Finding Voice

I’m in the process of discovering my voice.

I find this a bit ironic since this is something that I supposedly teach. I tell my tenth grade students at the beginning of each semester that one of the goals of our tenth grade writing curriculum is to help students identify and hone their unique writing voice, that by the close of the semester each student should be able to turn in a typed essay without a name at the top of the page, and I should be able to tell whose it is simply by the voice of the piece. In reality, they are just beginning to figure out who they are, who they want to be, trying on different personalities and styles, much like they do in their writing. And, at twice their age, I still find myself doing the same thing.

Maybe this is what makes writing engaging and exciting – it is always new. Perhaps good writers are always a bit unsettled, trying out new ideas and new styles. Perhaps this is what keeps writing fresh, what keeps us coming back to the blank page – the possibility. It is through writing that we are able to discover new possibilities in ourselves, in our lives, and in those around us. So perhaps it isn’t a bad thing that I haven’t been able to pinpoint who I am as a writer or nail down my own style.

Or, maybe this is just what I tell myself so that I don’t feel like I’m still floundering when faced with the blank, bright white screen in front of me.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about my own writing and what it means for me to be a writing teacher. I was recently accepted into this summer’s Pennsylvania Writing Project Summer Institute where I’ll become a fellow in the National Writing Project. As part of my application and interview, I talked about my interest in engaging students in the writing process through more authentic writing opportunities like those that can be offered through collaborative web 2.0 sites. In fact, I just delivered a professional development workshop on this very topic this past week to a group of my fellow teachers. Each semester I ask my students to post to discussion boards, write and respond to blogs, and collaborate on wiki pages. I’ve found that when I ask students to write for larger audiences, when they write and post pieces knowing that their fellow classmates, other teachers, and sometimes the general public will be able to read and respond to their work, they take the writing process much more seriously. They are writing for an actual audience and not just a single teacher. They seem to understand better the need to be clear. They spend more time with the writing process rather than just rushing toward the end of the page. This semester, I’ve asked my students to write personal narratives and reflection journals as blog entries, post videos of speeches they’ve written and given, use a discussion board to connect with students in Kabul, as well as collaborate, create, and post online a variety of presentation materials. In short, my students have been working diligently on establishing their writing identities in a public space, online. But as their teacher, the one you would think should have the most experience with these sorts of opportunities, I’ve found recently that the writing I tend to do most is didactic, not the same sort of reflective writing exercises that I ask my students to engage in.

I don’t seem to be carving out the same time that I ask my students to devote to figuring out who I am as a writer. I’m not writing with my students. Instead, I find myself giving instructions rather than instructing, meaning that rather than modeling my expectations, I seem to just be dictating them. I think this is an easy trap for teachers to fall into. I get so caught up in wanting to make sure that my directions are clear, that my rubrics make sense, that my lessons are meaningful, that I forget that good teachers are also learners. Students need to see their teachers learning right along with them. How else will they understand that learning is a life-long process if the adults in their lives don’t model this?

I am certainly not an expert in writing. In fact, I have a very long way to go in order to figure out who I am as a writer. But maybe that’s okay to share with my students. Instead of getting so caught up in the directions and grading, I need to spend time exploring my writing voice right alongside my students. I have a feeling that they can teach me a thing or two about writing, about what it means to be open to exploring new possibilities in my writing. I need to be willing to find my own voice together with my students as they discover theirs.

Today's Interesting Links

• Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC): Advancing ...
  The Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) supports and advances education through videoconferencing and other collaborative technologies. A nonprofit, CILC offers access to quality professional development and student educational content, as well as consulting and technical assistance. This helps schools leverage technology to improve educational outcomes, while saving time and money.
• GrowingWithGoogle - home
  Essential Questions:
  - Which Google Tools can help us to be more effective in our teaching and learning practices?
  - How can Google Tools be used collaboratively to transform teaching and learning experiences?
  - How can specific Google Tools be used creatively in classroom instruction?
  - How can specific Google Tools be used to organize documents, presentations and other types of materials?
  - How can specific Google Tools be used to create efficiency in teaching and learning?
  - How can Google Tools create rich documentation of teaching and learning?
• Google Forms: Self-Graded Quizzes « Robin's Technology Tips
  Google forms can be used to create a quiz that can be graded automatically in the spreadsheet using formulas. To save you time, these instructions are for a 20 question (or less) quiz using the template with the formulas already entered.
• embedit.in — Any file, in your website
• Wissahickon School District's eToolBox - pln
  Personal Learning Networks defined:
  * Personal - particular to a given individual
  * Learning - the acquisition and development of memories and behaviors, including skills, knowledge, understanding, values, and wisdom
  * Network - an interconnected system of things or people

Why Write Online?

Motivation on Prezi

In his recent English Journal article, "Real-World Writing: Making Purpose and Audience Matter," Grant Wiggins elaborates on why creating authentic audiences for student writers can have such a significant impact on student writing. When creating online writing opportunities, keep the following in mind:

Ensure that students have to write for real audiences and purposes, not just the teacher in response to generic prompts.

Authentic Assessment Demands:

• Engaging and worthy tasks of importance
• Faithful representation of the contexts
• Nonroutine and multistage tasks -real problems
• Tasks that require the student to produce a quality product
• Transparent or demystified criteria and standards

"Real writers are trying to make a difference, find their true audience, and cause some result in that readership," writes Grant. "...the point is to open the mind or heart of a real audience - cause a fuss, achieve a feeling, start some thinking. In other words, what few young writers learn is that there are consequences for succeeding or failing as a real writer."

Further Resources/Research on Creating Authentic Audiences:

• http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/0971-sept07/EJ0971Finding.pdf
  
• http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/0985-may09/EJ0985Fantasy.pdf
  

In thinking about how to use online tools to connect students with authentic audiences, I put together this resource page. I'll be using as part of an upcoming session on how wikis, Nings, and Google Docs could be used in the classroom to foster such creative collaboration and writing for authentic audiences. I'll also be introducing a number of sites that teachers can use to connect with other classrooms around the world - TiGed, CILC, ePals, and People to People International.

You can join this session virtually on Tuesday, May 18th as I will be broadcasting it live via my UStream channel. More information and times to come.

Holocaust survivor bears witness to atrocities - News Of Delaware County - Delco News Network

Holocaust survivor bears witness to atrocities - News Of Delaware County - Delco News Network

By Lois Puglionesi
CORRESPONDENT

HAVERFORD TWP - Haverford High School English instructor Jen Ward has taught thousands of students about the Holocaust through books like Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” But Ward has always felt her classes have difficulty “making the connection between history and a real person.”

So this year Ward tried something different. With help from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center she arranged for a Holocaust survivor, Michael Herskovitz, to visit the school last week.

A warm and affable man with a heavy European accent, Herskovitz, 81, described growing up in a small Czechoslovakian village where his religious Jewish parents owned a grocery store. Herskovitz said he never felt different because people treated each other with mutual respect.

But in 1943, when Herskovitz was 13, Nazi soldiers arrived and the happy life he’d known forever changed.Herskovitz described how within weeks synagogues closed, his parents lost their store, Jews were put under curfew and forced to wear yellow Jewish stars.

Stating that it was for their own “protection,” Nazi soldiers transported Herskovitz, his parents and siblings to a ghetto where they were given a tent to live in and fed once or twice a day.The situation grew even more ominous when soldiers took the family to a railroad station and put them on cattle cars crammed with 60-70 people. The train picked up many more passengers before reaching its final destination, Auschwitz.

Read more at the News of Delaware County

Writing for the World

Teaching is about helping students become more than just book learners. It is guiding them to be life learners. And that means that teachers, myself included, need to set up classrooms that are learning environments for everyone in that classroom - teacher included.

As a teacher, I believe that some of my best lessons have happened when I am also in the seat of the learner, learning right alongside my students. I've learned more about my own writing process as I've written with my students. I’ve learned that I have to commit to the writing process, not just to this or that essay, much like I ask my students to fully engage in writing as a process. I can’t just sit down at a computer and bang out a couple of pages, hurriedly assembled sentences and paragraphs. Like I ask my students, I need to remember that my written work is a reflection of who I am, of who I want to be. And so as I heard author James McBride once say, I must remember that “writing is rewriting.” As such, I must never look at a piece of my own writing as finished, and in turn, encourage students to return to their writing again and again and again. After all, aren’t the writers we remember those that looked at writing as a series of rewrites? Walt Whitman rewrote Leaves of Grass five times! Writing is a process that involves reflection, revision, and rewriting. Because I’ve recognized this in my own writing, I must open up space in my classroom for students to do the same. This means that I’ve had to stop assigning essays that students turn in only once, essays that I would labor over my commenting on but students either never read or did anything with the feedback.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve changed how I teach writing. Students can’t just turn in an essay to me. Instead, I ask my students to reflect on their writing goals following each writing assignment, contemplating how they addressed their previous goals with each assignment, reflecting on their progress as writers. Often times, I see essays multiple times, stressing each time that revision is not merely editing. And perhaps the biggest change to my teaching of writing involves who reads my students’ work.

Students are often asked to just write for their teacher. A single reader. What I’ve found is that the more I can open up my classroom to more authentic and meaningful writing experiences, the more invested my student writers are in the pieces they produce. The web has been immensely helpful in this process. Instead of turning in an essay on the themes of Elie Wiesel’s Night, I have students post their essays to our classroom blog site, where they can read each others’ work and give feedback. At the beginning of the semester, students write their own personal narrative essays on a core belief, in the style of NPR’s “This I Believe” program. I’ve found that when students share these essays with one another, post them on our class blog site, they generate an immense amount of feedback, and in turn, students ask to revise their essays. They ASK to revise! Later in the semester, I ask students to write editorials for our local newspaper, create web pages, and respond to each other using online discussion boards. When students learn that their writing is going to be seen by an audience other than just the teacher, they are more invested in the process of writing. They are engaged.

Interesting Links for Teaching the Holocaust

• Classroom Resources for Teaching Night: I put this list of resources together for my students and fellow teachers. It includes a number of resources specific to the Philadelphia area as well as a number of excellent national sources. There are enrichment reading pieces and extra credit assignments.
  
• Music of the Holocaust: Music of the Ghettos and Camps. Although the inhabitants were incarcerated, music was composed and performed giving voice to the indomitable human spirit within the ghettos and camps. Most cruelly, the large camps had orchestras and bands who were forced to play while their families, friends and neighbors were selected for death then sent to the gas chambers or firing squads.
• Holocaust Related Music: This Hebrew song, written in the twelfth century, is by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, who was a great religious philosopher. His Talmudic Psalm Number Twelve from The Articles of Faith entitled "Ani Ma'amin" (I Believe) was later sung by many Jews during the Holocaust, even as they entered the gas chambers. Maimonides' descendants clung to his words for hope for the future and for humankind.
• Fragments of a Lost World
  Holocaust Resources and Organizations in the Philadelphia Region
  Courtesy of:
  Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education
  Seidman Educational Resource Center
  7607 Old York Road, Melrose Park, PA 19027


• Holocaust Resources for Teachers: A wealth of resources for teachers!

I Believe

It took awhile.

After teaching nearly 500 students how to write "This I Believe" essays, I finally got off my procrastinating hiney and submitted my own. Since writing mine, I've had the pleasure of reading and watching another 100 or so 16-year-olds present their personal narratives in my World Literatures class. And, I also helped bring the essay project to other teachers in my district. Now, all 10th grade students have an opportunity to share their beliefs with their peers and teachers. It is a significant lesson in the power of voice - for teachers and students alike.

I just found out yesterday that the essay I submitted was published to the NPR "This I Believe" website - http://thisibelieve.org/essay/70654/. And just like my students, I can't express the thrill I felt at learning my piece was published. I hope that I can find ways for the next 600 students I teach to experience that same thrill of having their voice heard.