This Much I Know...

We began our conversation last night with two things we know for certain. Gathered around a conference table were our two PA Writing and Literature Institute instructors and five practicing teachers, myself included. We've each been pursuing our own teacher research on areas related to teaching writing. As I posted earlier, I'm looking into how the principles of mastery learning and grading might help to improve student writing. Specifically, I've been looking at how feedback on writing assessments differs between teachers who use a more traditional, cumulative grading system versus those who subscribe to the ideas of mastery learning.

We were inspired by Dorthy Allison's quote about her Aunt Dot:

"Lord, girl, there's only two or three things I know for sure." She put her head back, grinned, and made a small impatient noise. Her eyes glittered as bright as a sun reflecting off the scales of a cottonmouth's back. She spat once and shrugged. "Only two or three things. That's right," she said. "Of course it's never the same things, and I'm never as sure as I'd like to be."

So, here's what I know so far from my research:

Progress in student writing depends, in part, on doing something with feedback. If you've taken the time to grade a student's work, if you've written comments on it, or made suggestions for improvements, you must give students time to do something with that feedback. If you don't, you have wasted a great deal of your time grading the piece and wasted the student's time by asking them to write it. If you're not going to do something with the feedback, then don't give feedback.

This is not a new thought. A great many writers and teachers of writing have been saying this for years. But, it was interesting for me to see it echoed through the interviews and surveys that I've been doing with both teachers and students. Students admit to stuffing graded papers to the bottom of their backpacks with only a cursory glance at the percentage or letter grade at the top, and teachers admit to not giving time in class for students to read, reflect, respond, and revise based on the feedback they've given. And both teachers and students responded that they continued to see the same feedback time and time again. And no wonder. If a student doesn't have an opportunity to reflect and respond to a teacher's feedback about a his poorly written thesis statement, he's going to continue to write bad thesis statements.

What was most interesting to me about this is that many of the teachers I interviewed talked at length about times when they were able to really connect with a student and help that student make progress. Each example recounted a time when a teacher was able to help a student specifically identify a writing skill to work on, and then work with the student over time on various writing assignments to improve in that area. The student had multiple opportunities to receive focused feedback and respond to it, revising and reflecting on that skill area in order to make progress. Hmmm...isn't this working toward mastery? Identify specific skills, practice that skill, both teacher and student reflect on the student's progress, make adjustments, and repeat.

Which leads to the no-duh moment for me, the other thing I know for certain: our curriculums must clearly articulate the skills students are working toward and not simply the texts that they will read. In talking with teachers and in survey responses from teachers not just in my district but from all over the country, I have learned that many English teachers are simply picking for themselves the skills they will help students in their specific classes develop. One ninth grade teacher will choose to help her students develop clear organizational strategies in their writing, while the ninth grade teacher across the hall is working with his students on commas. And although both items are listed in the state's standards for writing, there is little consistency from class to class, let alone from year to year. I'm not suggesting that English teachers sit down to rewrite curriculums by creating page upon page of skill lists. But we need a starting point, a common ground and a common language. And by articulating the skills that we want our students to work on, we will help students develop as better writers overall, and not simply as better writers of literary analysis essays in response to a specific text.

Calling All English Teachers

If you are a high school English teacher, I would love your help! I'm currently doing some research on what works when it comes to feedback and assessment of student writing. If you have a few minutes, could you please complete the survey below? Thanks!

CLICK HERE FOR THE SURVEY

Making Assessment of Writing Meaningful

Toward the end of our first quarter together, I ask my tenth grade student to begin thinking of topics for their culminating research project. Students select a current issue or problem facing a non-Western culture. In last couple of years, students have found issues to research rooted in the culture where their pen pal hails from. We've researched issues in Liberia, Morocco, India, Argentina, and Afghanistan.

Devon was a gregarious, outgoing student, always volunteering to help others in the class. He did not struggle to come up with an area he was interested in researching. He quickly decided to research women's roles in modern day Afghanistan. Given what he had seen on the news and heard about from his peers, he assumed that Afghani women were uneducated and had very few rights, with a majority of women suffering beatings and stoning at the hands of the family and loved ones.

He wrote up a research proposal, attached an article he found related to his research, and I approved his topic. Both he and I were excited to learn more about the real lives of women in this part of the world.

The way I teach research and writing has evolved as I've learned more about formative assessment and taken various writing courses. I've changed what I do in the classroom, how I grade writing. I've started to cut out my obsessive grading, instead finding more ways to give students opportunities to practice writing and get feedback without the pressure of a grade. This is how the tenth grade research paper is structured. There are steps. Students complete a proposal outlining their research questions, demonstrate their ability to find scholarly sources, cobble together a working outline, and begin drafting an essay. All of these pieces are rough drafts. They are not graded when they are initially turned in. My hope is that students find this liberating. It takes them a few weeks to realize that no grades means no penalty for lateness. By not putting formal grades on these initial drafts, students have an opportunity to revise without fear. They have an opportunity to practice writing. At least that was my initial thinking. Later on, when students turn in their final project, they have to include all their drafts with both my comments as well as peer and self revision marks which do receive a grade along with their publishable copies. I grade their effort, attempts, not the actual writing contained in the drafts. By giving students more opportunities to experiment, to change their ideas, and to revise, would both make for stronger writing but also cut down on plagiarism. I would see all their work prior to ever having to grade it.

But in the last few years, I still manage to have a handful of students like Devon. Devon was initially excited about his research, that is until he realized that he had some leeway with the due dates. Suddenly his outline was a week late, his rough draft two weeks late. And by the end of the semester when final projects were coming due, Devon had only cursory outlines of his ideas. I called parents. They knew of the missing work. Devon's quarter grade will hang on his project.

Devon turns in his final research project. The final essay is in large part cut and pasted from another's personal website. Devon didn’t even bother to make sure the font was all the same. He clearly cut and pasted someone else's words. Usually tenth grade honors students are a bit more savvy about hiding their plagiarism. Devon knew he would get caught, knew I had seen his work or lack of work up until the final project, so it seems like he didn't even try to disguise the fact that he had plagiarized.

In some respects, my initial thinking was bore out. By not initially grading the rough drafts and giving comment-only feedback, I had a better sense of what the students were accomplishing by the time we got to turning in the final project. But what do I do with the students who still choose to disengage from the writing process? How do I assess in a way that not only gives students an opportunity to practice and revise their writing, but more importantly, engage in their writing? How can I use assessment to engage writers?

One of the reasons that I had stopped giving letter grades on rough drafts was that I was hoping students would feel more empowered to practice their writing, take ownership of their writing process. As I wrote about a month or so ago in an earlier post:

"…teachers must leave space for students to demonstrate their progress. This means that teachers need to think about how they approach the grading of late work (does a lowered grade for lateness accurately reflect a student's mastery of a particular skill?) and giving students multiple opportunities to practice skills. 'Teaching accountability requires adherence to sound pedagogy, not just conventional grading practices always done because that's the way they've always been done. Assessment and feedback, particularly during the course of learning, are the most effective ways for students to learn accountability in their work and personal lives' (Wormeli 26)."

How can writing teachers assess the work of student writers in ways that are meaningful, ways that reflect the individual student's engagement with the process of writing? How might grading writing for the mastery of skills help emerging writers grow more confident and proficient?

Perhaps Devon saw an opportunity to get out of doing homework. The lack of a penalty for lateness meant that he could take his time on this assignment. The problem being that he never returned to the assignment once it slipped by him. As his teacher, I had moved on with the majority of his classmates to the next step. Once Devon got behind, it was hard for him to catch back up. The project, which started as a series of manageable steps, spiraled out of control. And I had moved ahead without him.

I thought that simply by eliminating the formal grading of rough drafts I would be giving students more opportunity to practice writing. However, very little else had changed about how I taught research. I was still teaching research in a lock-step manner: first you brainstorm, then you research, then you outline, finally draft and revise. But some people don't write like this. I don't write like this. I need to write in order to find my idea, my focus, my point. Some of my students need to do the same. So not only do I need to think about when I grade but also what grade.

If what I want is for my students to engage in the writing process, to discover how they write, then I need to be grading how well the students learn these skills. I shouldn't be grading an outline if writing an outline doesn't really help the student write a better essay. Instead, I should be giving students multiple opportunities to discover what does work for them, to experiment with new forms and ideas, and grading, in part, how well the students final work is a reflection of how much they engaged in the process of writing and of what they learned about writing from a particular assignment. Which means that I need to think more deeply about why I am assigning particular writing prompts, what I skills I hope students practice and learn from that assignment, make sure that I give students opportunities to learn and practice those skills, and then grade what we have actually spent time working on rather than what I simply hope they have learned by writing an essay.

So how do I engage students in their writing using assessment? Well, first I must design my assessments in such a way that the feedback and grades students receive accurately reflect what we’ve spent time working on, what we’ve spent our time engaging in.

Stop the Regurgitating!

I was one of those students who was very good a regurgitating.

I would listen to what teachers would say in class, go home, essentially just paraphrase what they had already said, and viola! A letter “A” would be passed back a few days later. No originality, no creative thinking. I was good at regurgitating. It is safe.

Ralph Fletcher's book (mentioned in earlier posts) has me thinking about my formative writing experiences. When I think about my own primary and secondary experiences, I don’t really have a teacher that comes to mind. Unfortunately, I think I came from a system that rewarded students for being able to spit back what we were fed: lots and lots of plot-driven book reports. In fact, I was shocked by the C- on my first college essay.

It really wasn’t until undergrad and beyond that I found connections with people that helped mentor and mold my writing. The biggest of which, so sorry that this is going to sound cheesy, is my husband. In college we would read each other’s papers out loud in order to hear the phrasing, listening for vague descriptions and repetition. Any time I have something important that I’m working on, I still take it to him this day (12 years married this Sunday!) so that he might read it aloud back to me, and together we collaboratively edit.

In undergrad, I had a wonderful English education professor, whom I’m still in periodic contact with today, that also helped shape my writing and teaching of writing through reminders that it’s about the content. What I say is more important than how I say it. I have to be clear on my idea, focus, content – whatever you want to call it – before charging ahead to write a piece. I hope that I am are more concise, clearer writer thanks in part to his encouragement.

As a result of my early writing experiences, I find that I look for shadows of myself sitting in my classroom. Try to work with them to break that cycle, encouraging them to take risks, to be personal. I don’t feel that I really learned to start to write until I had teachers/mentors that called me lack of originality. So now I challenge myself to not only help students find their unique writing voice, but design lessons and assignments that encourage such writing.

The book report is banned in my classroom. There will be no regurgitating here!

"The bigger the issue, the smaller you write"

This past Saturday, I attended the orientation session for my summer PA Writing Institute course. Not only did we have some time to get to know the other teachers participating in this summer invitational, but we also had an opportunity to learn, discuss, and write about voice. And what we discovered is that as veteran teachers, we all seem to struggle with how to define voice in writing.

It is one of the hardest things to grade, let alone teach. Voice in writing is more than simply an author's diction or sentence structure. I must admit that I'm not a fan of how the PA Writing Rubric boils voice down to the simple "choice, use and arrangement of words and sentence structures..." Voice represents the art and craft of the writer. By paring down a definition of voice to something that we can easily dissect from a piece of writing, we lay waste to what makes writing an art, to what makes writing so powerful and moving. Voice is the subtle nuance that a writer brings to the page, to his or her subject. It comes through in the tiniest of details, in the smallest turns of phrase. We know a strong voice when we read it. We can literally hear the writer's words, understand how the writer wants us to say his words aloud. Voice in writing is that quality of a text that speaks to the heart of who we are.

We had an opportunity to play with this idea of voice in a couple of different writing activities. One of our morning presenters shared with us some writing activities she used with her students to get them reflecting and writing about their own voice. The first being a "Where I Am From" poem.

The directions are simple: students complete a series of six quick writes in which they gather details about their surroundings, their families, and memories. The idea being that, as Ralph Fletcher describes, "The bigger the issue, the small you write," meaning that the voice in our writing becomes clear when we focus on the unique, peculiar details. "Put forth the raw evidence, and trust that the reader will understand exactly what you are getting at." This exercise has students focusing on the "raw evidence" of their lives, what makes up their voice.

Students begin by brainstorming lists of what someone would see upon entering the door to their house, what a stranger would see outside their home, what they would see in the neighborhood, as well as descriptions of relatives, favorite foods, and memories of pivotal moments. Each list becomes a separate stanza in the poem. By combining elements from each list and beginning them with the statement, "I am from...," students begin to write about who they are and also about what they bring with them into their writing.

Taking to heart Fletcher's advice - that "writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific" - I tried my hand at this exercise.

I am from Skippyjon Jones
left open in the middle
of the living room floor, holy guacamole!
I am from a home hit hard
by a two and a half foot tornado.
I am from pillows pulled
from the couch,
piled neatly about the floor,
covered in little wet O's where Harry,
open mouthed,
flung his face.
I am from picture and board books,
balls and blocks.

I walked away from my morning orientation energized and excited. It reminded me writing is fun, it is personal, it is specific. And, given that, I need to find ways to make the writing in my classroom similarly engaging. Writing shouldn't be about rubrics and grades and grammar. Writing is about discovering one's voice.

Voice and Choice

"Voice is connected to real audience. We have to create classrooms where writers have a wide, sympathetic audience for their writing. We need to encourage students to meet their audience in authentic ways - not just by sharing sessions with their peers but also by going public with their writing in other ways beyond the walls of the classroom: complaint letters, articles, contests, etc.," -Ralph Fletcher, What a Writer Needs (72).

It was the perfect week to read Fletcher's chapters on establishing voice. My tenth grade students are diligently working on adapting their research essays to a specific audience outside of our class. Since the purpose of research is meant to change people's attitudes and behaviors, rarely, except perhaps in secondary schools, are research papers written for only one teacher to read and grade. Instead, research is meant to evoke change. So as part of our tenth grade research on a current issue facing a non-western culture, students have to share their research with an authentic audience.

And, having done this project with students for the last four years or so, I've have found Fletcher's observations to be spot on. Students do write with more voice, more conviction, and with more investment when they know they are writing for a larger audience. I currently have a student who has organized a fundraising campaign to raise money for Afghan Relief Organization's TEC fund to help students in Afghanistan gain access to technology. He's written and revised four versions of a letter explaining his project. He's adapted email letters for the entire staff in our district, another version for just students, another version for our morning announcements - he's learned to adapt his voice to suit his audience. Other students in the class have taken their research on everything from health care issues and education in Afghanistan to debate over oil in Argentina's Falklands and adapted it younger audiences, going into our elementary and middle schools this week to teach students about the cultures and issues they studied. On their own, students have researched best practices for teaching younger students, lesson plan activities, and have even been writing objectives! By opening up the research writing process, students have an opportunity to infuse their writing with voice.

Fletcher writes, "As students get older, the audience for their writing undergoes a shift. As they approach adolescence, they tend to become more self-critical, particularly in terms of writing. This internal shift gets reinforced by tougher demands from the outside world. The supportive writing environments in the primary grades, often flavored with child-centered or developmental philosophy about learning, yields to upper-grade realities of grading, book reports, grammar dittoes, writing tests, the five-paragraph, essay, etc." (73-4).

By giving students choice in their research writing - the choice of who and how to adapt their writing to a particular audience - they have been in the position of figuring out for themselves how to write for others. Their interest drives who they write for, whether that be the audience of the local editorial page or their peers throughout the world using social networking sites like Facebook. And it is this journey of discovery, which at first they think of as only yet another research project, that leads them to also discover how to write for others. And isn't that they purpose of writing?

Opening up the doors of my classroom, finding ways for students to write for more than just me, has been such a pivotal change in my writing instruction. The more students write for real audiences, the more they write period. They are more willing to revise, to change content and not just mechanics, more willing to enlist the help and suggestions of others, and look for models of good writing. In doing so, students have started their own discovery of who they want to be as writers.

Reflection on Writing Mentors

Before my class begins at the end of June, I’ve been asked to read Ralph Fletcher’s What a Writer Needs. As I sit here reading and reflecting on the opening chapters, my one and a half year old plops himself at my feet, an arc of picture and board books around him. He’s thumbing through page after page, babbling words, trying on different voices. When I lay my pen down, he makes a grab for it so that he might mark his pages like mommy is marking hers.

It seems fitting that Fletcher’s first chapter is on “Mentors,” beginning with Haim Ginott’s quote:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.”

My little one reminds me that even in our quiet moments we are mentors, modeling for our students our beliefs and expectations. It isn’t just what we say to motivate, engage, and encourage students; it’s about what we do. We pass on our love of reading and writing when students see us reading and writing.

Fletcher also makes the point that as writing teachers we are writing mentors and as such must take care to foster a relationship with our students that enables them to grow in their writing process. This involves finding the important balance of maintaining high expectations and encouraging novice writers. Mentors must be careful not to overly praise mediocre work while remembering that “Even in a ‘bad’ piece of writing, the mentor reaches into the chaos, finds a place where the writing works, pulls it from the wreckage, names it, and makes the writer aware of this emerging skill with words” (14). But what resonated with me most was Fletcher’s advice on risk.

By holding to a suffocating definition of what constitutes “good” writing or formulas for how particular pieces should (or shouldn’t) be written, we not only strangle the life out of our students’ writing, but we also deprive them of the joy that comes from playing with language. “You don’t learn to writing by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you” (4). Formulaic writing prompts only result in predictable, unimaginative essays written for the teacher to shred with the dripping red pen. What does this teach our students? How to write an essay for a particular teacher – one person. And although students do need to learn what how to meet a variety of expectations throughout their lifetime, isn’t it more important that students learn to write for more than one person at a time, to take a risk in their writing, and learn to appeal to larger audiences? The danger, as Fletcher points out, is that under such writing assignments our students learn to write for one particular teacher’s rules “instead of trying to internalize their own high standards for writing” (22). As writing teachers, writing mentors, we must find ways to encourage novice writers to play, take risks, and internalize their own high standards for writing.

Fletcher points to a wonderful quote by Patrick Shannon, “Risk allows children to outgrow themselves” (17). A writer constrained by the schema of right and wrong when it comes to writing will never find the “fluency and playfulness, the time and perseverance she will need over the long haul to become a skillful writer” (17). We must remember how we came to love writing and foster those moments, that environment, in our classrooms. My guess is that very few people remember one assignment or writing prompt that “turned” them into a good writer. Instead, good writers are grown in nurturing environments: fed with honest and compassionate feedback, allowed to stretch their writing limbs, to dig into their roots, and cultivated with creative and authentic writing experiences. Writing mentors remember that writing is a process not an end point, and therefore, we must nurture the journey.


_{Fletcher, Ralph. What a Writer Needs. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1993. Print.}