Moderating #TLAP chat and drafting the questions

(This is a re-post of what I just posted on my other blog.)

I just shared the questions I’ve been thinking about for tomorrow’s chat on Twitter – here’s a link to the Google Doc.  I’d like to explain my thinking about writing instruction a little bit here, as a background to the chat.  If that helps.

My goals with the questions are fairly straightforward, though that might not be clear from the questions themselves:

• To highlight the utility of writing across the curriculum, in both content classes and English/ELA classes
• To leverage the nature of writing as an instructional tool in as many different ways as possible
• To focus on what makes writing engaging or worthwhile for students, and how teachers can use that to motivate

I teach 7th graders in a public, Title 1 middle school with a large Hispanic population.  I often find myself working against a few common misconceptions:

1. Writing is “work.”  ”How many sentences does it have to be?”  ”Why do I have to use paragraphs?”  ”Is this enough?”
2. Writing is something you do at school, a kind of game that you play to make teachers happy, and then forget after you graduate.  Anything else you do with words – writing on Facebook, text messaging, anything else, isn’t really “writing.”  Or doesn’t count.
3. There are specific rules about writing, and those rules are rigid and unchanging for all eternity.  All teachers know them.
4. There’s no point to revise what you write.  Why bother writing something twice?  (That’s almost as bad as reading something twice!)

This is a steep hill to climb, but I think we can climb it if we start on the first day, and keep moving forward every day.  And I think we have a ton of strategies to keep moving up that hill.  (Plus, the more teachers that work hard at changing these views, the smaller the hill gets.)

So, what are some things that I do about this?  Here’s a short version:

• Daily Writing Notebooks or “Quickwrites.”  I have kids writing every day at the start of class.  We write for different reasons, responding to different things in different ways.  Often, the prompt is related to our objective of the day.  (We’ve been talking a lot about bias lately, so questions have included references to strong opinions and trust.)  Sometimes we write about pictures, or songs, or we just reflect on an assignment, an event, or an objective.  There are millions of ways to do this (have you ever googled “writing prompts”?), and I have books of writing prompts that I use sometimes (Unjournaling is a fun one that comes to mind).  Here’s a blog post about writing notebooks that has more about how I use these (though the recent change to 1-1 chromebooks has altered this).
• Writing Workshop.  This is just too awesome to let go of.  When it’s going well – and I’ve had it both ways – kids are working hard on developing their texts, learning tons, and engaged.  It pays off in writing, reading, vocabulary, and any other class where they have to explain their thinking in writing.  I believe it makes them better learners, because it helps students take control of their own learning.  I think we all want that.
• Sharing lots of (anonymous) student models, teacher models (mine and others), and thinking/revising aloud, in front of my students.  We were encouraged to use student models as texts when I taught college writing, and that practice carried over into my middle school teaching.  It’s pretty engaging for the students, and I think that incorporating student texts makes everyone feel better, not just the student whose work you use.  Of course, it takes practice to move beyond the guessing game of “whose is this,” but when you do this often enough without feeling obliged to share the author’s name, the students are better able to focus on the writing.  It can be really effective in motivating students to engage in the instruction about writing, but selecting the right kind of model helps push kids, too.  (I love it when I can find something really brilliant in student-written text and share it with the class.)  I also share my writing with students on a regular basis.  They need to see me writing, and they need to see me revising my writing – I try not to exclusively share polished, finished writing.  When time permits, I try to share multiple drafts.
• Publishing and celebrating student writing – nothing motivates like success.  One of the best groups of writers I’ve had didn’t “feel” like a special writing group until I read two student memoirs aloud for the class.  One was a quirky dog story full of surprisingly funny details, the other a sad story about a grandmother’s passing.  Both pieces of writing were full of poignant, powerful moments, and I celebrated those moments as honestly and clearly as I could.  I didn’t cringe from the errors or the oversights, but I chose to focus on the good.  I think that celebrating the good in such a public way changed the atmosphere, and made almost everyone in that class want to work hard and do well on their writing.
• Frequent use of writing as thinking, or writing to learn.  It can be as simple as “think-pair-share” with some kind of writing component, or just having kids write in response to a question before (or after) a discussion.  I love a good reflection – I’ve been doing it every week, with kids reflecting on objectives for the week.  It helps them stay focused on purpose and notice progress in their own learning.  And anything you do that has students revise their writing to represent changes in their thinking will help them develop their own strategies for writing-to-learn.  Graphic organizers are a really useful tool, but they can become a crutch if used too often.  They’re a useful scaffold – just make sure that students are finishing the building and pulling the scaffolding away at some point.
• Defining “writing” as broadly and inclusively as possible.  We don’t want them to substitute “talking” for writing in all cases, but we want students to see the relationship between speaking and writing, and how they can use one to help develop the other (reading a draft aloud, or writing out a speech).  I think it’s more and more important for students to see the interrelationship between visual information and text, and how pictures convey meaning in ways that are similar to (but not the same as) writing.  The same is true, of course, of music, video, and the complex interrelationships of text, pictures, links, and audio/video on the web.  People use these media to create meaning, and pretending like it’s not part of the business of writing is getting more and more obviously false every day.  (I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t be asked to complete text-only writing tasks sometimes.  I’m saying that we can’t ONLY do that.)
• Making revision and revision strategies a useful part of writing well, not an absolute requirement for all assignments, and not a “punishment” for being a “bad writer” the first time.  This comes from modeling, from discussing author’s craft, and from giving feedback that points to specific ways to improve a piece, as well as celebrating the good things.  Kids won’t revise a text if they see it as “garbage.”  There has to be something worth keeping, or the best you might get is a complete re-write (which might be a learning experience, and might just be a huge frustration).  I think that Writing Workshop is a great way for kids to experience a successful revision – and they won’t really see the value of revision until they’ve crafted something that they can see as really special.  I know that students need to be prepared for “on-demand” writing tasks – because of standardized tests – but that’s not the most useful or most powerful kind of learning about writing that students will do.  That can be taught as a “genre” (which is how I prefer to teach it), and students can be encouraged to see it for what it really is – a specific kind of writing that has a very limited use.

This doesn’t quite feel finished.  I think I’ll need to come back and say more about this later.  For now, this is a good introduction.

WRITE BESIDE THEM and Middle School Writing

I started reading this book a year or two ago (I can't honestly remember) when several teachers recommended it to me - several of whom were fellow participants in the Summer Leadership Institute for the Illinois Writing Project (a fantastic opportunity, and something I recommend to everyone, by the way).  So, I ran out and picked up a copy.  I read through the first 70 pages in a day or two.  The next 100 pages took more than a year.  This summer, I've finished the book - mostly because I bought another book by Penny Kittle (BOOK LOVE) and felt the need to finish one before starting the other.

So, comments about my weird reading history aside, the material in the book is pretty fantastic.  I envy some of the details of Kittle's teaching assignment (teaching a writing class? awesome!), and I know that her kids are different from mine.  So, I'd like to kind of "think aloud" about how to use this in middle school.

I've posted about the details of my teaching assignment before, and I don't want to go into too much detail.  Briefly, I teach in a suburban Title 1 middle school that uses a "teaming" concept (two or three teachers share a group of students and teach various subjects to the same group of kids, so that students have fewer teachers and teachers can collaborate better) and block scheduling.  Unfortunately, I only have one block (60 minutes) to teach both reading and writing (which are assigned separate grades, by me).  It's hard to teach a writing workshop when it means that you have to surrender all of your literacy time to writing.  I've done it, and it's worked really well almost all of the time (partly because I'm so passionate and motivated when it comes to teaching writing), but lately I've been trying other strategies that allow me to better emphasize both reading and writing at the same time.  So, a modified workshop, or a workshop built around "units of study" - genre-based study of texts, including close reading/analysis and then production/imitation of a text that fits that genre.

Anyway, what does this have to do with WRITE BESIDE THEM?

Let's start with a numbered list:

1. I really like her discussion of writing notebooks, something I use almost every day, and something that Kittle uses every day, too.  It's a place for "all of that bad writing that is essential to uncover good writing" (26) and a tool for helping students find their voice (27).  
2. I use her model of "quick writing" (Chapter 5), which has three important rules:
1. Write the entire time
2. Write quickly without letting the critic in your head censor you
3. Relax, have fun, play
3. She writes along with her students during these quick writes, and she shares her messy drafts so that they see her thinking on paper, and they see a writer making choices and revising.  
4. Heart Maps - Kittle got this idea from Georgia Heard, and it's a great way to get kids thinking about their "writing territories," something you can come back to later in the year when they say they don't have anything to write about.  
5. I love how she models re-reading of the quick writes - if kids are just writing and tossing the material, there's not much point in doing journals.  It's when they see value in the notebooks and are using what they come up with that these things are important and worthwhile.
6. Her overall flexibility and her willingness to adjust her teaching (and her expectations) to help kids.  Chapter 9, "Seeking Balance," should be required reading for anyone teaching writing to any person over age 10.  In a nutshell, Kittle argues that kids don't learn to write well when they are given writing assignments that they will never revise.  And many of the writing assignments given in English classes are first-draft, write-and-forget assignments.  She encourages letting go of some of the demands of literary analysis: not everything a kid writes in an English class in high school has to be about a literary classic.  Students don't learn effective writing when they have to write about something that doesn't matter to them.  True, that's not ALWAYS the case, and yes, students should be expected to do some literary analysis.  But writing a five-paragraph essay about THE SCARLET LETTER doesn't teach them very much about good writing.  They will probably learn about literary analysis, but that's not teaching writing.  
7. I like her discussion of conventions (grammar and mechanics), but I don't love it.  I don't think Kittle is the best voice on this subject (I prefer Jeff Anderson for this), but I think that she's developed a system for helping kids learn how to get better at conventions.  It's not the focus of what she does, but she addresses it.  Not everyone does, and not everyone who does manages to help kids retain and use better conventions.
8. Her discussion of feedback.  I loved the example she gave of the different ways that she was given feedback on something she wrote, and how that made her feel.  I think that we've all been there, as teachers and students, when we were given destructive or hurtful feedback on something we wrote that seemed to miss the goal we were striving for.  It's an excuse for the writer to ignore the feedback.  I really liked her discussion of it, and I think that it makes the point about how writers often feel about what they've written - how there's an element of trust involved in that exchange of written products - and how aggressive, insensitive comments can destroy any hope of helping the writer.  If you stomp on their fledgling ideas, they aren't going to share any more with you - or at least not any that matter to them.  And, if you manage the opposite, if you can sift through the messiest draft and find the nuggets of meaning, the funny part, the briefest glimmer of insight, and point that out to a student, then you've built trust.  You have a disciple.  Students identify with what they write, and they want you to find the gold in what they write, just like they want people to find the value in them.  It's a delicate thing, and it can be enormously positive and powerful if you become a skilled treasure-hunter.  
9. The craft of the book overall.  I've read books by teachers that were better written, but this is close to the top.  There were a couple of chapters and passages that really stood out to me.  Clearly, her writing matters to her, and she wants to convey her meaning appropriately and aptly.

I think I have more to say about this book, but I'm going to step away and think a bit more.  

Video about mini-books

I created and shared a video using Vimeo (and my old iPhone, and iMovie) of me reading a mini-book my daughter and I made.


Mr Stinkypants Goes Shopping Mini-Book from Ben Kuhlman on Vimeo.


I hope to explain the mechanics of making these things, then having kids make one for a writing workshop project that will help establish a playful, creative atmosphere.  I hope to do more things like this, but this seems like a good way to re-lauch the workshop right before Spring Break.

Teaching argument presentation

I tried posting some of my argument presentation here, but I was unable to add an attachment - though it's not hard to add a link to a Livebinder:

Teaching Argument Writing - My Livebinder

There's a bunch of stuff there, including the rubric, the assignment sheet, a sample of Crime and Puzzlement, and the slides.

The presentation was very well-attended, and I was a little worried at the beginning that some people would be disappointed.  But no one walked out (that I saw).

Last year, I included WAY too many things in the "blurb" for the program, and I never had a chance to talk about everything that I mentioned.  For example, last year I mentioned Big 6 research strategies in the blurb and never really talked about it.  I had at least one person express disappointment.

This year, I think I was boring.  More so than last year.  Last year, I think I was rushing so fast that people had to pay attention or take a chance of getting motion sickness.

Anyway, I think this went well enough that I'm planning to try again next year, and maybe step up to a larger conference - maybe a state conference (like the IRC?).  Not sure where I'm headed from here.  But I think it was fun, and I think that people benefited from the conversation.  And I think I did a decent job showing respect for the experience and contributions of the audience.  We say that we should demonstrate our "good teaching" when we present to other teachers, but we should also show that we understand the difference between the needs of our students and the needs of an audience of adult professionals.

I enjoyed hearing from the audience members, and I think my next goal is to involve the audience without asking too much.

Common Core and Argument

So we've started the process of aligning our district standards (or "power" standards) with the newly adopted Common Core for Illinois.  This process is going to take a while, at least in my district, and it's a great conversation for teachers to have.

I have mixed feelings about national standards, and I understand that not all of the motives behind the national standards movement are wholesome, student-centered, and progressive.  However, the standards have been adopted, and they are not all bad.  There are a lot of good things about the standards, and a lot of potential for good outcomes.  I choose to look on the "bright side" here.  

For me, the best part of Common Core is the emphasis on writing.  (For example, consider standard CC.7.W.10: "Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.")  While I'm not a huge fan of "informational" writing, as a label, there is a general tendency in the standards for more sustained writing instruction.  I have always felt that writing instruction is the most challenging, the most important, and the most neglected aspect of middle school instruction.  As a high school student, I felt that writing was "easy," because I was exposed to so little academic writing, and I did well on the few assignments we were given.  It wasn't until I became a college writing instructor that I realized how little I really knew about academic writing, and how much I had yet to learn.  

Let me throw in some links here, before I forget:

Common core home page - http://www.corestandards.org/

PARCC - the Common Core state test website - http://www.parcconline.org/about-parcc

Illinois State Board of Education standards page - http://www.isbe.net/common_core/default.htm

IL Common Core ELA resources page - http://www.isbe.net/common_core/pdf/elawebsites.pdf

There's a lot out there.  I think, though, that a lot of the emphasis - at least in ELA at the 7th grade level - is on "argument."

Joking aside, it's a useful technical term that has fruitful links to colloquial understandings of the term. At bottom, an academic argument is not that different from a "regular" argument.  There are claims, moves, reasons, and positions.  Most kids are going to enter the classroom with a thorough understanding of the basic principles of argumentation, whether they can articulate those principles or not:

1.  State your position.

2.  Provide reasons or evidence for your position.  

3.  Provide counterarguments or refutations of opposing arguments.  

I like to think of "argument" as a bigger, more inclusive term than "persuasion."  TV commercials and used-car salesmen are "persuaders," but they also make arguments.  Argument is a Big Idea.

Where do we see the term in the standards?  Here are four explicit references to "argument" in the 7th grade standards:

CC.7.R.I.8 - Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient to support the claims. 

CC.7.W.1 - Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. 

CC.7.W.1.e - Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented. 

CC.7.SL.3 - Delineate a speaker’s argument and specific claims, evaluating the soundness of the reasoning and the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

I would estimate that at least half of the rest of the standards make reference to argument-specific vocabulary (such as "claim" and "evidence"), as in this instance: 

CC.7.R.L.1 - Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

I think the most important thing about this isn't just that students are expected to learn how to write arguments, as part of a large collection of things they are supposed to learn.  Argument becomes an essential part of all of the English Language Arts - these standards come from almost all of the various strands (reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc.).  

So, learning about argument isn't just about writing instruction anymore (if it ever was).  Now, it's more explicitly tied to reading, speaking/listening, and synthesizing research.  

And that, I would argue, is a good thing.  

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.  

Using Music in the Classroom - Cat's in the Cradle

I mentioned in a previous post that I like to use music in the classroom to help reflect and promote writing/thinking.  I used Harry Chapin's song, "Cat's in the Cradle" to great effect last year.  I had them watch the video, follow along with the words, and then write about family and how it can influence you.  The lyrics are not hard to find, and the video is kind of intriguing and quirky (clothes from the '70's?).  Here's the YouTube link:

Quick note: students who struggle with the text are not going to be able to watch the video and follow along with the words in any meaningful way.  I passed out the questions and lyrics (below) first, then had students read and think about the questions before watching the video.  This helps set a purpose for viewing the video and makes the review of the lyrics almost like a fluency activity, helping them adjust and correct the "voice" in their heads.  Having the lyrics in front of them after viewing, while writing about them, also helps them get specific and respond more directly to the language of the song.

This helped produce a lot of strong feelings, and a lot of strong writing.  I had at least one student crying during this (a "tough guy") - and while he wasn't able (or willing) to explain all of his thinking for this prompt, it created a sense of need or purpose for the explaining that might have been hard to establish in other ways with this particular student.


Here's the text of the handout I created with the lyrics, if you don't want to do it yourself:

-----------------------------------------------------------

Writing about Family 

Listen to (and watch the video for) the following song about a father and his son.  While you’re watching, think about the following questions/things to write about:

1.     How do you feel about becoming just like your parents?  Do you think you will be just like them when you grow up?  Is that a good thing?

2.     Tell a story about something interesting or funny that happened between you and your parents.  Try to tell it slowly and carefully, including dialogue (a good guess of the actual words you said to each other).

3.     If you choose to become a parent (in the distant future, 40 or 50 years from now), what kind of parent do you think you would be?  What kind of parent would you want to be?

4.     Imagine you are dating someone seriously (twenty years from now), and that person starts asking about your family.  What do you think you would tell that person?  What are the important things that people need to know to understand your family? 

Please focus on only ONE of the questions above, and explain yourself the best you can in the time you have.  Remember that a quickwrite means that you KEEP WRITING for the entire time!

Cats in the Cradle

by Harry Chapin

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew
He'd say "I'm gonna be like you dad
You know I'm gonna be like you"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home dad?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

My son turned ten just the other day
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw", I said "Not today
I got a lot to do", he said, "That's ok"
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed
And said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

Well, he came home from college just the other day
So much like a man I just had to say
"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?"
He shook his head and said with a smile
"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys
See you later, can I have them please?"

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

I've long since retired, my son's moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"
He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time
You see my new job's a hassle and kids have the flu
But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad
It's been sure nice talking to you"

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

Thinking about writing journals?

I'm starting to plan for my 6th year as a 7th grade reading/writing teacher at Chicago-area middle school, and I wanted to "think out loud" about writing journals/notebooks and their use in the middle-school language arts classroom.

There are several schools of thought on this, and a lot of powerful ways to use these things, as well as several possible ways to handle the logistics.

Here are some ways that I've used journals (let's just call them that for now) in the LA classroom:

1. As a daily "Do Now" or immediate activity done at the very start of class.  This strategy is useful to reinforce management and get students seated and working.  It helps maximize productive class time.  
2. As a less rigorously structured thinking or processing activity done at variable times during the class.  This might be something like, "Brainstorm a list of ways that you can use this strategy," or "Now that we understand what similes and metaphors are, write out some possible reasons that authors might use figurative language like this . . . ."  
3. As a way to enrich classroom or small-group discussion, as a kind of preparation or planning ahead for a focused conversation on a specific topic.  "Before we discuss the end of the story "Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto, let's write out our thinking about this question: do you think it was okay for the main character to pretend to know French to impress the girl?"  

There is at least one other really cool way to use journals - as the "writing notebook," a kind of catch-all or "commonplace book" that writers use to gather their thinking and random ideas.  I think Ralph Fletcher and Donald Murray are the big proponents of this type of tool.  If used appropriately, it's a fantastic resource that makes composing much easier.  I'd like to move in that direction, and I'm going to be digging into this idea a little more this year.  If I decide to go ahead with journals again this year, I will probably try this.  

As far as logistical challenges go, there are numerous ways to provide students with notebooks to use for daily in-class writing:  

1. Spiral, wire-bound notebooks 
2. the slightly more expensive "neatbook" or bound writing notebooks with no wires
3. A bundle of lined paper provided several times a year (through the district copying service)
4. A stapled, pre-designed packet of prompts with space to respond
5. Binders and loose-leaf notebook paper
6. BYON (bring-your-own-notebook)

All of these cost money, and every year except one, I have provided these notebooks to my students.  One year I created a packet of prompts and questions, and had production make copies for me.  They not very sturdy, and the pre-written prompts often didn't feel related to the issues discussed in other parts of the class.  This also made it difficult (or cumbersome) to use longer response-type prompts, such as responding to poetry, music, or pictures (something that I began using this year with great success).  

I've been able to pick up dozens of notebooks during back-to-school sales, and the expense has been minimal.  I prefer this approach because it makes all the notebooks match (which makes stacking and differentiating them from others much easier), and it helps establish a positive climate at the beginning of the school year (here's a free notebook!).  It also makes me feel less guilty about collecting and reading them, and often keeping them at the end of the year.  

Notebooks as journals are more flexible than the packets, because it's easier to stretch to accommodate different-sized entries, and a notebook allows more creativity than a packet.  It also doesn't require a desk or hard surface for writing - students can take notebooks with them on "field trips" to other parts of the building or outside (a very intriguing and under-utilized feature, at least in my class).  I've never had a student run out of room, though students definitely vary in the amount of writing they do.  

I think the year-long tool is helpful, too, with year-end portfolios (it enables much greater scope of reflection), and regular use of the journal during daily required writing time helps build good writing habits (many students wrote that they felt like they grew a lot as writers because of the daily writing time) and writing fluency.  

I think the biggest surprise for me was the amount of room left over in the notebooks at the end of the year.  I think that regular feedback helps most students (some students were uncomfortable with me collecting and reading notebooks, and I did the "mark the entries you want me to read" approach at least twice during the year), and I think the lesson is that I should be using notebooks more often, and more closely tying notebook writing to grades and to curriculum.  I'm considering a weekly writing assignment, over-and-above the daily in-class notebook writing and workshop writing time.  

So, in the end, this whole thing boils down to one essential question:

How can I get my students to use their writing notebooks more, both writing more in the notebooks and using the writing for other things more often?

I'll be digging through some professional books in the weeks ahead to look for some answers.    

Twitter in the Classroom?

So, I signed up for Twitter a few months ago, and I've become a big fan.  To my surprise, I was also given a school account by my district.  I was at a loss for how to use it at first, but then I thought about the hashtag concept.

If you aren't familiar, the "hashtag" is a way of making your "tweets" - the things you post on Twitter - instantly searchable.  If you tweet something with a hashtag that others are using, people can watch the feed for a specific hashtag, and they will see your contribution pop up as part of a conversation.  For example, a recent hashtag was #5words.  People tweeted a five-word phrase that they considered important or enlightening, and then tagged it.  Then everyone else could search for that hashtag, and follow the tweets as they came out.

So, it occurred to me, why not create a hashtag and use that to have an ongoing, synchronous conversation with another classroom?  I posted something about this on the English Companion Ning, and I had two or three responses almost instantly.  That was cool, but I had no idea what to do about that.  Now that I have the Twitter account, I don't know that I have the time to insert a text or unit that we can collaborate on with another classroom.  (As is usually the case, at this point in the year, I'm dumping cool ideas that I've been putting off, and trying to jam as many cool ideas and new ideas for next year into the classroom as I can before school is over.  Between the required stuff and the stuff I want, I don't have much room left.)

So, since that didn't work, I just started actually using it.  I felt like I had waited too long, and tried too many different propositions, and ended up wasting time.  So, I just started tweeting "cool sentences" on my school Twitter account.  Students volunteered these sentences, and I tweeted them.  I recently tried the #5words hashtag (though I didn't use the actual tag because I didn't want too much unwanted attention drawn to the school account), and that worked really well.

So, with five weeks left of school, I'm thinking about other ways to use this.

I think the goal for the next several weeks is going to be just tweeting as much student work as I can.  It should be - or it seems like it would best serve as - a student publication tool, of very short student texts.  So, I'm going to publish anything and everything that I can, without breaking district rules.

I would love to hear other ideas, if anyone has suggestions.

What's interesting about Coal?

We watched part of a documentary about mountaintop removal, THE LAST MOUNTAIN.

Here's a link to the website to the movie.

I like this movie for a couple of reasons.  I'm going to skip my inclination to side with the filmmakers, because that's not something I can avoid or ignore.  I think that this movie does a good job of breaking the issue of mountaintop removal into manageable and understandable chunks - since I didn't understand it very well before this movie - and presents evidence or reasons for their position in relation to each of those parts.  For example, the movie points out that mountaintop removal is permitted partly because coal companies are required to return the mountain to its original state when they are finished removing the coal.  Then, they show a clip of a site after the coal company has allegedly returned the mountain to its original condition.  This becomes the logical beginning of a discussion about how coal companies manipulate the law to maximize profit.

There are some propaganda techniques evident in the film.  Clearly, some of the clips are intended to be heart-wrenching, sympathetic portrayals of union workers and protesters, and copious evidence of corporate wrongdoing.  But the film is unusually evidence-based, and I've seen other movies that present similar evidence against mountaintop removal.  They employ some breathtaking photography, lots of visual examples and contrast, and some rousing testimony from people on the "front lines."  I love that it's localized around one mountain (called Coal Mountain), and that the people around that mountain are the stars.

I think that this movie is on the leading edge of the current controversy around coal and "clean coal" technology.  I think that mountaintop removal is a horrible, destructive practice, and there is no question that coal companies are tearing apart wilderness for coal, and making false claims to defend their destructive actions.  These false claims are supported again and again by lobbyists, politicians, and the companies' employees.  It's a tragedy.

What's going to happen?

Research = Work?

So I was listening to Car Talk, the NPR show with the two old mechanics from the Boston area who take phone calls about car trouble.  They were talking to a woman from Palo Alto who was having problems with a noise in her tire.  Eventually, they asked her what she did for a living.  She answered, "I'm a graduate student."  Of course, they asked what she studied, and she responded, "Italian literature." They tried to make that into pleasant "small talk," and something came up about "at least you get to go to Italy."  She said, "Yes, for research," and one of the hosts said, "sounds like a lot of work."

My first thought was, "what the heck are you talking about?"

My second thought was, "you must not be someone who enjoys research."

I was putting myself in her place.  I was thinking about what it feels like, to finally dig into the topic to try to create your own original work, your own take on the issues that stir your field.  To step forward and assume the mantle of the professional scholar, diving into the topic to discover and explain something new.  An intellectual astronaut, as it were.  If you are the kind of person who is lucky enough to have found a field that you can be passionate about, this is a dream come true.  This is akin to meeting your childhood hero and getting his/her autograph and then sitting down for dinner with that person.  It's a chance to drive your dream car, go on a date with your dream girl/boy, sleep in your dream house, and so on.  It's a GOOD thing, not work.  It's a chance to play in the "big show," the audition for the lead on Broadway, and so on.  It's not a bad thing.  It's not work.

There's lots of ways to think about this.  I know that not everyone likes research, and not everyone gets a chance or a reason to conduct research on a topic that they love.  But it's the kind of skill that everyone needs and that everyone wants.  It might be work to do research for something you hate, but hopefully a graduate student is not someone who hates to do research.  Hopefully, it's the opposite.

My point is this: research doesn't have to be work.  It doesn't have to be painful and soul-crushing.

That's not to say that it isn't difficult or sometimes time-consuming or even expensive (like flying to Italy).  But my own research experience was not really work, or not always work.  True, there were a lot of difficult nights with piles of dense, seemingly irrelevant text to wade through.  But there were great moments and the pleasure of discovery.  There were times when I could make sense of things, and I could explain something new.  That's a great feeling.  I feel like I learned something and made something, and that has helped me in ways that are hard to explain sometimes.  Perhaps it's like the kid who can be successful in sports, so he/she feels more confident off the playing field because of success on it.  I don't know if that's adequate.  But research is a chance to make something new, building things from the knowledge and experience of others.  It's important now because of the vast opportunity to conduct research via the Internet and other electronic tools.

This is an ongoing concern, and I don't think I've adequately expressed it here.  I'm going to think about the research process and post again when I'm ready to try to explain it again.

OCTOBER SKY and coal

Well, I watched this movie because it came up in the library database attached to the keyword "coal."  It's not really about coal, though it's set in West Virginia in a "company town," and the main character and his father are coal miners (or, in the case of the main character, work as a coal miner for a few months).  It's about someone struggling against unlikely circumstances to be successful in a way that people don't expect or predict.  It - or the director, Joe Johnston - sets the film in West Virginia, but that's more because of the "true story" that it's based on than because of any inherent need in the film for that setting.  Homer's dad could have been a steel worker, a dock worker, a farmer, just about anything that could be dangerous or boring, and it would also work.

I think this movie is relevant to the conversation about coal, though, and sheds light on the situation of coal mining that would not otherwise be noticed.  It's a mainstream, large-scale release of a film by a major studio (Universal) with some top-name actors (Jake Gyllenhall, though he wasn't a superstar yet, Laura Dern, and Chris Cooper), and several parts of the movie take place inside a coal mine in what appears to be a realistic depiction.  It's not friendly to the coal-mining industry, but it's also not friendly to unions, either.  It's that ambiguity about the setting that really makes it an interesting study for this topic.  

Here's a link to the IMDB profile if you want to see more about the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/.  

Briefly, the main character's father, John Hickam (played by Chris Cooper) is a site manager or foreman at a mine in West Virginia.  He's grumpy, favors his older, football-playing son, and distrusts his youngest son's strange habits.  Later in the movie, after struggling with his son to contain an interest in rocketry, he is injured in a mine accident and sent to the hospital.  Homer, the main character (Jake Gyllenhall) is forced to start working at the mine, dropping out of high school.  The father recuperates, and begins working at the mine alongside his son, but Homer is inspired to return to work on his rockets and leaves his father behind.  

Homer doesn't seem to mind the job so much, though it is clearly not a good fit for him.  There's an aura of sadness (slow music, a shot of Homer staring up into the night sky watching a satellite as he descends into the coal mine), but it's not clear if we should be sad because he doesn't belong there, or because no one does.  When the mine workers are on strike, the abusive father of one of Homer's friends takes a shot at John and misses - he seems to be aligned with the union, and the union doesn't look too good when men like that are mixed with it.  There are good friends and honest workers among the miners, but none seem to favor Homer until he enters the science fair and becomes a town favorite.  

At the end of the movie, we discover that John died of black lung disease about fifteen years after the events of the movie took place.  All of Homer's friends - and Homer - escaped coal mining, and that appears to be a good thing.  Clearly, people aren't supposed to want to be coal miners.  But Homer lionizes his father, in the end, and the movie seems to make his father into a kind of blue-collar hero.  Even though the father died of a work-related illness, he was well-suited to his position and became a hero through his work.  He was fulfilled in that job, and - we seem encouraged to think - many people can be happy as coal miners.  Even though not everyone wants to be a coal miner.  

So, to summarize this into a pithy little statement: people ought to be allowed to choose what they do with their lives.  There is honor in everything, from rocketry to coal mining.  Honor comes from finding where you belong, and sticking to it.  Something like that.  

Coal mining is just another job, and some people choose to do it, and do it well.  Unions are not part of this equation.  Neither, it seems, are corporations, really.  It's all about individual choice.  

Filmic Thinking? - Key Points of Film as Research

Coal Company thugs bullying a union family in Matewan

I think it's important to notice that video (especially long, narrative films like these, and most especially fictional representations of actual events, like Matewan) can seriously manipulate - even mislead - our thinking about an issue or an event.  There are a lot of ways to construe this story, and a lot of things that you can say about coal mining and its checkered history.  Fictional films always present events from a specific perspective (a particular camera angle), and that choice always affects the representation of events.  Who is in the center, for example, in the above image from the film Matewan?  The sheriff (the guy with the cigarette and the gun on his belt, played by David Straithairn) is in the center of the frame, alongside the slightly-off-center Coal Company bully, who is speaking and directing the removal of these people's belongings from a Coal Company house.  This frame puts these two men at the center of the action, which will turn out to help with the next step, which is when the sheriff stops this forced eviction.

But if you move the frame a little to the left, you shift the focus to the young man with the suspenders and blond hair.  He becomes an important character because of the way the coal company men mock him.  (What a great depiction of bullying in this movie - the scene where the two coal men are sitting at the dinner table with the kid, his mom, and his grandma, and making fun of his preaching, even pulling a gun on him.)  If you do that, the whole scene shifts to the effects it has on the townspeople.  Shift to the right, and focus on the stocky guy with the suit - who is the other Coal Company thug in the town at the moment - and you make this "sidekick" character suddenly important.  Is he conflicted about their tactics?  Is he seething with hatred and prejudice against "hillbillies"?

The most important question, really, is this: who's standing next to that guy?  Who is outside the frame?  Who is left out of the picture?  And, why does the director - or whoever is deciding what goes into the frame - choose to leave these people out?

As soon as you ask that question, you start to realize that the whole film is deliberately and carefully constructed from a huge assortment of film, and that every scene - every image - every moment reflects a conscious, purposeful decision.  Someone has a message to convey, and the images - their order, their content - even the sounds that go with them - represent an attempt to convey it.  Film is no accident.

Roll that up with an understanding of bias and perspective, and you start to think about how important a director (and whoever is helping the director edit the film) really is.

Watching a movie like Matewan as a kind of research is a lot like reading a novel about coal.  It's a made-up story from someone's point of view, really just meant to entertain.  Watching a documentary about the coal industry is different, but it still represents a carefully crafted message, delivered with a purpose.  It's easier to forget that manipulation with film.  It's easy to forget that someone is holding the camera, and that someone else is cutting and putting scenes together for the final product.  Someone is controlling what you see, and we must be careful that we don't forget that when we watch a movie.

Text Frames and Nonfiction Writing

This is a really useful way to conceptualize nonfiction writing that works "both ways" - for reading and for writing instruction.  That is the essential insight of authors like Lucy Calkins, Katie Wood Ray, Laura Robb, Doug Buehl, and Ralph Fletcher.  (Or at least one insight common to all of them.)

What is a text frame?  It is a way of structuring or arranging ideas in a text.  It might be thought of as a kind of genre, a convention, a pattern, a formula, a rhetorical strategy, a heuristic, or even a trend.  The easiest example is chronological order.  A writer might choose to arrange her ideas in "time-order," or the order in which they occurred, or in a kind of beginning-middle-end narrative order.  This arrangement suits narrative - one of the most common ways and reasons for writing - because it tends to represent the experience of the story.  Writers often choose this strategy because it is common, engaging, and simple.  Readers can easily interpret and empathize with this arrangement.  

It makes sense to teach this text structure first for two reasons.  First, it is the simplest and most common.  Students will be able to understand it easily, because they use it and encounter it more often than any other.  Because it is so common, students will be able to apply this understanding to future encounters with chronologically-ordered text.  This ubiquity will also make it easy to locate models for students to learn from.  Second, pointing out this strategy to students, and suggesting that there are others, will help students notice large-scale textual patterns and help them think about the possibility of other patterns.  It will push them toward noticing holistic features - a powerful higher-order thinking skill.  

Hopefully, when you start to teach text structure, you will open a door for students to thinking about texts in bigger terms, on a larger scale.  When students seem to understand the concept of chronological order (which should not be a big leap), there are two good questions to ask:

1. What kinds of texts are organized in way other than chronological order?
2. Why would an author choose to compose a text that is not in time order?

Question 1 is really a reading question.  Question 2 is a writing question.  But both are really the same question.  I hope this helps explain how text structure - the concept as an instructional focus - illustrates how writing and reading instruction reinforce each other.