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.  

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.  

Teaching Nonfiction Writing

I'd like to post some of my thinking here about nonfiction writing.  I recently read the book, Because Writing Matters, a short compilation of the collected thinking of the National Writing Project.  This is an organization that is near to my heart, since I attended the Summer Leadership Institute this past summer with the Illinois Writing Project.

I proposed a breakout session at the upcoming DuPage County institute day conference (I don't remember the official title), and I am considering how I can use this material.  It's useful for establishing the warrant for writing instruction, the purpose and value of writing instruction to teachers at K-8 schools where writing is not explicitly tested and only indirectly mandated through state learning standards.  (How do you usefully promote writing instruction to teachers by saying, "You are supposed to be doing it anyway."  That's a little too parental.)

There are chapters that outline the value of writing instruction for purposes of promoting learning and for improving test scores.  But that also feels disingenuous, at the very least.  Writing is not only - or, in my view, should not be considered only - a means to some other end.  It is an end in itself, a valuable and useful tool that students need in order to be successful in high school and college.

I think that this book is more about arguing for a particular policy or instructional choice.  It does not necessarily provide methods for promoting effective writing instruction.  Perhaps that case is obvious and does not need to be argued.  If it ever does, this book is a useful tool for defending the instructional choices that we make.

Some new thinking about teaching writing

I'm very pleased to have heard that I've been accepted into the Summer Leadership Conference for the Illinois Writing Project. It's something I've had my eye on for some time, but I think this was finally the year where I'm in a position to really capitalize on this opportunity. I've always been most excited about (and probably best at) teaching writing, and this is a chance to really begin to develop as a leader in writing instruction in my school district and among my colleagues.

Here's a link to the Illinois Writing Project website if you're curious about what that is.

I want to spend a little extra time thinking about (and writing about) being a writer and a teacher. I want to get as much as I can out of this workshop, and I think that the first step is to really throw myself into reading about writing instruction, writing about writing instruction, and really trying some new ways of teaching writing.

Here are some of the books that I'm going to dust off and read (or re-read):

• In the Middle by Nancie Atwell
• Teaching Adolescent Writers by Kelly Gallagher
• After the End by Barry Lane
• But How do you Teach Writing? by Barry Lane
• The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins
• Writing Essentials by Regie Routman
• Digital Storytelling by Carolyn Handler Miller

There are also a couple of textbooks on teaching writing (like Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product by Gail Tompkins) that I would like to look through, and some general Language Arts or Reading textbooks that address writing instruction that I want to look through. I'm also going to take full advantage of my subscriptions to IRA publications like The Reading Teacher and JAAL, as well as take another look at the NCTE publications that I used to get.

The real goal here is to try to synthesize and model writing-as-thinking and writing-to-learn. I want to dig deeper here and really turn this proclivity into a resource that I can be proud of.

Posting Here

With the new addition of the other two blogs, I'm not sure how I might use this space. I'm not really sure about the best ways to discuss these issues anymore. I suppose it helps to talk about methods and thinking, but I think that the PD blog might be more appropriate for most of that.

Embed video links on the Jena 6

I'm going to put some links in here to the Jena 6 videos that I want to show:

Updates

It's been a long time. I'm a 7th grade Reading, Language Arts, and Science teacher in the Northwest suburbs now. I'm having some of the same problems as last year, but I'm out of CPS. I have a ton of support, students who respect and like me (for the most part), and a great administration and team. I'm departmentalized, which is wonderful. I have an advisory, which is also wonderful. And I'm active with the students before and after school, in a few different clubs and organizations, like intramural soccer. It's a completely different year.