Inquiry in the Reading/Writing Classroom - Units of Study

Last year, I was looking around for ways to use more inquiry in my Reading/Writing class.  I was in love with the idea as a content-area (science and social studies) teacher, and I wanted to use it more.  

It helped that I attended a Summer Leadership Institute with the Illinois Writing Project.  I met several teachers from other schools, and I found that another school had begun using Study Driven, a book by Katie Wood Ray.  The book introduces a way of teaching reading and writing in related ways, as part of a focused, intensive study of ("immersion" in) a specific genre.  

Let me explain by example.  Let's say that you choose to study memoir.  You flood the students with examples of memoir, as many as you can find that are appropriately leveled and (hopefully) engaging.  After they have read and studied several examples, you ask them to notice or discover what these texts have in common.  You articulate these common features, and you talk about the ways that writers can choose to adhere to these conventions or not, but that generally a genre will follow a certain set of conventions.  Memoir, for example, is typically told in first person and focuses on significant events in a person's life.  It is tied to specific contexts and settings, often to specific objects or people.  It is almost always intensely localized or focused on the minute details of the past.  

This is the inquiry part.  You are focusing students on a specific line of inquiry, and you are asking the big questions, but students are discovering the nuances of the answers.  Eventually, the goal would be to encourage them to branch out on their own, discover and analyze their own notion of genre, or even start to formulate an emerging genre (very cool!).  The end product, however, is for them to create a text that fits the genre they are studying.  

So, students are buried in examples or models of a genre, asked to study them closely, articulate the conventions of that genre as a result of that study, and then create a text that adheres to those conventions.  The text is created under the conditions of a typical writing workshop, with students choosing the particulars of how they will create the text and allowed to work at their own pace in an environment where they are supported and given time to compose and revise.  

The results were impressive.  Partly because I supported this with journals, and partly because I swamped them with models - all directed toward a specific, up-front objective - my students created some of the best memoir I have seen from 7th graders.  I read so many good examples that it was overwhelming.  

Part of the success comes from the choice of genre.  You can't study a genre like political satire or medieval mystery plays in a middle-school classroom.  You need good examples that students can connect to, and you need to be able to help them focus topics and sustain effort over time.  Many of my students were writing longer texts than they had ever written before.  And not every student wrote great stuff or tried their hardest.  That's something I will continue to work on, but it was not a Hollywood movie or a fairy tale, so it wasn't 100%.  But it was much closer than I have ever been before.  I was also successful with the "scary story" genre, and with shorter examples like the 55-word story.  (I found a book of examples of this - the number of words is not important, as long as they are forced to fit that example.  Like haiku, forcing them to shape their thinking into a certain conventional container can be challenging and fun.)  Odes also worked well - mostly because of examples from Pablo Neruda and past students.  We also had fun (perhaps a little too much) with tweets as a genre.

I'm working on units based on jokes, narrative nonfiction with "tension" (a concept from Donald Murray), tweets (a more organized version), and some kind of persuasive text (still searching for a good, authentic genre appropriate for this developmental level with engaging models of appropriate length).  

I was planning to also discuss inquiry and the teaching of grammar, but I'll have to post about that later.  

TRAPPED by Marc Aronson

So, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

One of the reasons that I pursued COAL as a topic is a book called Trapped by Marc Aronson.  I heard him speak at the NCTE conference, and I had already encountered his great book, Sugar Changed the World.  He spoke for a few minutes about the book, and mentioned some of the things the trapped miners said and did.  (I remember him talking about the one word that made the difference for the miners - the thing that saved all of their lives and kept them all from dying.  "Democracy."  They voted on everything.)

Of course, the funny part is this: the book is NOT about coal mining.  The people who were trapped in the San Jose Mine in northern Chile were mining COPPER, not COAL.

Oops.

Does this mean I need to change the topic?  I don't think so.  I think that the book and its ideas are still relevant, though perhaps less directly.  I think that the concepts of mining that I can take from this book, as well as comparisons to other mining disasters, are useful.  But it's funny, now, how this mistake in understanding (did he say that they were copper miners at the presentation?  If he had, or if I heard and remembered it, I might have chosen some other topic.)  helped me choose this topic.  I hope that the decision turns out to be lucky.

I suppose we'll find out soon.

Watching Documentaries = Research?

I think so.  I think that watching a nonfiction film - especially a credible one that uses the same (or similar) methodology as a reasonably good historian (although with a slightly political slant - which everyone has these days) - is a kind of research.  I'm not sure that I could publish this in Critical Inquiry with only film sources, but it's helping me understand the topic.  There was a nice use of music in this one, too, including a short interview at the beginning (and a clip at the end) of Kathy Mattea talking about her album, Coal.

Last night, I watched an older movie about unions in coal country (Matewan) and a documentary that was mostly about "mountaintop removal" or "mountaintop extraction."  (Even the term is contested.)  It was trying to be incendiary.  There was a lot of tension in the beginning and the end, but the middle kind of lost traction.

Here's a trailer for the movie Coal Country:

There's a site for the movie (careful, there's music that kicks in when you go there) - Coal Country Site.

I think one of the more interesting parts was the treatment of anti-coal activists.  People who are trying to fight the coal mining companies are getting threats, mistreatment, and the kind of thing that happened to Civil Rights activists in the South in the 60's (like, for example, standing in the woods next to a person's house, in the dark, at night, and yelling evil names at them - my favorite was "tree hugger" - as if trees don't deserve a good hug now and then).

The most significant problems with mountaintop mining, according to my "reading" of the film, are air and water pollution.  These huge explosions spread coal dust for miles, and it is affecting people's breathing and overall health.  Worse, perhaps, is the runoff from rain on exposed coal seams.  Toxic chemicals are entering the water supply through this process.  Other, perhaps less serious consequences of this process are the long-term change to the landscape (fewer mountains and valleys, a flattened landscape where companies try to re-grow the "overburden") and the subsequent carbon emissions from all of this coal being burned and used to make electricity.  Landscaping is a significant concern, but it doesn't have the same "bite" as people being poisoned.  Carbon emissions are also significant, but that's a much larger and more complex problem.

The other concern is the fact that mountaintop mining is a response to the dangerous conditions involved in older mining operations that involved underground mining.  Mountaintop mining is much safer for the workers (assuming they know how to handle the explosives).

Drive by Daniel Pink

Someone suggested this book to me a few weeks ago, and then someone else - I don't remember who in either case - suggested it as well, so I thought it was officially my job to read it.  So I did.

It's not written for teachers, and there are a number of places where it's obvious that the author (Pink) is not sympathetic to or informed about the interests of educators.  But that doesn't mean that it can't be useful.

It's mostly interested in explaining what motivates people, and the essential insight is that carrot-stick motivation strategies don't work.  Paying people to do good things can sometimes make them not want to do good things anymore.  It can also hurt creativity.  According to the majority of studies, extrinsic rewards can limit and even damage creativity.

I think most teachers already know that extrinsic rewards can be bad for intellectual work.  Any kind of payment sends the message that the work isn't rewarding enough in itself, that it requires some kind of outside motivator to be worth doing.

The most useful part of the book, in my opinion, is the way that it breaks down intrinsic motivation into three essential components - so-called Motivation 3.0 -

1. Autonomy - acting with choice of method and means to achieve desired results.  For this to be effective, people need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), technique (how they do it), and team (who they work with).  
2. Mastery - seeking skill or fluency, as a result of appropriate challenges (not too difficult, not too easy).  There are three "laws" of mastery - it is a mindset (a way of thinking about being good at something), it is a "pain" (it takes effort and hard work), and it is an asymptote (it is something that people can work toward but never achieve).  
3. Purpose - some sense of an end that is important or worth working toward other than money or extrinsic reward.  

I think that most teachers already knew a lot of this.  I think that some of the thinking and the language around this helped clarify the "why" for me, but I don't think that this stuff is as groundbreaking as it wants to pretend.  The challenge, of course, is implementing these things in a consistent, responsible way in the classroom.  Giving middle school students the chance to choose who they work with can easily go wrong.  But what an incentive, and a powerful tool, if it is done right!  

Now, the goal is to get through some of the material I have on inquiry.