80/20

AP Language, Readers Writers Workshop, Reflection, Sarah Morris October 30, 2018 Comments: 2
photograph of a lighted ferris wheel

I’d like to take this post and, in honor of Halloween, share something really spooky with you. Well, maybe not spooky, but terrifying. Maybe not terrifying, but scary…

It’s the fear that creeps in every time I try something new in the classroom: a little fear I like to call The Questioning. And that’s what it is – just a series of questions that like, any good Halloween monster, waits until I’m lulled into complacency to rear its ugly head. Questions like is this best practice? Does the research support it? Are you doing enough? Are you doing too much? Are there better ways to support your kiddos? What are the unforeseen consequences of this action.

You see, my PLC partners and I are trying a lot of new ideas this year in our AP classrooms. We are organizing our units around essential questions, including a lot of choice reading in classes where choice reading has never really been an option for us, and slowing our instruction down in an attempt to go a mile deep and an inch wide instead of an inch deep and a mile wide.

I feel almost like a new teacher again – high on the possibilities of all the new ideas but brought low by the realization that I’m creating new content again while also surrendering a lot of the direction in the classroom to my students. Now, granted, they are rising to the occasion, and their conversations and writings are truly interesting, interesting in the ways that I’m not sure they would have been without these new procedures. But, it’s been a little bit of a roller coaster of a year – a crazy, scary rollercoaster.

I find that I’m spending a lot of my time thinking through new activities and new approaches, trying to predict the possible benefits and consequences of these changes while also teaching and grading and making time for reflection. I don’t feel like I am ever wholy in one part of the teaching cycle, but instead just this Go Go Gadget-person vacillating between all of the points on that spectrum at any given moment. It’s stressful.

In times like these when I can’t get my brain to settle, I remember a little tidbit of wisdom dropped by Penn State’s Russ Rose at a volleyball clinic several years ago. He argued that limiting your drill set to a few key areas and the finding variations on those drills to keep them fresh was the key to his success.

He called it the 80/20 rule.

The idea goes back to an Italian economist in the 1800s who found that 80% of the wealth in Italy was held by 20% of the population. Oddly enough, he also found that 80% of the peas in his garden were produced by 20% of the plants. Essentially, Pareto‘s rule could be boiled down to this: 80% of the effects are the product of 20% of the causes.

Whenever my class seems frantic or I’m nervous about my practice, I think of Pareto. If 20% of my effort produces 80% of my results, where should I spend my time? How should my students spend their time? I’m becoming more and more conscious of the demands placed on our students. I grapple with what I should expect of them outside of school as many take two or more AP classes, play sports, work jobs, and still need to be, you know, people with a consistent work-life balance. I want to make sure that I make intentional choices that meet the demands and rigor of my subject while honoring my students’ time.

Pareto’s Principle reminds me to consider what has the most immediate and lasting effects on my students. It reminds me to channel my energies into productive avenues by limiting my focus to just a few key ideas. For me, those ideas always come back to Socratic Seminars – it’s important that we talk through our ideas in controlled and questioning places. It comes back to writing – it’s important that we write every day (a goal I’m refocusing on) And, it’s important that we marry those ideas in conferences – safe places where we talk about our writing. Consistently, these have been my 20%. What are yours?

Sarah Morris teaches AP Language & Composition and Film as Literature in Murfreesboro, Tn. She is rediscovering her love of bullet journaling and PaperMate InkJoy Gel Pens.  She tweets at @marahsorris_cms.

Less Really is More

Description Mentors, Katie Maguire, Mentor Texts, Readers Writers Workshop October 29, 2018 1 Comment

Any English teacher who has seniors this year or who had juniors last year or who ever gave useful feedback to any student at any grade knows the feeling of this time of year: It’s early-deadline-week in the college application season, which means most/many seniors are in the throes of essay anxiety. Much of their stress — and the stress of any of us called upon to assist in this process — arises from the arbitrary word-count limit which, depending on the school and the prompt, can range from 30 words to 650, the latter being the upper limit of the Common App essay.

If we stay true to the process theories of mentors like Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, Lucy Calkins, and Penny Kittle — among so many others too numerous to name — we tell students to address word count limitations only in the final stages of the process. Every year, we all hear the same concern, some version of the following:

“Thanks for the feedback, and it really makes a lot of sense, but I’m already past the word limit so there’s no way I can add anything.”

Scissors-May2Students wish for us to tell them what to cut out before the essay has even been developed, before the central story has been identified and fleshed out to its most meaningful degree. Mariana and I brag to students about our 100% success rate in revising with students to pare down their college essays to within the word count:  possibly the ONLY 100% success rate we can boast. Still, this critical skill of letting go what isn’t needed in the writing — which also, 100% of the time, results in a cleaner, more gratifying piece — is one students still struggle with.

Kristin Jeschke offers hands-on (and fun!) strategies for students to cut out the riff-raff in this post. For our senior writing classes, Mariana and I have found some other useful ways to develop this skill in our aspiring college freshmen, starting last quarter with the 100-word memoir.

imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery-that-mediocrity-can-pay-to-greatness-oscar-wilde-7013bLike all great lesson plans, the 100-word memoir was “borrowed” from Kittle & Gallagher. We didn’t even realize the value of adhering to this limited verbiage until we witnessed students engaging and (willingly) struggling with it. While this exercise doesn’t seem to have been quite enough to provide students with enough strategy to pare down their 1000+-word college essay drafts by almost half during revision, we found the concept of a limited word count so potentially instructive that we have decided to turn it on its head with our seniors in our second quarter fiction-writing unit.

Fiction is driven by conflict, but conflict arises mainly out of character, so we start with brief character sketches, using McSweeney’s satirical versions as mentor texts (warning: a few of these are R-rated for language and adult themes). Students took these short pieces and extrapolated the rest of the iceberg, so to speak, by imagining clothing, favorite media, relationship status, hopes and dreams, and potential conflicts that might arise in the lives of each of these fictional folks. Next, they will develop character sketches of their own, describing the main character of their budding short stories. (To give less fiction-confident students a grounding [and to require all students to build some foundation to a piece of writing that can remain dangerously nebulous throughout the entire process], we required all students to craft the world of the story first, through research and planning. I’m happy to elaborate on this for anyone interested).

I’ll also truncate the entire writing-of-the-short-story for the sake of staying focused on the topic of this post: boiling down the writing to its most essential elements. Rather than scaffolding toward longer, more developed pieces as we did in the narrative (ie “college essay”) unit of quarter one, our third writing endeavor (or “lap” in the language of 180 Days) will be to pare down their 1500+-word short story to, say, 250 or less.

the-flash-hates-flash-fiction-2To heighten the deletion and word-choice challenge — and, more importantly to encourage students to boil down prose (their own and others’) to its very essence — one might consider “hint fiction.” I plan to try the strategy with my AP students, asking them to boil down the essence of a complicated argument presented in a text, using limited words to still capture the nuance of a complex argument. In fact, in a late-Sunday-night-lesson-plan-panic, I think I’ll have them do just that this week with Arthur Miller’s article “Why I Wrote The Crucible.” So much of AP Language & Composition depends on seeing just how much depends on that red wheelbarrow of nuance, and this exercise can develop the skill of precision in identifying argument. We’ll see.

buried-under-paper (1)In the meantime, though, I can feel the value of requiring shorter work for both us and our students, on so many levels: precision in word choice, saying more with less (vocabulary development); eliminating redundancy (sentence variation / sentence combining); not to mention the refinement and clarity of ideas that is required to say what you mean with an extremely limited word count. Not to mention the exquisite beauty of conferring on 100 focused words as opposed to 1000+.

First, Love

Conferring, Kristin Jeschke, Readers Writers Workshop October 28, 2018 Leave a comment

Wisdom to Stand On

On a gray, rainy October Monday in central Iowa, Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher came to town. And, friends, I got to spend a day with them (in an intimate ballroom at the Sheraton stuffed with many other teachers and coaches and administrators). Did I fangirl? Of course I did. But not for long. Their struggles with technology, their comedic timing, their gifts as storytellers–these transformed them. These giants in our field morphed into humans in front of me: mentors with experience, mentors with ideas about volume and choice and feedback–wisdom to stand on. Even now, nineteen years in, I still need that kind of mentorship. Perhaps that’s why one of Penny’s principles about feedback lingers, even now, weeks later: The first teacher interaction with writing should be love.  

I’ve worked hard over the years to provide the kind of feedback that sets my students up in hope. Yet I wondered–have my first interactions been love? No. Not consistently. While conferring, my leading questions are “How’s the writing going? What roadblocks are you running into?”. These certainly help conferences stay focused and solutions-oriented in those precious few minutes. Love, though? No. When providing feedback on drafts and best drafts, I’m certainly identifying and encouraging strengths; and I’m taking the time to respond as a reader, too, with what I love and appreciate about the writing. Is that very first interaction, are those words in the first comment bubble, love, though? No. Not regularly. How does it feel if what’s first heard is or read is criticism?

In Tom Newkirks’ Embarrassment (pretty sure I’ve referenced this in each of my blog posts this school year. Like Penny’s words, the book lingers. Read it.), he mentions the “close association of writing and shame.” On some level, writing means rejection. Our ideas, our words, our rhythms–all can be rejected. For students, this feeling of rejection–linked with shame!–comes from us, especially, as Newkirk notes, because of the power dynamic in the classroom. But we can learn to look at the love-first interaction as a tool for more productive feedback.

My colleagues will remind me of the challenge, at times, of the love-first interaction. Indeed, it may be challenging to find what’s working in the piece, and there’s danger in seeming disingenuous. I tend to agree with Newkirk, though, who explains that in most writing, there is something to like: “a word choice, an image, a bit of humor, a good detail, a sharp verb, a telling fact or statistic, a fine bit of logic.” Still, there’s also danger in love that’s not balanced with constructive criticism, which is why we can use the love-first interaction to set the stage for that constructive criticism.

In the days following the conference, I tasked myself with love-first interactions, while conferring and while scripting feedback. To do so, I prioritized strategies already in my repertoire.

Ways to Interact with Love

  1. When a student shares a concern, I scan the paper and look for a place where the student successfully handles the skill. Then I say, “Look what you did here! More like this!”. Following this approach in a recent conference, the student commented she worked hard on the section I pointed out, and if she just needed to do more of that, then she could. That conference ended with smiles.
  2. Sometimes it’s about giving love through curiosity. When I read a student’s paper and realize a deficit of details, I re-frame it with something like this: “Wow. I really want more of this. I’m so curious about …”. This reinforces that what’s written has value and then showing where they can build more value.
  3. Other times, it’s about saying YES!  I’ll say, “YES–I notice that you recognize the need for justification here and use the “this shows that because” strategy. Now the next step is to . . .”. The love first interaction allows me to set the student up in hope through the small victory.
  4. Occasionally, I focus love to the idea or topic. I confess–sometimes I might even squeal. “Ohh. I really like this idea of comparing grief to a pinball machine. There’s a level of unexpectedness there that will engage the reader.” I’m loving and reinforcing what good writing does for audiences.  
  5. And, finally, my new favorite: asking my students what they love. Some students still don’t believe in my genuine praise; I get the side-eye, the nervous giggle. So, encouraging them to share what they’re loving allows me to affirm their observations and shift the power dynamic.

Why Prioritizing Love First Matters

We all need the shoulders of giants to stand on: as I need the steadying wisdom of Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Tom Newkirk, Peter Elbow, Don Murray, and so many others, our students need our strong shoulders to hold them–no, LIFT THEM–higher. Love first interactions set up our students to persist. Love first interactions set up our students to take risks. Love first interactions set up our students to silence their own inner critics. Love first interactions set up our students to hope.

Kristin Jeschke teaches AP Language and Composition and College Prep English in Waukee, Iowa. She’ll need to remember the love-first mentality as she helps her nine year old practice cello and her six year old practice violin. Follow her on Twitter @kajeschke. 

Getting “There:” The Narrative Behind the Grade

Maggie Lopez, Narrative, Readers Writers Workshop, Reflection October 26, 2018 Leave a comment

Suddenly, there is snow on the mountain range that encircles Salt Lake City and the first quarter has come and gone.  Even after spending 11 weeks together, I confess that we, my students and I, aren’t “there.”

You know, there, that elusive place in education where students are investing, taking ownership, engaging, and enjoying thinking.

We have engaged in the elements of workshop, but our classroom feels like we are on a 10 mile per hour train to “there” that is frequently derailed.  Reading as a community was a high point, but the momentum has since stalled.  My old bag of tricks–student-created due dates, “go to” YA books that may shock or surprise, favorite mentor texts–aren’t reaching a far too large chunk of my people. 

Students are being compliant, but they’re not engaged.  

I am not okay with this.  It feels…I feel…mediocre.  

Was it me?  Is it me? The stress of junior year? Too much choice?  Not enough choice? Other teenage things I don’t know about? In an effort to figure out what was going on, what the story behind the data was, I asked students to write the narrative of the student behind the grade. 

I simply wanted to know:  Who is the student behind these grades?  Who is the human behind the numbers?  

Throughout my 100+ students, the reflections were consistent and their honesty certainly made the case for continuing to cultivate a workshop classroom.  Thankfully, we are heading there.  Summatively, these are the three take aways from their data-driven reflective narratives.

  • Stress and anxiety:  Junior year seems to unkindly smack students in the face.  I have seen it for eight years now. The ramped up, seemingly casual yet threatening chats about the looming college process sits heavy on their shoulders.  Increased course demands eat up time that used to be spent with friends or participating in activities without sacrificing academics. Aside from school stress, there are two-sport athletes, thespians, part-time workers, and family child care providers struggling to balance.

All the more case for carving out time to read for pleasure.  These students’ lives are just as busy as adults. Giving time to read, even 10 minutes at the start of class, can be “therapeutic” as Emily said: “This student found reading at the start of class each day to be therapeutic.  She is sad on odd days when the class doesn’t read.” Our students need time to pause. More importantly, they need to connect with characters, settings, and challenges that mirror their existence. They need to read that sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t, but you will get through these tough years.

  • True choice is new:  While students now admit they really like being able to choose books, choice in August was scary.  I believe it was scary because they didn’t know themselves as real readers, just readers who were assigned chapters due on certain days.  Aria, who is reading through everything that is on Netflix or will soon be a movie, reflected: “This student, who read three books last quarter, loves being able to choose books without judgment.”  

All the more case for exposure to new titles.  While my school is a college prep school and many teachers, from theology to science, assign books to read outside of a textbook, it isn’t a culture of readers.  Students struggling with choice lack a knowledge of what genre or story they prefer versus what they don’t like. My developing readers need exposure via student recommendations, book talks, library displays, topic journals, or ANY other medium, so they can continue to curate a “To Read” list with meaningful titles.  

 

I use my classroom library to highlight books by genre, theme, etc. to grab students’ attention.
Developing “To Read” lists in our notebooks.
This fall’s bulletin board outside my classroom, suggesting titles to read before streaming.

 

  • Writing voices are still developing:  Elliot wrote:  “This student has never been asked to write anything besides school stuff.  This student has a writing voice, but it is quiet and shy, only the notebook knows it now, but the voice is gaining courage.”  Wow. Check out that voice! Many times, I feel my students don’t trust their ideas or analysis as being “right,” just as they don’t yet trust themselves as writers, frequently asking “Is this what you want?” or “Is this good?”

All the more case for writing, writing, and writing more.  Writers need practice just like athletes. Aside from developing confidence in their ideas, students need to develop confidence in trying out elements of voice to develop the craft of writing by writing beside mentor texts, infusing craft into formal writings, journaling, and closely reading for craft in their choice books.  

Boiling it down:  students need time, exposure, confidence so we can get there.  

I will keep at it, as Lisa encouraged, because the work is not easy, but we know it is worthy. As some keep resisting, fake reading, or simply not reading at all, I will keep conferencing and book talking.  I will give reading time As students doodle instead of write, stare at the ceiling instead of revise, ask “Is this good?” instead of trust their skill, I will keep modeling writing and encouraging.  The culture I create this year will create momentum for next year, then into the following, speeding up the train to take us to that special place of learning.

The train may not be speeding ahead, but it’s chugging along.  At least I know we are on the track, heading in the right direction.

Maggie Lopez teaches American Literature and AP literature in Salt Lake City.  She is anxiously awaiting the start of ski season in Utah and NCTE in Houston next month, while reading Girl, Interrupted and scouring for flexible seating furniture on a budget. You can follow her on Twitter at @meg_lopez0

 

#3TTalks Shop — It’s about Time

#3TTWorkshop, Amy Rasmussen, Lisa Dennis, Pedagogy, Readers Writers Workshop October 25, 2018 Leave a comment

Quick Conversations on the Topics That Matter to You!

“To the true teacher, time’s hourglass should still run gold dust.” ~Douglas William Jerrold

“These are the times that try men’s [teachers’] souls.” ~Thomas Paine

Conversation Starter:  With all the demands on teachers beyond the classroom (extra duties, campus committees, new initiatives, etc) how do we capitalize on the time we have and keep our focus on our learners?

Amy:  I am lousy at self-care, yet I know that is an important part (maybe the most important part) of time management. It is hard to take care of ourselves, physically,

time

Photo by Aron on Unsplash

mentally, emotionally, and spiritually when all require at least a little of our time–usually alone time–and others put demands on us we have little control over. My trouble starts within the school day and bleeds over into home time: excessive meetings where little get accomplished or co-opted conference periods or new accountability systems or school initiatives that do little to promote academics, especially literacy, are the biggest time swamps to the workday. New things so often trump what actually needs to happen regularly in classrooms. Every good teacher I know takes work home, and this is the work that usually requires the most mental capacity and relates directly to student learning. I think administrators forget that all too often.

Lisa: I spent some time in a school improvement meeting today, during which I wrestled with this very notion. How do we continue to work eight, nine, twelve hours a day without burning out? How do we face the fact that “hour number twenty-five” is never going to come to the rescue of our ever-expanding task lists? How do we devote ourselves daily to the exhausting pursuit of teaching, and have anything left over for family, friends, or even the pet goldfish? (I marvel at Doc’s resilience as the often neglected Dennis Family goldfish)  

Most importantly, how do we make sure the precious few hours we have with our students in class, best reflect all the work we do outside of class on their behalf?

Amy: That’s where the routines of workshop keep me sane. No matter what anyone else demands of me, when I keep my focus on student engagement via reading, writing, listening, talking, and thinking together about issues they care about, utilizing our classroom library and writer’s notebooks, we accomplished something good that day. I

time 2

Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash

remind myself to step back, slow down, and focus on what really matters in growing confident and accomplished readers and writers:  choice, access, volume, time, and my expertise as literacy instructor and discussion facilitator.

Lisa: Yes! I find that when I’m spinning out of control with all the “other,” my solace lies on the shelves of books that guide my work with kids. My refined definition of what it means to be a good English teacher includes taking time to lose myself in books, with the express purpose of bringing the mirror, window, or door back to my students through book recommendations, excerpts for mentor texts, and even just the calmer, happier teacher that reading makes me and that they deserve.

Now, as for overcoming all of the additional demands the job places on us these days, I am slowly coming to terms with (very slowly, as my mental health is still a bit tenuous in this regard) the fact that only I can create the personal boundaries around how much work comes home with me both literally and figuratively, and I absolutely must make it a priority to limit the extent to which this job becomes my entire life. This happens when I let go of what I think I should be doing, and focus instead on what’s most important. 

Amy:  Personal boundaries! Yes, yes, yes. I am pretty lousy at those, too. I am working on it though. One thing that’s helping me set myself up for success (and cope with everything else) is a combination of two time management techniques. It works like this: 

  1. List 3 big (urgent, important, make-everything-else-easier-when-this-gets-done) tasks
  2. List 2 other important, but not so pressing, things
  3. Then, do #1 on the big list in sprints of the longest time chunk I can manage. Within the school day, this might be 15 minutes. Unplug, shut the door, and keenly focus.

Imagine the possibilities if we had the time to keenly focus on our students all the time?

Lisa: It’s so true. There’s always a ton to bring home. However, having a kindergartner at home has really put into perspective for me how much time I should be putting in at home when it now feels like it’s not only at the expense of my mental health but the well-being of my child. I limit the amount of work I do at night these days because spending time with my family and then trying to get a reasonable amount of rest before my alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m. may be the only thing between me and burnout right now.

I’ve taken the practice of one of our district administrators to heart this year and I’ve worked to keep my “school hours” to a twelve-hour window. I do not check my email before 6:00 a.m and I do not check it after 6:00 p.m. I am more than connected to colleagues and school happenings in other ways, so should there be an emergency or change of plans big enough to impact the following day, I’d still know about it. Beyond that, the homework “emergencies” of my students can be addressed the following day. I can follow up with a parent or colleague when I get into work. In this way, I can be more present at home when I’m there, and at least attempt to draw that line between my work and my life so that my time is better spent in both places. Now weekends…that’s another story. I’ve got some reevaluation of time management to do there, for sure, not to mention guilt around working AND not working. 

Amy:  Smart, Lisa! Your twelve-hour window is generous, and you are so right:  That kindergartener of yours–and Doc the goldfish–need you! Everything else can wait.

Do you have topic ideas you would like us to discuss? Please leave your requests here.

 

On Writers’ Testimonies & Why We Need Them

Affiliate links, Amy Rasmussen, AP Language, Classroom Culture, Mentor Texts, Modeling, Narrative Mentors, Readers Writers Workshop, Strategies to Add Some Zip, Writers Workshop October 23, 2018 Comments: 2

If I want to call myself a writer, I better start writing. Seems simple enough, right? I’ve read tons of quotes from writers who say the best way to begin is just sit down and bleed on the page. But I struggle.

As I was trying to write this post, with my dogs barking incessantly at an invisible squirrel in the backyard, and The Walking Dead booming from the bedroom tv where my husband languished with flu-like blahs, I thought of all the tweets last week for the National Day on Writing (fantastic inspiration and ideas there).

tweet#whyIwrite

I thought of why I write:  to think, to feel, to clarify, to play with language, to vent and heal and commit to change. All the reasons that everyone else writes. I am not unique.

Or am I?

Recently, I’ve been reading and re-reading the writing of Donald Murray. (Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching is my bible as a writing teacher. Huge thanks to my friend Penny K. for the recommendation!) But I’ve also delved into Murray’s Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers. It’s a collection on quote on writers about their craft. Murray states in the preface that he began collecting quotes on writing when in junior high, filling twenty-four three-inch-think notebooks with at least eight thousand quotations. His motivation? He just wanted to know how writers wrote. Murray explains the importance of writers’ testimony:

     Many people have the romantic notion, encouraged by those writers who feel comfortable in the magician’s robes, that writing is an instinctive matter of talent, an art, not a craft, and therefore cannot be explained.

     But writing is not an unintelligent act. Writing is a craft before it is an art, and writers can and do discuss their craft in terms we can understand. There are good reasons teachers and students of writing should hear what writers say about their craft.

     . . . I bring writers into my classroom through their written testimony. As writers of today and yesterday–female and male, young and old, poets and novelists and playwrights and nonfiction writers–talk about their feelings and their problems while writing, my students discover that their natural responses to writing are often the same as experienced writers.

     This is vital. Students facing a writing problem will often find they have to solve it by starting over and will fell they have failed. When they read the testimony of experienced writers, however, they discover that they too act like writers and this increases their confidence in designing their own solutions to their own writing problems. School often teaches unnatural, non-writerly attitudes toward writing–know what you want to say before you say it–and students need to see that their own instincts are the instincts of published writers.

     Students also need to see that writers are not looking back at a finished text but are in the act of confronting the blank page–or looking at the world before their is a page; trying to get started; trying to keep a text on tract or following it off track; working to make a text clear to themselves and to a reader. Writer’s counsel isn’t distant, detached from the act of making; it is immediate, speaking to the writer in the middle of making, a master sharing the tricks of craft with an apprentice at a common workbench.

I need these reminders–for myself and those I hope to take on the identity of writer, other teachers and students alike. Murray explains:

Too often we defend writing as a skill, saying writing should be taught so that students can fill our a job application or write a better letter asking someone to buy a cemetery lot. Writing is a skill on that level, but it also a craft and an art; it satisfies an essential need of the human animal.

So how do I share more writers’ testimonies? How do I help satisfy the essential need of the humans in my care daily?

10-768x384

Here’s some ideas:

  • Share some quotes on writing by writers. There’s lots of insights in that link and even some nice images like the one above.
  • Share Poets & Writers and follow on Twitter, too. I love their weekly update.
  • Read and share articles from NY Times Writers on Writing. This one by Amy Tan is a favorite and makes a fantastic mentor text to write beside.
  • Think, write, model, talk, share, and repeat with writers every single day. Let them know they are not alone in their pursuit of putting meaning on the page.

When I brought the barking dogs in, and before the tv went off and the zombies faded out in the bedroom, I heard a line that gave me pause. It went something like this: “This place is a canvas, and we are the paint. We were sent here to create. We did.”

I don’t know about you, but I think that relates to writing. I write to paint my world in the swirl of language, to create images and goals and imaginings, to figure out what I feel and think and know. I write because it feeds my need. I am human, so I write.

Amy Rasmussen writes most often sitting at her newest DIY project, a desk she repurposed from a vanity her paternal grandfather made for her grandmother over 70 years ago. She lights a candle and listens to Michael Bluble radio on Pandora. And when she gets stuck in her head or on the page, she reads. Follow her @amyrass

Guest Post by Amanda Penney: The Workshop Classroom and YOU!!!

#poetrychat, AP English, Best Of, Charles Moore, Classroom Culture, Conferring, Poetry, Readers Workshop, Readers Writers Workshop October 22, 2018 Leave a comment

Note: This post signifies quite a milestone for the ELA 1 team I had the privilege of joining this year.  As of this morning, and thanks to the graciousness of this blog’s creators, the entire team has now published on this site.  To see a post by our department chair Megan, click here. Austin posted this summer, here. Sarah, our team lead posted a few weeks back, and my one year anniversary as a regular contributor is in January. This agency affords us power.  It gives us a voice in our fight for literacy.  To the creators of this blog, Thank You.

The workshop classroom is undoubtedly overwhelming to embrace at first. It is difficult to find information on how to properly implement this pedagogy, and there are many misconceptions of what workshop actually looks, for instance, on sites like TeachersPayTeachers. It’s a lot of work to be a workshop classroom. You actually have to read and write yourself if you want your students to benefit from this structure. You need to learn how to identify a solid mentor text from a variety of works and know what you can do with them successfully.

But the work pays off. It gives you, the teacher, so much more than you could ever have imagined. To keep your students engaged in their choice reading, you have to keep up with the never-ending influx of newly published works. You are forced to venture into genres of writing that you would not normally reach. For instance, I read Matt de la Pena’s We Were Here, and I can assure you, it is not historical fiction (my typical go-to). My students were writing about their foster care experiences and retelling their mishaps that placed them in alternate schools. Matt de la Pena provided an avenue for me to better understand these students, who in turn, helped broaden my reading interests.

For me, this shift has been monumental. As a workshop teacher, I actually get to read what I want to read and have picked up books I wouldn’t normally and enjoyed them! I get excited when I stumble upon a passage that might as well jump off the page and into my computer, so I can begin identifying my mini lesson and therein construct my fantastic lesson cycle. It is fun and exciting, and I have such a unique opportunity in my profession to be creative each and every day.

Writing has been the most exciting shift for me personally. I had lost a lot of confidence in my abilities as a writer when I entered college. I will never forget attending Texas A&M’s orientation for new students and the very blunt speech we were given. Simply put, the speaker stated that the five-paragraph-essay would lead to nothing more than a failing grade, so we better learn something new now or “See you later!” I was terrified, of course, because I had been taught nothing other than the five-paragraph-essay. The only piece I had ever written that did not follow that god-awful structure was my college admissions essay. Little had I known, I had “workshopped” my most proud piece of high school writing to which my first line stated “I am crazy.” However, one piece did not shake the terror I felt upon beginning my first day of classes the following week.

As a transfer student my sophomore year, I took an Advanced Composition course and a Shakespeare course. I held a solid A in my Advanced Composition class with helpful pointers and typically positive feedback from my professor. Yet, I could barely hold a low C in my Shakespeare class where I was regularly criticized for my writing style. I spent most of my time in the writing center, and at one point, the graduate assistant was so baffled by my C- paper over Shylock’s speech “I am a Jew” that he asked for the opinion of his “boss” who returned with a shrug and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why you got a C…. it looks like he just dislikes how you write and is grading you accordingly. Good luck.”

I spent the rest of my English degree pursuit frustrated and confused. I concluded that writing was a painful process, which would typically yield disappointment from my readers. I would never truly be able to improve because I, unfortunately, did not and would not inherit the mutant skill of mind-reading from Professor Xavier or Gene Grey.

Then, I began to teach. My first year, our campus did not have workshop at all, and teaching was painful day in and day out. My students really did not benefit from The Odyssey or the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and to be honest, neither did I. My second year began with the introduction of workshop, which was difficult to understand, considering I not only had never taught this way with my meager one-year experience under my belt, but I also had not learned this way. So, I struggled through what I learned and still could not get my students to engage. They always referred to their “I give up” phrase of “I don’t know what to write about,” and it left me frustrated and exhausted each day.

I had heard about writing along with my students, but I was afraid to do this. I did not identify as a writer and had long since decided I wasn’t very good at it. My students could never know this of course… But I was getting nowhere, and it was time for a shift.

So, one day, half-way through my second year of teaching, I tried something new. I chose to write with my students. I had been flipping through the pages of Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This and stumbled upon his “1 to 18 Topics” lesson cycle. I embraced my fears of writing with my students and took the dive head-first the next day.

I started safe with soccer and intended to choose a new topic to expand each class period. To my astonishment, every single student had their pens to their papers and were scribbling madly as if they had been starved of this freedom for too long. Conferring revealed a vulnerability I had not anticipated, and I became inspired to show my own vulnerability as the day continued. I realized I had a lot to say, and I wanted to “say” it through my writing. I had starved myself of this freedom for far too long, and I was eager to continue writing.

My third-year of teaching is when workshop really kicked off in my classroom. I was searching for an engaging mentor text that utilized simple sentences as my students struggled (and still do) with sentence boundaries.  An excerpt from Dune stood out to me and I was eager to write beside it with my students in class. The excerpt is as follows:

penny1

Each student wrote for 10 minutes and were asked to begin their piece with “I must not __.” We then pulled a Penny Kittle and revised it to ensure it was only constructed of simple sentences. My students wrote some incredible pieces, and I am convinced their success is a result of my own enthusiasm for the lesson itself. Their writing inspired my writing and in turn began to reconstruct my identity as both a writer and teacher. I was embracing myself as a writer, and my students, in turn, began to embrace themselves as writers.

Workshop has transformed my perspective of writing and provided a unique platform for me to embrace myself as a writer. It has exposed a variety of genres to read but also has provided a variety of genres I can choose to write.

Prior to workshop, I used to hate poetry. Yes. I used the word “hate” … as an English major and teacher…. It was this daunting task and an awful entity that lurked in the dreary school hallways. My teachers never taught me to write beside a poem and always found the most difficult poetry to “interpret” in class. In Ohio, my freshman English teacher appeared to enjoy watching us squirm in confusion and insisted we leave his classroom never ever knowing what the author’s message actually was. I despised poetry’s very existence because of this and determined its purpose was a cruel joke on the reader.

Workshop completely shifted this perspective of poetry for me. I would never had guessed in a million years that I would currently be reading not one, not two, but THREE poetry books at once. The thought of writing my own poetry was a complete joke as well. Yet, here I am, writing beside poetry in my classroom and encouraging my students to do the same. It has a completely different purpose now than it ever did before. Its purpose is no longer to torment my being but to excite my creativity and provide an avenue for expression I never would have known existed if it wasn’t for workshop. The first poem I wrote beside was a Rudy Francisco piece and it looks like this:

Mentor Text:

When people ask how I’m doing

I want to say,

my depression is an angry deity, a jealous god

a thirsty shadow that wrings my joy like a dishrag

and makes juice out of my smile.

I want to say,

getting out of bed has become a magic trick.

I am probably the worst magician I know.

I want to say,

this sadness is the only clean shirt I have left

and my washing machine has been broken for months,

but I’d rather not ruin someone’s day with my tragic honesty

so instead I treat my face like a pumpkin.

I pretend that it’s Halloween.

I carve it into something acceptable.

I laugh and I say,

“I’m doing alright.”

-Rudy Francisco, Helium

My Version:

When people ask how I’m doing

I want to say,

leave me alone, please, now and forever while

my anxiety leaps and jumps throughout my body

and makes me cringe.

I want to say,

standing here is an allusion of sanity,

a trick I feel I will never truly perfect.

I want to say,

this fear is my only possession I have ever had

and I want someone to destroy it so it cannot return,

but I’d rather not burden someone’s day with the demon that encircles me

so instead I treat my face like a canvas.

I paint with bright colors.

I create something mundane.

I smile and I say,

“I’m doing alright.”

-Ms. Penney

I felt so freed of my previous misconceptions with this one piece, and as a result, my class and I enjoy our daily “Poet Moments” inspired by my colleague Charles Moore. I revel in this peace and tranquility and am grateful for workshop with each and every poem I have the privilege to write with my students. This joy has completely altered my initial definition of poetry, and I will forever be indebted to workshop and this genre of writing.

Workshop has given me the opportunity to grow as a reader and writer. It has given me a purpose and a drive to find new and exciting ways to engage not only my students but myself. I no longer feel as if writing is a painful process and the nagging frustration of how my invisible readers expect me to write has long since passed. I have a voice and a means of expressing that voice, as do you, every single day.

Amanda Penney is a bit of a perfectionist and is grateful for the patience that her colleague, Charles Moore, has for her and her ever-changing blog post. She plays soccer whenever she can and loves exploring nature with her only child (her dog who she considers her child) Shanti. She is a complete nerd when it comes to anything comic book oriented and is currently exploring the possibilities of her favorite series, The Uncanny X-Men from the late 1960’s, becoming an exciting and invigorating mentor text. She hopes this will be the topic of her next guest post, that is of course, if Charles is willing to embrace another bought of Penney and her procrastinating-perfectionism.

What Secondary Teachers Can Learn From Elementary Teachers

Angela Faulhaber, Readers Writers Workshop, Writers Workshop October 18, 2018 Comments: 3

I sat outside my son’s first grade classroom helping students practice handwriting skills one day when a lightning bolt hit me.

Kids were in and out of the room, going to reading group, using the restroom as needed. When I finished with a student, they’d quietly walk in, tap the next person on the shoulder, and out they’d walk. As a high school teacher, I was enthralled by the bustle.

When I went into the classroom to touch base with the teacher, I continued to look around in amazement. Kids were everywhere. More importantly, they were working with purpose and focus. Some kids were lying on bean bag chairs reading. Others around a kidney table with the teacher. Another cluster of kids were sitting at their desks, working on bookmaking, tongues hanging out in determination. It felt like magic.

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 5.36.07 PM

I know it’s not magic, though. The teacher had made deliberate choices to nurture this environment. To be honest, though, it took me a moment to be open to this aha moment. At first, it felt like chaos. But when I took a step back, I realized that this wasn’t chaos I was seeing. It was productivity. It dawned on me that my high school classroom rarely had this kind of energy. I wondered, if these seven-year-olds could be taught how to work like this, could I create opportunities for older kids to do the same?

Some of my takeaways from spending time in elementary classrooms:

Classroom Set-up

Rocking chairs. Flip charts. Book bins. Cozy Rugs. Desks in clusters (rather than rows which Tom Murray recently referred to as “the cemetery effect”).  

Elementary classrooms feel different. There’s an energy, a flow. The room often hums. When I’m in my colleague’s elementary classrooms, I’m struck by how different they look from my classroom setup. It’s not just the posters on the wall, or the rugs on the floor. It’s that the room feels like it belongs to students. Books students care about are on the shelves. The rooms are a welcoming space, which leads to students engaging with the content differently. They’re not just receptacles; rather, they see themselves as much a part of the space as the teacher. And everything in the space has a purpose. 

I’ve been loving the ways that teachers are incorporating flexible seating and I think that even if you haven’t won a grant or launched a Donors Choose campaign, there’s a way to get creative about the space. I know I sometimes worry that kids will talk too much, or goof off. I remind myself, though, that when students are engaged in workshop practice, then I’m coaching them into independence. And if I can easily move around the room, I can cut off much of that behavior.

To read more about how we might set up our rooms, check out Kristine Mraz and Christine Herz’s book Kids First From Day One.

Many teachers are re-thinking the way high school classrooms might look (source: https://www.edutopia.org/article/high-school-flexible-seating-done-right)

 

Routines

I notice that in elementary school, teachers spend a lot of time explicitly teaching routines for how to utilize the spaces. They build on what’s happened in year’s past, reminding students that they come ready with a whole skill set. They focus on those rituals as much as they focus on the content, especially in the beginning.

Sometimes, we teachers of older kids fall into a deficit thinking trap. I sometimes hear teachers say, “My students can’t do that [insert collaborative/independent work here].” I wonder, though. When they were seven and eight they were doing that work. How might we channel some of that muscle memory from their early learning years?

What would happen if we teach our older students explicit routines for work time. Teaching them explicitly what the room should look like and sound like when they are independently working. And of course, we know that older kids are different. Reinforcing the routines reground them.

Conferring

We know that conferring is one of the most powerful tools in our teacher tool box. Carl Anderson reminds me to ask kids, “how’s it going?” Kelly Gallagher & Penny Kittle show me how powerful conferencing is in their work. An effective conference can be the most impactful thing we do all day.

I also know that this is really really hard to do. Not only because of time constraints, but also because when I’m conferring, other students feel like it’s free time. Suddenly there’s whispering and laughing. While I’m chatting at my desk with a student during a conference, I often find myself saying, “Hey, everyone get back to work,” disrupting both my conference and the students who might have actually been working.

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 5.50.04 PM

What if instead I channeled the elementary teachers I know? I notice when I’m in their classrooms that their conferencing happens right where kids are sitting. They crouch next to students, leaning in, having whispered conversations. 

This kind of conferring cuts down on transition time. Students aren’t walking across the room. Instead, they’re able to turn right back to their work and apply what they’ve talked about. And the teacher doesn’t have to wait on kids to gather materials and walk to the desk. Those minutes are precious, and I notice that when the teacher is where the work happens, more conferences can take place.

Small Group Instruction

Conferring isn’t the only way to have those smaller settings with students. Sometimes I forget that it’s not an either/or — we either work whole group instruction or 1:1 conferring. After having the same conversation three times in 1:1 conferences, I realized I needed to be more efficient with my time.

When I’m in an elementary classroom, I’m reminded of the power of small group instruction. I thought back to the way I saw my son’s teacher gather five students around her desk to teach them all the same skill. While the rest of the class was working independently, she was able to re-teach or extend the learning. I noticed too that she was able to target their needs in specific ways.

Whether it’s at a kidney table, or clustered around my teacher desk, I wonder if I could have students come to me in smaller groups.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that secondary students are different from elementary kids. They’re louder, bigger, and sometimes have checked out of school by the time they get to us. I try to remember, though, that they’re still kids. And when what I have been doing isn’t working with them, then I wonder if maybe it’s time to try something different. I think back to the students they once were, and I wonder if channeling some of those structures from their elementary days might make our days feel a little more magical.

Angela Faulhaber is a literacy coach in the Cincinnati area. She’s currently reading Greeting From Witness Protection by Jake Burt, based on the recommendation of her 11-year-old daughter. She’s also trying to figure out how it’s mid-October when it feels like school just started. 

 

Lost and Found: A Writer’s Voice

Readers Writers Workshop, Shana Karnes, Writer's Notebooks, Writers Workshop October 17, 2018 Comments: 2

Image result for nulla dies sine lineaWriting, like anything else, is a skill: a muscle we must exercise regularly or watch soften and fade. Pliny the Elder’s advice, nulla dies sine linea–not a day without a line–hangs on the walls of many a writer’s office for good reason: daily writing is a must.

But where many writers dismay is in what they write each day. They punish themselves when their writing feels flat, lackluster, uninspired. Writer’s block creeps in. They begin to fear the empty page, to shy away from it. They stop writing, drop the pen, lose their voice.

I’m talking about a specific writer, here: me.

I recently began running again after nearly three years off. I used to love running: the empty mindlessness of it, the feeling of accomplishment the finish line brought. I ran until the third trimester of my first pregnancy, when I looked more like a bouncing beach ball than a runner.

img_6707Now, two babies, three years, many pounds, and one shoe size later, I’ve finally begun to run again. It was hard at first–I could barely run a mile without stopping. I didn’t feel the famed “runners’ high” I used to: I just felt sad. Sad that I couldn’t do what I used to be able to; sad that I’d let my running identity dissolve; sad that my days of half marathons were seemingly over.

But I bought a jogging stroller and kept at it, and forced myself to run to justify the expense. I went to the gym daily and ran circles around the track or outside on hills. I ran up and down stairs at my house; I ran after my youngest, who recently began crawling; I parked far away from stores and ran to them. Memorably, I once forgot my Starbucks on the baby shelf at Target, and ran to retrieve it.

It wasn’t always enjoyable, especially at first, but I built the skill back up, little by little. I kept at it, running on trails or in neighborhoods so I couldn’t just give up and stop. I, someone who is terrible at self-discipline, made myself a runner again.

Recently, I read Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, where I learned the difference between hard and soft skills. Hard skills, like running, are quantifiable: can you run three miles? Yes, I can. Can you write in English? Yes, I can.

But soft skills are more nebulous, less quantifiable. They’re less about whether you can do something and more about how well you do it. Can I run three miles in 20 minutes? HA. Can I write a book? HA, HA.

img_4974.pngBut the key to developing soft skills, as Coyle writes, is in the practice. High reps, new variations, and clear feedback. I ran daily, even when it was terrible. But it only took a few weeks to regain my ability to run multiple miles at a time.

As I ran, I often thought about other things that once felt easy but were now hard, like my seemingly voiceless writing identity. My writing just didn’t sing anymore; it felt blah. It wasn’t fun to do. I felt I’d lost my voice.

But after reading Coyle’s book, it was clear from the gaps in my notebook that what my voice was lacking was a result of lack of practice. If I wanted to find my voice again, I would need to approach writing anew.

I wrote daily, which, like running, was painful at first. But the more I wrote, the faster my words flowed, the faster my thoughts and ideas developed. The more ideas I had, the more I craved good writing in the books I read, podcasts I listened to, music I ran to. I wanted to be surrounded by strong, elegant thinking, to help push myself to communicate strong, elegant thinking in my writing. I renewed my passion for reading good literature, regained pleasure in opening my notebook, and found my writer’s voice, and writing identity, again.

For our students, this daily, varied writing is essential. They need practice to build their voices, to sharpen their thoughts, to hone their craft. For many, their writing voices are a muscle not yet developed: they will build them in their notebooks in our classrooms.

Our students need to be saturated with good writing, strong ideas, thoughtful words. If most of their day is filled with Snapchat and Facebook and all the hideous writing social networks often entail, our students must see beauty in the books and poems and articles we share with them.

Coyle writes in The Talent Code that mentoring ourselves to experts is a key to developing our own proficiency at skills. We cannot just show our students good writing; we must bring writers to life for them; show them how a writer lives and works to illustrate the possibilities of a writing identity. We must allow them to think, “if they can do it, why can’t I?”

We must offer our students this opportunity: to be writers, with the habit of daily writing, the inspiration of strong writers, the ideas that come from reading great texts. Our routines might look like:

  • Quickwrites to begin the day as writers
  • Mentor texts to study within a larger context–as part of a genre, author, or thematic unit
  • Instant, frequent revision that goes beyond copyediting and into the addition of ideas and clarity
  • Transparency of writing process in the form of sharing one another’s drafts
  • Varied, voluminous reading independently and collaboratively
  • Quiet moments to reflect, self-assess, and set goals about our writing and writers’ identities

A writer’s voice can be so easily lost, but so readily found again with practice, purpose, and passion. We can all be writers.

Helping our students find their voices is an amazing, rewarding part of our work as teachers of readers and writers.  Keep constant the routines of daily reading and writing, and keep sacred the mantra of nulla dies sine linea–never a day without a line.

Shana Karnes lives in West Virginia with her two daughters and husband. She reads and writes daily at a large desk that overlooks a small view of the mountains. Connect with Shana on Twitter at @litreader.

To Recommend … or Not?

Books, Katie Maguire, Readers Writers Workshop October 15, 2018 Leave a comment

Have you ever recommended a book or done a book talk on a book you haven’t read? I know I have. Always, of course, with the caveat that I haven’t read it yet, but still. I have two examples of how this has backfired, one with minor consequences and another that could have gone terribly wrong.

riskThis year, I recommended Concussion to an athlete in my AP class, for his independent reading. I did so based on the subject matter and its popularity. AJ is loathe to pick it up during independent reading, but at this point (because it’s AP and they use their independent reading for analysis) it’s not practical for him to start something new and still be able to complete the rhetorical analysis work.

Effectively, what my faulty recommendation has done is to reinforce for this student that books are just a part of an academic life that one has to endure to reach a broader goal (AP college credit). Not only did I confirm that reading has nothing to do with his interests or identity, I hit the trifecta by reinforcing for him that teachers are clueless and wasting an opportunity to build his literacy skills. Indeed, I may have set them back. Maybe I should have recommended Junior Seau: The Life and Death of a Football Icon, which appears (appears is key) to explore the same issue but in a much more narrative and less esoteric way than Concussion. Plus, one of my footballers from last year read it.

But using previous student experiences with a text to recommend it forward is, at best, for-mature-audiences-onlyimperfect. Last year, a student was looking for “something edgy” and was willing to try transitioning into fiction from her obsessive poetry reading. So, I recommended a short story collection that a former student with similar interests had found on her own and loved, and which I subsequently added to our classroom library: Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer. This current student took my recommendation, read her 20 minutes per night and diligently recorded her progress in her reading log, finishing it before we had a chance to conference. But when she handed it back to me she said, “Ms. Maguire, this book might not be for everybody.” She then went on to describe scenes of exhibitionism and lesbian prison sex.

I have become more reluctant to recommend to students books that I have not read myself. For 3TT readers, though, I’ll still take the risk. Here are a few titles I have recently added to our classroom library. Full disclosure: the first two I have read in their entirety; the third, about half.

This Way Home, Wes Moore and Shawn Goodman: This YA novel came out in 2016, but I only came across it recently, browsing the BookOutlet web site (which offers fantastic deals btw). Many students in my district are familiar with The Other Wes Moore, the true story of the divergent trajectories of two African American boys on the same block with the same name. This Way Home tells the fictional story of Elijah, who has pro-basketball aspirations but must cope with a dilemma brought on by the local gang’s interest in his neighborhood team. I HAVE read this one, so I can confidently say it is high-interest for striving readers.

Delicate Monsters, by Stephanie Kuehn: This novel by the author of the award-winning Charm & Strange, which I haven’t read yet, is darker than I expected, and from the very beginning. The -isms that this novel touches on are SO numerous: racism, classism, voyeurism, alcoholism, to name a few. Also included are bipolar disorder, bullying, suicidal ideation and suicide, gun violence, adultery, sociopathy, even Tourette’s and Munchausen’s-by-Proxy. And there is no happy ending. For anyone. Personally, I’m down with the darker, the better. But to recommend for students? Probably more on an individual basis than a book talk. But speaking of book talks, this next one could work.

Pride, by Ibi Zoboi (author of America Street): This YA novel is a retelling of Pride & Prejudice, set in present-day Brooklyn. I’ve read the first few chapters, and I’m hooked pride_zoboi(this from a reader who has little patience with the precious world of Jane Austen). What compels me to bring this text into our classroom, though, is the author’s response to a review in WSJ: the review suggested that the book would have limited appeal due to its “heavy use of slang,” ie, Afro-Haitian dialect. If I can do my job right, we might be able to examine excerpts of the text in conjunction with the WSJ review and the social media responses it generated, as we enter our second quarter focus on text analysis.

Sigh. Second quarter, really? Where did first quarter go? And there’s one of the main reasons books get recommended without them having been read, convoluted passive voice intended. I think in the writing of this post I have reminded myself–and I hope, you–to rein in the guilt, for not doing more, for not doing it all. I just asked my 11-year-old child for 5 more minutes to finish this post, and he patiently waits in his room for me to join him so we can continue reading together D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.