, 2017 Comments: 4

I don’t know that I would survive the end of the year without book clubs. While this might sound hyperbolic, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that book clubs are the very best way I have found to round out the school year with meaning and enthusiasm for all parties involved.

In the past, I might’ve said that the end of the year was a time to push through and cover material for a final exam. In the past, I might have suggested that the end of the year was a time to have students start summarizing work that we had done in order to demonstrate cumulative knowledge, as if a project could encompass all we’d learned together. In the past, I believe I was missing the point.

I have since come to see the end of the year as the perfect opportunity to allow my students to dive once again into high interest texts in a way that promotes choice, challenge, meaningful talk, reflection, collaboration, exploration of weighty topics, and (ideally) momentum to continue reading over the summer.

Where previous final projects and speeches felt…well, final, book clubs feel like both a continuation and extension. We are honoring what we’ve been striving for all year – to be active, engaged, authentic readers.

Disclaimer:

This is not some sort of educational utopia. These are, after all, seniors who graduate in three weeks. For some, it’s rough. It’s been rough for awhile. But I keep at it.

I have a group of gentlemen, smart (though resistant) lads, who’ve spent precious little time reading and an irritating amount of time complaining during discussions. Perhaps, if they had more carefully looked over the extensive list of options, and/or read the descriptions of the books, I wouldn’t have been compelled to give my “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” talk after their last discussion.

Three. Weeks. To. Go.

Overwhelmingly, though, I’ve been blown away by the discussions I’m listening to and participating in.

Top nonfiction texts in my post-AP test book clubs this year include:

Evicted by Matthew Desmond
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Missoula by John Krakauer
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
American Sniper by Chris Kyle
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

A discussion on When Breath Becomes Air recorded with Screencastify

Discussions take place each class period and I’m having my kids occasionally use Screencastify (a plugin that took my kids 2 minutes to install and 3 minutes to configure and get comfortable using) to record those conversations.

They can record for up to ten minutes at a time for free and instantly send me the link via Google Drive. This way, I can float around all class period to gather insights, but if I get hung up or want to check in more carefully with a group, I have a snippet I can pull up and listen to whenever I want.

And, for the first time (both in the spirit of inspiration from my reading of Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst and needing inspiration to keep things fresh up until the bitter end), we’re focusing discussion on just two questions:

How is this reading changing me?
How is this reading changing my view of the world?

Beers and Probst have reminded me that the more often my students see books as “invitations to experience new thoughts” as opposed to “burdens,” the sooner we can realize the “ultimate goal of reading” which is to “become more than we are in the moment; to become better than we are now; to become what we did not even know we wanted to become.”

I’ve heard students discuss mortality and our responsibilities to the aging population, whether it’s better to have a community that is falling apart or no community at all, how they can use knowledge of habits to change their own and improve their lives, and what it means to overcome tragedy based on their reading coupled with their own experiences. As Amy said in a previous post about book clubs (with a bonus of suggestions for several great book club titles!), “Just let them talk.”

I want my students to spend every last class minute we have together focused on what they want to become…with books in their hands. Then, we are going to make goals for summer reading.

I don’t want to let them go without a plan to keep reading.

It’s my job to keep them reading. Our democracy, their spirits, and my sanity depend on it. How’s that for hyperbole? #booklove

Are you rounding out the year with book clubs? What are your students discussing? What are they reading? Please leave your ideas in the comment section below.

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. She has added eight books to her summer reading list just based on student discussion the last few weeks. No hyperbole. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum

An Idea: Author Bios and Some Focus, Wit, & Polish

Affiliate links, Amy Rasmussen, AP English, Books, Community, Modeling, Readers Writers Workshop, Talk, Writers Workshop May 23, 2017 Comments: 6

I stole this idea from Lisa. She said it was okay that I write about it first. Bless her.

I finally feel like I’m getting a little of my writing mojo back. If you’ve been following my posts lately, you know I’ve had a hard time. I loved my student teacher, but I missed my students and how they inspire me to want to write and share.

It hasn’t been easy taking back my classroom. I am much more intense than Mr. G, and this translates to mean for some of my students. It’s true I grade hard, expect a lot, teach bell to bell. It’s not that he didn’t — maybe it’s just that I’m 50+, and he’s close to half my age. Whatever the reason, reinvigorating relationships hasn’t been easy.

Kind of casually one day, Lisa suggested she wanted to write author bios with her students next year. She said she’d read a few she wanted to use as mentor texts, thinking this little writing task would be a way to help her students develop their identities as writers. What a fantastic idea!

So last week for our writer’s notebook time, we wrote author bios, short, little, quippy, quirky writing that states who we are and why we write. (We still need work on the why we write part.)

I prepared first by reading the inside back covers of some of my hardback YA literature. I chose four bios with similar elements: Andrew Smith, Winger; Julie Murphy, Dumplin‘; Heather Demetrios, I’ll Meet You There; and Jason Reynolds, All American Boys. {Bonus: four book talks, along with the author intros. Boom.]

I explained the task: We’re going to read four short author bios and then write our own. Listen to each one carefully, so we can pull out the similarities within each one.

We charted the elements of the bios on the board and then drafted our own.

We spent five minutes on the writing, two minutes on revision, and six minutes sharing with our peers. We laughed. We wondered if the authors wrote their own book cover bios. We discussed our writing process.

“It would have been easier writing about someone else,” one student said.

“I need more time to think of how to say things,” said another.

“This would be fun to do at the beginning of the year,”

“I don’t do anything!”

“I’ve never won anything!”

“I cannot write that I am interesting when I am not interesting.”

“Can we write about what we want to do in the future instead?”

Oh, yeah, we stirred the pot, and ideas bubbled out. Throughout their questioning, my response remained: Be creative.

One of the best books I’ve read on writing is How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark. I marked it up with lesson ideas: “the whole chapter would make a great lead in rhetorical analysis” and “on annotating: read before starting 1st book club” and “use b/f narrative –teaches analysis with song lyrics” and “parallel structure & compound sentences!”

This paragraph from the introduction is a great reminder for all types of writing — and writing instruction:

Focus, wit, and polish. My students and I talked about our identities as writers. We talked about the time it takes to develop our voice, our craft, our meaning.

As they read their author bios to one another, the cough of community clamored just a bit, and in a few minutes the whole classroom caught it.

I reminded students as they write over the next few days — finishing their multi-genre projects, their last major grade — to write with intention, to write in a way that shows the answer to the last question I’ll write on the board this year: How have you grown as a reader and a writer?

In the fall, I will do this exercise again. We will write our author bios at the beginning of the year, on day one, maybe. We will spent a good deal more time on them, and we’ll return to them again and again as we practice the moves all writers make to produce effective, convincing, creative writing. We will publish our writing with our bios. Hopefully, this will help us keep our sights on Focus, Wit, and Polish in all aspects of our writing.

How might you use this author bio writing activity? What tasks do your writers do that help them take on the identities of writers? Please leave your ideas in the comments.

Amy Rasmussen lives in north Texas and teaches AP English Language and English 3 at Lewisville High School. She loves talking books, daughters’ weddings (two this year), and grandbabies. Facilitating PD for other teachers making the move into a workshop pedagogy delights her. Amy adheres to the words of Emerson: “We aim above the mark to hit the mark,” and Jesus: “Love one another.” Imagine a world if we all aim higher. Follow Amy on Twitter @amyrass.

Varying Paragraph and Sentence Length for Effect

Amy Estersohn, Narrative, Readers Writers Workshop, Writers Workshop May 22, 2017 Leave a comment

The formula is simple.

Pair a simple, declarative sentence in its own paragraph with a longer, more detailed paragraph to follow. The two paragraphs set against each other will balance the other’s flavors out nicely.

Practice it mercilessly in workshop and use sparingly in finished work.

As you can see from this blog post, an entire essay or article that’s filled with long-short paragraph variations is going to tire, frustrate, and bore readers easily. It will also become predictable, just like predicting that LeBron James is going to score 20 points in a game. The good news, however, is that once you introduce the trick, you can invite readers to look for it across their reading.

Mentor texts used: An article about Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump impersonation from The New York Times and a chapter from The Nix by Nathan Hill (hardcover pgs. 482-492) Note: read over these mentor texts before using to see if they are appropriate for your students.

Teaching this technique – version A:

Invite students to freewrite off of each of these starting sentences from these mentors: “It takes seven minutes” or “Today was the day he would quit Elfscape.”
Have students share their work.
Reveal first two paragraphs of the Times article and page 482 from The Nix. (Note: the vocabulary on this page of The Nix is tough, so I would suggest using it as an example of the technique only.)
Identify ideal locations for this technique (leads, beginnings of chapters and sections.)
Practice this technique in a freewrite or on a piece in progress.

Teaching this technique – version B:

Have students read the New York Times article and flash-skim the chapter from The Nix. Unless you want students to read a sentence that extends for ten pages…
Ask students about how and why these two authors decided to begin paragraph 1 simply and laden paragraph 2 with all the details. Why might an author decide to describe a character’s decision to stop playing an online role playing game with zero periods? Why might the Times author give us excruciating detail about Alec Baldwin’s Trump makeup? To what extent are these “characters” portrayed similar? Or are the purposes here different?
Invite students to “hack” their own writing or another expository piece (e.g. a history or science textbook) to mimic the long-short style. Is this an improvement? Is the writing worse? Why or why not?

Amy Estersohn teaches middle school English in New York. She has never played an online role playing game and only pretends to know how to play paper and dice role playing games, so reading The Nix wasn’t easy. Follow her on Twitter at @HMX_MsE.

3 Ways to Offer Choice and Challenge in Reading

Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes May 19, 2017 Comments: 7

Yesterday I got the opportunity to write for our state NCTE affiliate, the West Virginia Council of Teachers of English! Their best practices blog is full of great stuff–definitely check it out, and follow @WVCTE on Twitter for more ideas and resources.

Here’s my offering for their blog–and I’d love to know how you offer your students choice and challenge in their independent reading. Please share in the comments!

I can be a bit of a lazy reader.

I get impatient while reading, waiting for the plot to pick up, and abandon books with gusto. I leap from mystery to mystery, romance novel to short fiction, and toss in the stray nonfiction book when I’m feeling curious.

When I first began making choice reading a priority in my classroom, many of my students were lazy readers, too. They gobbled up YA fiction in droves, but balked when I booktalked a classic, or an award-winning piece of fiction, or any nonfiction. Some of them refused to move beyond their genre of choice for a whole year.

I knew, when I committed to choice reading, that it went far beyond just YA. I knew that all kids were capable of reading sophisticated texts, making complex choices about when and how and what to read, and that all readers have a hunger for a challenging, engaging read. But I wasn’t seeing my students living out those expectations, so I built in some structures to help them get there.

Reading Challenges — I began scaffolding students up to more difficult reading choices with reading challenges. I read about these in Book Love by Penny Kittle, but wanted to put my own spin on them as far as making very specific challenges went. So, the first reading challenge involved picking a book outside your comfort zone (which required a fun day of work identifying our own reading zones); the second challenge involved reading a nonfiction book, the third involved reading an award winner, and so on.

By working as a whole class to try new books out simultaneously–me reading along with my students–everyone felt comfortable getting uncomfortable. We were all struggling along together, trying to decipher the vocabulary in a new book, or the structure of a new genre, or the style of a new kind of writer. I built in mini-lessons on these things, but I think it was most helpful that we talked about these issues in the light of being real readers–not “struggling” readers.

Authentic Writing about Reading — When I first joined GoodReads many years ago, I realized how much my reading life was improved by just quickly taking the time to rate what I’d thought of a book. Before that, I’d start and finish books and never really think about them again. Soon, I began writing short book reviews, and then long ones, first just for myself, and then for the benefit of other readers. I began reading more book reviews to get a sense of what I might talk about other than writing and characters.

I wanted my students doing something similar, so we began studying book reviews–popular, funny ones on Goodreads and Tumblr; professional ones in the New York Times and the New Yorker; even famed reviewers like Roger Ebert, whose writing moves about film we applied to books. Students began tweeting at authors, writing reviews informally in their notebooks and formally for our school paper and giving their own booktalks to one another.

Nurturing a Real Reading Life — No longer were kids feeling confined to books I handed them. They began to choose books more independently, armed with information about their tastes, their peers’, and what was popular in general. I began to see more students reading books that didn’t come from my classroom library, more students talking to one another about books, and a bigger variety of books being read in general.

In my own reading life, I modeled these challenges. I read The Great Gatsby, Walden, and a few other classics for the first time in years, and truly appreciated them more during these second reads. I wrote book reviews on Goodreads, the Nerdy Book Club, and Three Teachers Talk. I tracked my reading in my notebook, on GoodReads, and on Twitter, setting goals and trying to take a moment to jot down, in quick review form, WHY I liked or didn’t like a book.

These practices not only helped me become a better reader; they helped my students grow as readers, too. Anna’s favorite book of all time became the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, while Connor was blown away by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. These books and more were chosen, read, and evaluated independently, without the confines of assignments or the too-broad sea of “your choice” to hold them back.

Where Dioramas Go to Die

Lisa Dennis, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop, Talk May 16, 2017 Comments: 7

I picked up my first pedagogy book of the year this week and I can’t put it down. Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst is living up to its name. It’s 1950’s Louise Rosenblatt Reader Response Theory meets a desperate modern need to educate kids to be responsible consumers of information in order to compassionately embrace the viewpoints of others.

The first few chapters have felt like the perfect “Now what?” for someone that has recently made the move to workshop.

My kids are choosing what they read. Now what?

I’m devoting class time for students to build this habit. Now what?

My students are reading more and more. Now what?

The “now what” is to really think about the how and why we read. The text details insights on building responsive, responsible, and compassionate readers who will interact with a text, rather than just extract from it, question the text, and open themselves up to the text in order to see other points of view.

Cue the angelic choir and parting clouds. I’m ready.

But, I am also guilty of not always facilitating this type of reader response. Not on purpose, of course, but just out of difficulty in dealing with the daily grind.

We read. We talk. We mini lesson. We write. We rearrange the order. We repeat.

However, somewhere in there, we also lose a lot of readers. The once enthusiastic elementary kids, with their literal cartwheels about books, often come to us as vacant vessels of readicide. How does this happen? Beers and Probst suggest that “we have made reading a painful exercise for kids. High-stakes tests, Lexile levels, searches for evidence, dialogic notes, and sticky notes galore – we have demanded of readers many things we would never do ourselves while reading. We have sticky-noted reading to death” (46).

Now, ironically, I’ve written quite a few sticky notes around the insights in this book…I like to organize my thoughts this way. And, in no way am I suggesting that pulling ideas from a text is malpractice. At the end of the day, of course we need students to think deeply about their reading and demonstrate that thought through talk, written reflection, and/or analysis of some kind.

But what is appropriate? What is too much? What kills a desire to read as opposed to igniting it?

In search of some renewed inspiration, Disrupting Thinking had me laughing out loud as it got me thinking about why and how I interact with texts:

Seriously, as you finished the book you most recently enjoyed, did you pause, hold the book gently in your hands and say to yourself, ‘This time, this time, I think I’ll make a diorama’?…Do you write summaries of what you read, make new book jackets, rewrite the ending, take tests over every text? Any text? Do you want your reading level put on a bulletin board for all to see. Do you even know your damn reading level? (Beers & Probst 46)

So, how do we balance professional responsibility, a love of content, a desire to build up students as readers and writers, and the knowledge that a lot of what we’ve done (or still do) in our classrooms actually exhausts, irritates, and/or alienates our students from reading?

Unfortunately, I don’t have all the answers. This is a reflective process in action.

What I do know, is that Disrupting Thinking has me…thinking about it. A lot. It also has me vowing to put a few things into practice and promote a few others in my classroom:

Promote Responsive Readers through more and more opportunities to talk about choice books. I’m guilty of still trying to “make sure kids are reading,” when in fact, most often, they are cutting corners in that reading if we are trying to “catch” them. Book clubs, conferring, and talk through reflective notebook writing promote low stakes opportunities to share insights on texts. With mentor texts to support skill instruction, the thinking can be applied to choice reading, but doesn’t necessarily mean that I should be looking to choice reading as a summative data point.
Promote Responsible Readers by working to find a balance between supporting/celebrating reading and “holding students accountable.” This is an imperfect science to be sure. I find that the more I talk with students one on one, the more they have to say, and the more I can directly intervene to move them forward to more challenging books, deepen their understanding of why I want them to keep reading in the first place, and celebrate their successes as independent readers. Save the evaluation for skills based cold reads when the curriculum demands the assessment we as teachers need, while keeping in mind that many students don’t see those assessments as their responsibility to reading, and I would argue, nor should they.
Promote Compassionate Readers, again, through talk. When I read something that is changing my perspective on the world, myself, or life in general, I want to share that with someone. I want to share that with many someones. I also know, that to grow in my reading life, I need to read a wide variety of books…books that challenge my long held beliefs and understandings (or misunderstandings) of the world. Again, this is where helping students to diversify their reading lives is so very important.
Talk, Talk, Talk! I’ve been asking my students two questions this week to drive their book club discussions: How is this changing me? How is this changing my view of the world? These two questions invite personal connection and reflection. I can’t wait to hear my AP students’ book club discussions!

Lisa Dennis teaches English and leads a department of incredible English educators at Franklin High School near Milwaukee. Her thinking has been disrupted and she’s loving it. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LDennibaum

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