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.

Today's Interesting Links and Tools for Teaching Writing

• FactCheckEd.org
  This is what we offer:
  Many of our Lesson Plans are topical, presenting students with a message, such as an actual political or product advertisement, and guiding them through a process of discovery leading to the facts. Another group of lessons teaches some of the core concepts of reasoning, giving students the building blocks to help them parse others' arguments and strengthen their own. Using clips from Monty Python and other popular films and television programs, our lessons explain deductive versus inductive reasoning, how to pick out logical fallacies, the power of visual rhetoric and similar tools of critical thinking. Resources is our go-to directory of Web sites, including synopses of what they offer. Official government sites can be terrific fonts of facts. So can think tanks and issue advocacy groups; we give rundowns on their political leanings and reliability.
• ProfHacker
  Great post of Google Docs in the classroom
• Embeddable Forums by Tal.ki
  Add an embeddable discussion to your PBWorks wiki (or other website) using Tal.ki. No account registration needed. Your forum will be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other services so members can skip registration. Engage your website's visitors. Turn passive blog and content readers into participating members, contributing content.
• 50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers - TeachingTips.com
  Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun.
• Great Source - iWrite
  Everything educators, students, and parents need to make the writing process work in the classroom and at home.
• Holt Writing Resources
  Interactive writing models for middle and high school students. Analyze the elements of good writing with these interactive writer's models. Each model includes annotations and tips to help you be a good writer yourself.

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.}

Makin' it Real

This has been my favorite teaching semester.

Why? Because I've taught less.

One of my goals for this school year was to spend less time standing in front of students and more time learning right alongside them. Instead of dictating notes, I've focused on honing my skills as a facilitator, setting the stage for students to learn and discover literature concepts on their own. I've tried to find more ways to get my students in front of the classroom, teaching their peers about various grammar mistakes, about motifs from The Kite Runner, about themes from Asian poetry. I'm no longer afraid of open-ended assignments. In fact, I relish in them. I don't want to read 30 of the same exact essays on cyber bullying. Instead, students research issues that have meaning for them and find ways to adapt and share their research with authentic audiences outside our classroom. And in doing this, I find that my students are more engaged and more interested in delving deeper into our content. And as their teacher, I have an opportunity not only to learn more about my students but also learn about a topic that I might not have otherwise encountered. I've tried to find more ways to connect my students with authentic audiences as a way to encourage deeper, more meaningful reflection on the skills and content we learn in class.

In this past semester alone, I've been able to bring in a speaker from Penn's Middle Eastern Center and one from the South Asian Center, Michael Herskovitz spoke with students about his experiences in the death camps of World War II, and most recently, my students have connected with students from Kabul's Marefat High School in Afghanistan through our Ning discussion site. Students have been learning about history first-hand, an experience I hope to replicate semester after semester. There's something about learning from those who have lived through the experiences we've studied in our literature and social studies courses that cannot be replicated by a teacher standing in front of the room with a PowerPoint packed with notes. The connections, the questions, and critical thinking that such opportunities inspire make the effort of organizing them well worth it.

Over the last couple of years, I've tried to cultivate these sorts of opportunities in my classes. It has not come easily, and goodness knows, I've definitely made many missteps along the way. But more than anything, I've found value in learning from those faltering steps right alongside my students. It is such opportunities that make it enjoyable to come into the classroom, for students and teachers alike. And, with so many wonderful collaboration opportunities available through education oriented websites, it's even easier to bring the world into the classroom, to make literature come alive. So, I thought I would pass along a few of my favorites. Check 'um out:

Taking it Global Educators (TiGed)
What is TIGed? (from the TiG website)

• As TIG's vibrant global community has evolved, educators inspired by its young members have sought to integrate its resources and focus on action-based learning into their teaching. This was made easier beginning in 2006, with the launch of the TakingITGlobal for Educators (TIGed) program. TIGed allows educators to leverage the resources of the world's most popular online community for youth who want to make a difference - TakingITGlobal.org - in ways that meet the needs of their learning environments.
  
  TIGed is a community of globally-minded educators interested in empowering their students to think and act as world citizens, a collection of resources that facilitate the inclusion of global perspectives in the classroom, and a virtual classroom that allows students to use collaborative technology in order to connect with people from around the world and learn about global issues.

A Community of Global Educators

• TIG members who are actively engaged as educators can apply for an educator badge through their profile settings in order to join the TIGed community, a network of thousands of teachers and students from over 70 countries around the world. Collectively, the TIGed community comprises diverse perspectives, expertise, and knowledge and members can potentially learn a lot from one another. TIGed uses technology to make it easier for global educators to connect, share ideas, and work together.
  
  TIGed members can network, communicate, and collaborate in several ways. Having an educator badge allows users to search the member database for educators only, thereby identifying potential friends, allies, and partners. A discussion forum allows educators to share successes, challenges, strategies, and ideas with respect to integrating technology and global perspectives into education. A collaboration database of educators interested in partnering with other classrooms around the world facilitates international learning partnerships. Meanwhile, regularly produced TIGed blogs and newsletters help TIGeducators stay up to date on developments and events related to the TIGed community.

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Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC)
Planning to take your students to worlds unknown? Partnering with CILC is a great way to start! Here you will find information and tools to help make your job easier and to enhance learning through the use of videoconferencing and other collaborative technologies.

BENEFITS: In addition to searching a variety of databases, membership in CILC enables you to

• create a Custom Catalog aligned to discipline types and/or topics, audience type or grade level, national standards, and/or learning objectives


• post collaboration requests in the Collaboration Center


• Receive in your inbox weekly updates matched to your preferences, CILC e-News, published 5 times from September to May, e-Flashes sharing special CILC offers, usually once a month, and e-Updates explaining new website features, usually twice a year


• access MyCILC.org to manage your CILC member profile, view all your collaboration and/or class requests, and see all the Favorites you've marked as you searched

TAKE THE CILC TOUR: Learn where and how to access all your benefits.

The tour is a free, live presentation, accessed through the Internet at your computer, which provides a complete overview of www.cilc.org. View a variety of dates and times and REGISTER.

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ePals: Welcome to the World's Largest K-12 Learning Network!
ePals is the leading provider of safe collaborative technology for schools to connect and learn in a protected, project-based learning network. With classrooms in 200 countries and territories, ePals makes it easy to connect learners locally, nationally or internationally.

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People-to-People International
From the People-to-People International website:

People to People International's School and Classroom Program is a free service that connects teachers and their students with classes in other countries for pen pal exchanges and projects that improve cultural understanding and encourage friendship. Classes are matched according to similar age and number of pupils to form partnerships. Students interact by exchanging traditional paper letters or email messages supervised by their teacher, who receives a program manual for guidance. Teachers may form partnerships with classes in multiple countries and work together for one or more school years.

Primary, middle and secondary-school classes and youth groups (grades kindergarten-12) from all countries are welcome. To join, we ask teachers or adults, who supervise students, to register. Registration is open during July - October. Registrations submitted before or after this time will be held for the following semester or school year. We will contact you to discuss options.

Register here or contact classroom@ptpi.org.

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More Ways to Connect with other Teachers/Classrooms:

Try finding other teachers interested in connecting with your students using one of these sites:

• Check out this impressive list of the best Web 2.0 tools for educators from the blogger at Box of Tricks


• Build your personal learning network (PLN) using some of the helpful hints from Michelle Bourgeois


• Want to learn more about establishing a PLN? Check out this list of resources


• Check out this great list of educational wikis


• Use Skype to bring an author into your classroom or to connect with other teachers and classrooms.

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.