Screencasting

Thanks to the new books that I recently received (Crime and Puzzlement, recommended by Hillocks in Teaching Argument Writing), I'm ready to teach a new lesson on argument writing.  I hope to use one of the visual mysteries from these books to help students craft an argument based on evidence.

To help promote engagement (and to promote this type of writing among my colleagues), I want to try screencasting this.  In Hillocks' book, he describes several lessons where students and their teacher are collaborating on a text, a kind of think-aloud about writing (sometimes called the "language experience" approach).  I want to try this, and I want them to get deeply involved in the text that we are co-constructing.  So, I'm trying to blend all of these things together.

We'll see how things go.

For now, here's a demo of the tool that I want to try using:

Here's a link to the video on vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/52945275

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.  

Debbie Miller

I just posted a long discussion of Debbie Miller's book, READING WITH MEANING, on my other blog.  Here's a link to the post if you'd like to read more.  I created this other blog, as I stated before, to kind of develop my thinking as a teacher reading professional books and books related to teaching. So, I thought that would be the best place to post my thinking.

I hope to have more to say about other books I'm reading soon, such as a book about classroom discussion that I started today - Building Literacy through Classroom Discussion by Mary Adler and Eija Rougle.  I was planning to read a book about Socratic circles, but the book I have is rather dry and wordy - this one seems both more readable and more broadly applicable to contexts other than just a single instructional practice (Socratic circles seem like one approach, while this book - about discussion - seems to be about a larger family of approaches built around discussion.  Much more useful.)

Some Updates

I just created two new blogs here, attached to this account.  I hope to funnel some of my thinking there, and connect in interesting ways here.  I've started to feel like this is a nice, public place to think and reflect on teaching/reading/writing, but that it's not an appropriate place for some of the things that I want to write about.  So, I hope to post my thoughts on teaching, technology, literacy, etc. here, while my (perhaps less interesting) other thoughts will be posted in either of the other two blogs.  

I'm a weird mix of research instincts (from being an English Ph.D. student some years ago) and the urge to write (from being a wannabe novelist/writer/provocateur since middle school), and these things are coalescing around some obscure interests, like common shade trees.  Honestly, there's not a big difference between trees and Frank Lloyd Wright, really, except perhaps people are more interested in the latter.  

So, anyway, that's what's up.  I'm hoping to post a few things here soon, dealing with engagement and motivation, some new ideas for portfolios in my middle-school classroom, and some general thinking about literacy and technology.  Big, teacher-related things.  

So, thanks for reading.  

Great video of "thinking partners"

I shared this on Twitter because I really like it as a model of effective use of student talk in the classroom:

I think that there would need to be changes for this to be effective with 7th graders.  Obviously, they might not be as fascinated in caterpillars as these kids are.  And you might not want to stop so often to model the thinking and talking.  But the physical modeling of appropriate behaviors is really effective and important, and would definitely help.  I think it's a nice way to create a mental picture of what they are supposed to be doing.  Too many students at this age just don't have an appropriate mental image of what effective collaboration and partnering is supposed to be like.  If they have an understanding of this, it is often misguided or misleading.  It always helps to solidify this - especially early in the school year - because it can be so useful later.  And I really think this is important for middle school.  7th graders are so peer-focused that any way to channel student talk in a positive direction is probably going to work.  (They are often much more engaged in what they say to each other than in what you say to them.)

Debut of my YouTube Channel

Check out my high-quality vid here:

I know, I know, it's super-stupid and slightly (!) boring.  But this was just a test, eh?  So please be patient.

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.