Romeo & Juliet's Crime Scene

To introduce my students to Romeo & Juliet and have them make some predictions before we started reading, this week I made a crime scene of their deaths. It turned out to be one of those lessons where every student is immediately engaged.

The forensics teacher set me up with caution tape, plastic sheeting, some skulls and bones, and fake blood. I set up evidence markers for my crowbar, a stage dagger, and a vial from the theater department. I intended a table to serve as Juliet's deathbed, but it needs a tablecloth and pillow to look the part. Then I put a picture of Roman catacombs on the digital projector and taped some body outlines on the plastic sheeting.

Next year I think I'll skip the plastic sheeting and fake blood. Some students thought the blood was rubber and others thought it was a tear in the plastic. And the whole reason for the plastic sheeting was so I wouldn't stain the carpet with the fake blood. I also forgot Paris, which would have added some mystery to the activity.

Weeks later, when we were finishing the play, students could be overheard saying, "So that's why there was a crowbar!" or, "That's why she died on top of him."

If you'd like to borrow this idea, here are copies of the evidence gathering sheet, Romeo's autopsy report, and Juliet's autopsy report. If you have other ideas to make this activity better or your own unique way of starting a Shakespeare unit, leave it in the comments.

A License to Teach

When I moved to Denver from Portland and started working at Lake International School, I thought I had a good sense of how to do this teaching job right.  I had 8 years under my belt in rural, suburban, and urban schools, though most in rural.  I was appreciated by colleagues and administrators at these schools, at least partially due to my skills as a teacher.  I had finished my master's degree, had a reading specialist endorsement, and taught a successful model lesson at Lake, an inner city school with over 95% of their students on free or reduced lunch.  I had two job offers on the same day and jumped at Lake because I hadn't done it, the model lesson went so well, the school was beautiful, and it was a middle school, which I've wanted to teach in since I was in middle school.

The principal asked me a question after I did my model lesson: "You used a number of cues to get students' attention or to get them to do what you wanted them to do.  How do you set that up at the beginning of the year?"  I didn't have a good answer for her, but she said she was willing to take a "leap of faith" for me.  The right answer now (I think, or a part of the answer), almost two years later, is to expect 100% compliance every time.  When I taught at St. Helens, I could get 70% on day one.  At Lake, I got 80% during that first month.  And it steadily decreased from then on.  I am certain my principal regretting taking that leap of faith.

I spend a lot of time in my classroom building community.  At Health and Science School, the public magnet school I worked at, I spent the first month on nearly nothing but that, and reaped the benefits.  But I think doing that at Lake gave the students the idea that it would be all touchy-feely all the time.  I should have done a little bit of that each day, but I should have shown them how hard we could work, because by the time I was ready to do work, I'd already lost their respect (or, rather, hadn't earned it to begin with).

The biggest thing, though, the number one cause of my failure as an inner-city teacher, is going into the job with guilt.  I reasoned, both consciously and unconsciously, that I lived a childhood of privilege.  There was always food on the table.  My parents only had to work one job.  I lived in a safe neighborhood.  My brother didn't deal drugs. So what right did I have to tell someone without all those supports what to do?

My right came from two college degrees and a teaching license.  But instead of exercising that right, I gave them the idea that I didn't care.

Both my coach and my principal tried to tell me that.  But it took 10 weeks of summer to get it through my thick skull.

I didn't get the chance to continue at Lake, which is probably good.  I'm not ready for the big leagues.  But I did learn a lot that has improved my practice this year:

• No nonsense nurturing
• The skillful use of sentence frames
• Focused Rove
• Extremely useful lesson planning that doesn't create an overwhelming workload
• Planning ahead be creating exemplars
• Brain breaks

And I imagine I'll add more to this list as I think of it.  And link to posts about each one from here.

I can feel a divide developing in my career between pre-Lake and post-Lake.  Pre-Lake, in Oregon, I presented lessons, provided feedback, retaught what I needed to, graded summative assessments; I did everything to make me good teacher, and enough to score "effective" on my districts' evaluation rubrics.

Post-Lake, I make students learn¹. And I've seen sometimes this year, I can make them like it.

And that's why this is my anthem this year:

1. Not that the students aren't due the credit. They've worked for it. (I just made them. Bwahahaha!) Go back.

2016-2017 Anthem

It's been a tough year moving from rural Oregon to inner-city Denver.  Tougher than I expected.

More on that to come.  For now, here's my anthem from this last year, "Runnin' Just in Case" by Miranda Lambert.

Students and Social Media

This is why I use social media with my students: a research essay is due at midnight tonight.  I just spent 20 minutes in a direct message helping a student organize her main points so she could work past some writer's block.

A Case for Balancing the High School Literature Curriculum - Part I

I went into college with grandiose plans of taking a separate class each for Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare.  I was going to be a English major and then become a teacher.  Because, after all, "Teaching is just presenting information enthusiastically," my pompous, arrogant, college freshmen self thought.  So I plugged along, taking not one but two classes on Shakespeare (fun!), two very bad Survey of American Literature courses (ugh), American Novels 1945-Present (okay) where I struggled to read a novel a week, and immediately dropped some course on early English novels that were written as a series of letters to avoid being scandalous (barf).

My first semester as a junior, I realized that in addition to presenting information enthusiastically, I would also need a teaching license, and apparently my enthusiasm alone wouldn't get me one of those.  So I reluctantly began taking education courses.  Schooling in the United States.  Boring.  Literacy and the Learner.  Could be interesting, but the adjunct professor just preached about multiple intelligence theory most of the time.  Really, both classes could have been better if they weren't one evening a week for three hours.

And then there was Adolescent Literature.

That is where I learned what teaching really is.  That there is a science to it.  That there were strategies that taught students best.  It was in this class that I fell in love with book clubs.  And where I read all the literature that I had never read as an adolescent.  Monster.  Son of the Mob.  Feed.  Speak.  The House on Mango Street.  Out of the Dust.  My middle and high school years would have been so much brighter with books that I could relate to.

The only book that qualified as young adult literature I read in middle or high school for a language arts class was Are You There God, It's Me, Margret.  Never read it?  Go read the synopsis.  Right now.  Really.  I'll wait.

What adolescent boy would want to read that book¹?

I finished my English degree with a double concentration in education and literature.  It seemed silly not to finish the literature concentration after spending two years in literature courses.  But taking those classes in conjunction with Adolescent Literature and my own personal life experience embedded in me a dislike of the canon, especially teaching it.  Why teach that when there was so much good literature that spoke to my adolescent self?  What great books I missed out on.  What great books my students would be missing out on.

I started this post because I'm in the second week of my Action Research Proposal class, working to finish up my masters.  I thought I was going to do my research on using young adult literature in book clubs to connect with the canon.  And as I was freewriting on that I found myself asking again, why is it so important to teach the canon?  How will I explain to my students why they should care?

The next day, I asked my colleagues at school.  And they had some pretty good answers, which I'll paraphrase below as I understand them, because it's Sunday and I want to ask before quoting their e-mails:

• The canon, better than anything else, addresses the issues that are at the heart of the human condition.  What other text on the same themes can equal To Kill a Mockingbird?  None that I know of. 
• Cultural relevancy and the ability to understand allusions to greater works isn't just good for cocktail parties.  It actually makes you smarter because you're able to understand so much more.
• Without reading enough of the canon, you cannot understand most of Western Civilization and how those in power remain in power.  Instead of being an agent of change against the status quo, you are a cog in their machine.  The Republic by Plato was used as an example text.

I realize now, after writing this, that "Why teach the canon?" isn't the question.  And it isn't "How do I use multiple forms of media to help students engage with the canon," though I'll be working on that this next semester as well.

The purpose of my action research is to determine ways to integrate young adult literature into the high school language arts classroom.  

Adolescents need stories about characters like them.  It increases the chances that they will become lifelong readers and increases chances they will continue to read other works, including the canon, after they are done with school.  Reading the canon is important.  Reading the canon in school is important.  But not to the point of excluding other texts that can change students' lives.

Footnotes:
1. But I did read it, and liked the parts about struggling to choose a religion.  In fact, that's all my book report focused on.  Props to Judy Blume for publishing a book on the topic in the 1970s - it was banned all over the place.  Go back.

New Year Resolutions

As winter break approached, I noticed that I had become complacent with some areas of my practice.  I don't think that this is the complacency that comes with too many years of experience¹.  I think this is the complacency that comes with figuring out how to be both a good parent and a good teacher simultaneously.

At the same time, I came across this post by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris via my undergrad education professor, @CindyOA.  I walked away thinking about this:

If you were to draw your inner teacher, what would he/she look like? How does he/she feel? Excited? Nervous? Overwhelmed? In reading the work of Martha Beck–which encourages us to pay close attention to our emotions because they are our inner compass–we’ve discovered that our inner teacher’s emotions can serve as our teaching compass. After teaching, thinking, feeling, writing, reflecting–lather, rinse, repeat–we’ve learned to trust our inner teacher, and to understand that, when she is lethargic or angry we need to adjust something in our practice or our thinking, or even both. As we have explored the connection between our energy, our effectiveness, and our teaching, we have arrived at a four big principles that help our teaching compass stay on true north. We call these four guiding tenets “The Four Intentions” and, if we are mindful of them, our inner teacher feels like this:

We use these intentions to plan lessons, purposefully considering each tenet as we design instruction. We also use them to reflect on lessons we teach. These intentions have become the framework for all our thinking about instruction, even about education in general. Here is an explanation for each intention, and questions you can ask yourself to reflect on how well a particular lesson or some other work addresses “The Four Intentions.”

Intention 1: Alignment (with our inner teacher)

In these days of aligning curricula, instruction, and language with performance standards, we offer, instead, as our primary teaching intention alignment with our highest purpose for teaching–that is, a focus on lifelong learning. This includes a reconnection with our original visions for our teaching selves and a reawakening of our loftiest visions for students as learners [emphasis added].  Staying true to the alignment intention means keeping our sights set on our long-term outcomes and the ways in which our instructional decisions can affect who children will grow up to become. The alignment intention is all about recognizing and action on our agency as teachers, and using this agency to empower students. To evaluate your work against the alignment intention, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my inner teacher, my highest teaching self, feel safe (even happy) with this instructional choice? How do I know?
• How does this work/decision/lesson  show students their power as learners?
• Am I excited about this work/lesson? Why?

While flying through all parts of life by the seat of my pants for the last two years, I've lost some of the practices that make my inner teacher happy.  He isn't "lethargic or angry," but he is . . . uncomfortable.  Unsatisfied with his current performance.  I've let some things slide, and he doesn't like watching them slide.

So.  Here's what I'm going to do about it.

Build Better Relationships

Back when I was a second year teacher and struggling with classroom management, I began using conversation calendars (Tovani, 2004, p. 106-110) with my students - exit slips that allow me 15 to 30 second one-on-one conversations with each of my students.

In 2009, when I was only working half-time, it was no problem to go through 90 of these each afternoon.  With six classes, however, I need to set up a rotation through my classes, hitting two per week.  Logistically, this has been a little bit more than my toddler-fried brain could handle.  But I'm recommitting myself, setting reminder alarms on my phone if I need to, because the written conversations I have with students make a huge difference in my student-teacher relationships.

When I was a fourth-year teacher, I wrote and responded to student letters quarterly, asking students how the units of study went for them and what I could do as a teacher to help their learning.  Every year, I try to respond to letters my students write at the beginning of the school year where they tell me a little bit about themselves.  Lately, I've been getting through five in one class, maybe 20 in another, but in a majority of classes, zero.

I'm going to end first semester (February here in the Pacific Northwest) with teacher evaluations for my students to provide me feedback on how I can improve, and start second semester with letters from my students that I'll write one group letter back in response that explain my rationale for any disliked activities and address student suggestions.

Emphasize Proceedures

When I was a younger teacher, I was much more of a control freak.  Things had to be done a certain way.  If one student spoke out of turn, it felt chaotic to me.

Thankfully, I've mellowed², but I'm a little too far in the other direction.  It takes my juniors five minutes of reminders at the beginning of class to start their sustained silent reading.  Often, I have to threaten lunch detention in order to get everyone quietly reading.  That's silly.

I listed proceedures in my syllabus - the same ones I've had since my second year of teaching.  I just need to refresh my students on them, and start enforcing them.  (I haven't been.  At all.)

When entering the classroom: Get your materials from the filing cabinet in the room. Be in your seat with all your materials when the bell rings. When the bell rings, immediately and quietly begin the warm-up exercise.	When reading: Reading is thinking.  It is easier to think when it is silent and there are few distractions.  Do not talk when reading. When you do need to talk to the teacher or a partner, whisper. Fully focus on reading during silent reading time.
When writing: Writing is thinking.  It is easier to think when it is silent and there are few distractions.  Do not talk when writing. When you do need to talk to the teacher or a partner, whisper. Use the entire writing time working on writing.	When leaving the classroom: The teacher dismisses, not the bell. Leave your workspace cleaner than you found it and return all materials to the right place. When your workspace is clean, sit in your chair and wait to be dismissed. When dismissed, push your chair in if necessary. Turn in calendars and any other assignments on your way out the door.

Grade During Block Prep

This is my seventh year teaching, and I'm back at the school where I started my teaching career.  I work with a fantastic department and have a great administrator.  So this year I felt comfortable playing a role as a small, unnoticeable agent of change.  Most of them have to do with reading - posting student book reviews on a Twitter account other students can follow, creating and distributing book review index cards that sit in the back pocket of library books.

These small crusades³ are fun.  And often take place during my prep time.  And then I have a toddler at home.  Which means I've gotten behind on grading.  I even got a holiday card from a great student that encouraged me to have a nice break and enjoy the time off but also to grade her writing.

Thus my 88 minutes of Thursday prep⁴ shall find me at my desk, grading the papers that are so much less fun than crusades for changing school culture.  But feedback is important too, so I'll do it.  (And during my Monday prep, I'll make stickers with qr codes that lead to book trailers for the library TAs to put on books.  Bwahahaha!)


Footnotes
1. If it is, then I need to find a new job.  Go back.
2. It's all about the yoga.  Go back.
3. That only I am noticing and pretending is worthwhile, I'm sure.  Go back.
4. And weekend naps.  And evenings.  Go back.

How to Use Your Summer for Lesson Planning

The National Writing Project is putting on a Connected Learning MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) this summer.

I first learned about Connected Learning through an #engchat on Twitter led by Seecantrill.  So far, as I understand it, Connected Learning uses digital tools to break down classroom walls - learning takes place in the classroom, but continues outside the classroom, thanks, in part, to social media and other tools that can be used to share ideas.  I don't know if that's completely right.  In fact, just now looking up what NWP calls it, it's much more than that: "Connected Learning is a model of learning that holds out the possibility of reimagining the experience of education in the information age.  It draws on the power of today's technology to fuse young people's interests, friendships, and academic achievement through experiences laced with hands-on production, shared purpose, and open networks."  Here's their infographic that explains it so much better than I do.  [UPDATE: I forgot to mention my one concern with this - around 25% of my students don't have cell phones/text/data plans or computer access outside of school.  So all of their out-of-classroom learning needs to take place face to face?]

So week one was to make a "How To . . ."  This was a good "get to know you" activity - some made "makes" that were "How to be so-and-so."  Others taught a skill they knew something about.  Here's mine (better late than never):


This week is learning through the use of memes.  I believe mine is academic, and should appeal to the students I had last year:

It appeals to my interests, but I don't think I can ask my students to make a meme on the sentence of the week and call it connected learning.

Look out for more memes here and whatever makes I'm assigned in coming weeks.

QR Code Scavenger Hunt

I first got the idea for this from a conference session presented by Myron Dueck in December.  His example was with history content knowledge.  I adapted it for content knowledge on The Crucible.

We read the first three acts of The Crucible before winter break and were coming back in January to read the fourth act (in Oregon, the semester ends at the end of January).  I wanted a review of the plot before we tackled the final act.

So I created 18 multiple choice questions on the major plot points of the first three acts and grouped them in pairs as nine Google forms that wouldn't let them go on to the second question until they answered the first correctly.

Then I set it all up as a scavenger hunt using QR Codes to link to the Google forms.  Students who had smart phones and a data plan formed groups with those who didn't.  Then groups used their phones to scan the codes and answer the review questions.

Answer both questions correctly, and you'd get your next clue.

Most of the codes were posted in the school building, but my personal favorite was the one I posted across school grounds by the football stadium.

The students loved walking all the way over there.

American Literature Units Chosen by Students

This year I decided to ask my students to vote on the units they would study in American Literature.  A big thank you to all those who helped refine my list of topics and corresponding texts.

For those who are interested, here is the final list I gave my students to choose from.  Here's the raw data from voting results.

And here are the units I'm teaching this year:

• Classroom and School Community (my unit to start off the year)
• Witch Hunts (The Crucible as an anchor text with literature circles on books about Salem witch trials, modern adaptations, and 1950s McCarthyism)
• Horror Stories (Edgar Allen Poe, I Am Legend, and possibly In Cold Blood)
• Terrorism (Not sure yet; maybe literature circles with some YA texts like Ghosts of War, Sunrise Over Fallujah¹, but also some non-YA texts like Manhunt)
• Dark Times in America (Snow Falling on Cedars?  All the President's Men?  Other texts about times America was on the wrong side of history)
• In my district, in 11th grade they write a pretty extensive research paper.  I may do this with the horror stories unit because I have a number of students who are really interested in serial killers², or I may do this as a separate unit.

I'm still finishing up the school community unit, but from what I saw the first days, the unit selection earned me some street cred³, and in some ways it made my job easier - I wouldn't be able to cover all of American Literature in a year.  One of my colleagues says he rarely gets past transcendentalism.  This way I cover a wider breadth historically and have greater engagement from my students.

Next time, I think I may just give students a list of units.  I gravitated towards those results since I already had an idea of what I could do with them, and I think they are more engaging to the students as well rather than a list of historical eras.

1. Those these are more related to the War in Iraq than terrorism directly . . . Go back.

2. Yeah, it's a little creepy.  Go back.

3. Not street cred.  Some other type of cred.  But more than just regular ol' credibility.  Cred.  Go back.

Narrative Essay - Step Two: Rewrites

Last week Last month Eight months ago, I wrote a post about my new approach to narrative writing.  This is the follow-up.

After students have written writer's notebook entries for about a month, I ask them to go back, reread their entries, and choose around five they like or would want to revise.  Then I hand them a glue stick and a copy of the rewrite square to the right (here's the file if you want a copy).

This gives students a place to start and helps them identify what's good, rather than misspellings, grammar issues, or poor organization.  None of these things matter when creating the bedrock for mining.  Identifying what works is the vein of gold we're looking for.

When they've finished marking up this first one, I introduce Graves and Kittle's (2005) concept of the heartbeat (p. 10-1).  The heartbeat is the writer's wish for the piece or what they want the reader to take from it.  Often there's a line that embodies this.  I may ask students to look for the heartbeat in that first piece, or to go on and re-read their second selected entry, using the second rewrite square in the file above.

Here's an example straight from my writer's notebook:

[I met Noel at summer camp.]  She was the manager at the ranch office across the highway and pretty forward about where she saw our relationship going.  "I want you to play your guitar for me," where the first words she ever said to me.  Never having a girlfriend before, at 18 years old, I was more than happy to oblige, and follow it up with a 30-minute make-out session afterwards.

Weeks later, I left notes in the various pockets of her duffel bag, "I love you" written on each one.

The heartbeat is underlined.  What the piece is mostly about is in brackets.  The bolded words are words that I liked.  As we'll see in the next post, my heartbeat changed, as they sometimes do as one writes more.

Once students have done this with the five pieces, they choose one to rewrite.  They keep what they like, move the heartbeat around, and try to bring in more of what they liked in the original entry.  All this is still done in the writer's notebook.

In the next post, I'll showcase the narrative essay outline I used with students this past year.  There's nothing five-paragraphy about it.

Works Cited

Graves, D. H., & Kittle, P.  (2005).  Inside writing: How to teach the details of craft.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

American Literature Units

Next year I'm teaching American Literature to juniors.  The last time I taught the course was my first year teaching, so there are quite a few things I'd like to do differently.

This will also be the first summer I've had a solid job set up for next year.  I won't be spending my time completing applications for dozens of districts or signing up for licensure tests to add endorsements that are contingent for my employment.

So, because I'm a little sick¹, I already started putting together a basic year-long plan aligned with standards.

I was feeling good and wanted to nail down some overarching questions for the full year, because that would be cool.  Overarching questions are like essential questions that cover the whole year - the "so what?"  I had one, but I wanted some other ideas and decided to consult some literature from my undergrad to make sure I remembered how to select overarching questions.

So I pulled out Teaching English Through Principled Practice by Peter Smagorinsky and found the section on overarching questions, which gave me some ideas, and looked through the chapter on year long units².

Smagorinsky (2002) states there are three ways to set up a years worth of units.  There are all out teacher selected or where students craft all the units.  Then, there is the middle ground:

In this approach to choosing a curriculum, the teacher sets up a menu of possible topics, allowing the students to select eight or so for their year's study . . . This approach has the advantage of giving the students choices in their learning while operating in a framework of topics that the teacher considers culturally and educationally important (p. 36).

I had considered doing this my first year teaching, but Smagorinsky (2002) warns against it:

It is often a good idea to wait a few years before taking this approach so that you will have several units prepared, rather than having to write many new units from scratch in your first or second year on the job (p. 36).

After teaching for five years in three different districts, I'm ready to skin this chicken.  Peel this potato.  Gut this fish.  I am all over this like ham on cheese.  And apparently in need of a snack.

Here's where you, my dear readers, come in.  Having taught American Literature only once, and for just a semester, as a first year teacher, I need a list of American Literature units.  I've got 26 ideas right now on this Google doc.  Some are bad, some are better.  I also need texts I could teach with them.  No idea is too questionable.  From this I can put together a final list and say to my students in September⁴, "Choose your top ten."

Works Cited
Smagorinsky, P. (2002). Teaching English through principled practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

1. You can use the common interpretation or the student vernacular. Go back.
2. My current favorite quote from this book: "You'll probably end up teaching the selections in an order quite different from their order in the anthology.  Such is the life of the maverick" (p. 87).³ Go back.
3. I teach mostly with mavericks . . . wait, doesn't that go against the definition?
4. Yeah, that's right, suckas!  I don't start school until after Labor Day!⁵ Go back.
5. Makes working until mid-June worth it.

Plot Line Video

I recently made a video that show examples of different points in the plot line for my class.  Hopefully you can use it too.  Here's the link.

Narrative Essay - Step One: The Writer's Notebook

Photo by Grassroots Group on Flickr, some rights reserved.

Writer's notebooks are the first step I took towards changing the way I teach all writing, including moving away from five-paragraph essays.

Over the last year, I've been thinking a lot about writing instruction that is authentic and closer to the process "real" writers go through¹; the non-prescriptive² pre-writing that creates a solid bedrock of thoughts ready to be mined for high quality topics to be refined into short stories or cut and polished into poems.

The mold for where this bedrock can be formed, I'd argue, is the writer's notebook (WNB) as opposed to what some classes call the journal or diary.  It's different in the type of writing that goes in.

What I refer to as a journal contains writing on prompts selected by the teacher, or, when it's an option, whatever the student wants to write about: their weekend, or the basketball game the night before.  This is good - getting students to write daily or multiple times per week is research-driven good practice and will make students better writers.  But there are some disadvantages to this model³.

Journals don't contain what students value.  They get the student to write, or they act as a primer connecting yesterday's lesson to today's.  But at the end of the year (or a month in), the student asks themselves, "so why am I doing this?"  Beyond the grade they get and the lessons we teach⁴, the journal isn't valued by our students.  It isn't something most of them will want to save.

Journals aren't connected to a long-term process.  The work that goes into a journal rarely extends beyond that day's warm-up.  Warm-ups are good.  But maybe student-writing time should be at a different time⁵.

Journals don't assess students' writing ability.  Journals judge a student's ability to write about something they don't value (see above) because we tell them to.

Journals aren't authentic.  Journals aren't where published writing takes place.  Students don't take their responses to these prompts and revise them into polished pieces.

So here's how I set up a WNB this year.  All those journal prompts?  You still need them, because students coming into class at the end of the summer aren't going to churn out a lot of writing.  They need to work up to it.  So the first day I give them some of those journal prompts to choose from, and I ask for just four lines (from my 10th graders).  The next day, I ask for 5 or 6.  We continue this until we're at half a page.  I may take a breather here, ask for half a page for a week.  Then start to ratchet it up to a full page.

This is what Aimee Buckner calls the Daily Page - students writing a full page each day.  In her book Notebook Know-How: Strategies for the Writer's Notebook (2005), Buckner offers a couple strategies for students to use to come up with their own topics.  Some of my favorites:

Writing from a List  I use this one in my class frequently.  Students make a list of the top ten best things that have happened in their life and the top seven worst.  Then star the ones they could write about.  Then choose one to write about that day.

Observations  What do you notice using your five senses?  The sweaty smell of the kid who had gym class last period.  The grinding pencil sharpener next door.  Write about it.

Conversation  Write a conversation between you and someone or something else.  Here's part of my conversation with a pen:

Me: Hello, pen.
Pen: I don't talk.
Me: Um . . . you just did.
Pen: No, I didn't.
Me: Yes, you did. You just talked again.
Pen: No, that's just a figment of your imagination.
Me: But if I look back, I have what you said. See?
Pen: . . .
Me: See? . . . See?
Pen: Okay, okay. So I talk. So what?
Me: I just wanted to see how you were doing.
Pen: Fine.
Me: Oh. That's good.
Pen: Is that all?
Me: And I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your continuous ink flow.

So those are great, because students can choose the topic, but it's not something like "This weekend, I . . ."  A conversation with a pen might not produce something that goes to the next step.  But a conversation with your father who left you when your were 10?  That could go somewhere.  That's something I'd want to read.  These prompts create bedrock for mining - not everything will be good.  But some of it will be.

In addition to those options, I give students a list of prompts from Inside Writing (2005) by Donald Graves and Penny Kittle.  One of my favorites: Think about a photograph you feel a strong emotional connection to, one of: a family gathering, you and your grandfather, your first communion, a day at the beach.  Tell who is in the photo and why you treasure it.

These prompts are different from the typical ones we write on the board at the beginning of class.  This prompt got me to write a coming-of-age story about a friend and mentor I worked with at summer camp and who greatly influenced the person I became.  It's something people want to read about.

That's the point of the writer's notebook.  Push back in the comments.  Next week I'll write about how I got students to choose a topic and rewrite it - but it's straight out of Inside Writing, if you'd rather get it from the source.

1. Everyone's a real writer, but I'm talking about professional writers, in this case.  I guess. Go back.

2.  So here's my prescription of how to do it.  Geez. Go back.

3. I am looking for a fight on this, because I'm moving away from journals myself and I others to force me to think about this deeply.  So bring it on in the comments, please. Go back.

4. Which, in many cases, are more dear to us than to our students - at least for me. Go back.

5. Full disclosure: this is an idea that just came to me.  I'll try it out and let you know how it goes. Go back.

When We Lost the Love

The way I teach writing now is so different from the way I taught writing when I started this gig¹.

When I started, I taught writing as I was taught.  I did pull in some stuff from college, like awesome 5-3-1 rubrics with points and weights and six-trait writing.  Heck yeah.  But accordion style paragraphs?  Yep.  Fact/Quote/Shocking statement hooks?  Uh-huh.  Five paragraph formulaic writing?  Oh yes.  Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

I mean, I made this whole detailed outline students would fill out with complete sentences, and then all they'd have to do is string it together.  I was convinced this outline could slay poor organization and vanquish it forever.  But we just broke up.  It's okay.  I was the breaker-upper, not the breakee.

Because when we first got together, I had this image of a graph in my mind.  It came from a teaching writing class in college, so I don't feel too bad about this.  But the idea was that students had to start writing with a formula and then through experimentation could move away from the formula into more independent and innovative styles.

And maybe formula to a certain extent is good.  If students are writing a literary analysis essay where they're quoting a text, they should know that quoting evidence as the first or last sentence isn't typically done.  Maybe even give them a formula for the body paragraphs: transition, main idea, set-up the quote, quote, explain the quote, restate main idea/transition.  Sure.

But a formula for a full narrative essay?  Or placing restrictions on the number of paragraphs a student can have?  Oh no you didn't²!

We all³ wrote five paragraphs essays in elementary school.  And middle school.  And probably, for many of us, in high school.  But that doesn't fly in college, does it?  Nor, I would assume, in business reports, or a firefighter's emergency response logs, or any number of other real world writing situations.  Instead, the length is dependent on the information to be presented.  So let's teach students how to do that.

I was headed in that direction after taking the writing workshop class at PSU last spring, but two professionals finally convinced me that Essay Outline and I had lost the love.  Kimberly Campbell and Kristi Latimer presented at the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (OCTE) Fall Conference, and at this year's NCTE Conference.

Here's an excerpt from their conference handout⁴, if my brief tirade wasn't enough to convince you⁵:

The Myths of the Five Paragraph Formula  

Myth: The five-paragraph formula is an actual form. 

The five‐paragraph essay, “speaks a logic that is important to challenge precisely because this logic perpetuates the commonsense myth that the five‐paragraph theme is an actual “form” and that “forming” in writing is simply slotting information into prefabricated formulas rather than a complex process of meaning‐making and negotiation between a writer’s purposes and audiences’ needs” (Brannon et. al, 2008,16) 

Myth: The formula is just a starting point; it’s a necessary first step that supports students in moving to more sophisticated writing. 

Studies indicate that for most students, they never move beyond this formula. “The FPT (five‐paragraph theme) formula may assist students with proper formatting of papers, but it appears to fall short of helping  them offer a cogent discussion of their thoughts. Worse, strict adherence to the FPT may actually limit students’ development of complex thinking” (Argys, 2008, 99). 

Myth: It is a helpful tool for students who struggle with writing. 

Struggling writers need support in developing their ideas and finding structures that allow their ideas to be understood by a reader. “[B]ut repetitively following the same direction for writing every essay will not help these writers advance beyond a kind of ‘successful’ codependence on teachers who have agreed in advance that this sort of formulaic essay will be what they reward” (Wiley, 2000, 65). 

Myth: It prepares students for standardized tests. 

Although the prevalence of the five‐paragraph formula can be linked to the increase of standardized writing assessments, studies indicate that the formula does not lead to high test scores. For example, a study of the Delaware student testing program found that essays with no organization earned low scores; essays that followed the five‐paragraphformula (FPT) earned middle range scores (score of 6 on a 2‐10 scale), but every essay that earned a high score (8 or better) “used other than the FPT organizational scheme” (Albertson, 2007). 

Myth: It prepares students for college writing. 

College professor, Elizabeth Rorschach notes that when she reads the five‐paragraph formula her students rely on, “I find myself terribly disappointed by how shallow and unthought‐out most of the five‐paragraph essays are (2004, 17). 

Myth: Teaching the five-paragraph formula is teaching writing. 

Donald Murray drew on his own years of experience as a writer in asserting that the fiveparagraph formula “had little to do with the exciting, mucking‐about process of real writers (Romano, 2000, 74). 

A study of high school students and academic writing confirms Murray’s assertion in finding that the “fill in the blank” structure of the five‐paragraph essay “did not allow students to do what real writers do, develop compositional goals, make plans to reach those goals, and address rhetorical and pragmatic concerns that develop during composing, or to practice making strategic decisions as writers must do” (Kane, 2005, 194‐95 in Argys 2008).

So who's my new girlfriend, and how do I teach an essay now?  That is a post for next week.

1. Teaching in general, not teaching at a specific school.  Go back.
2. But yes, yes I did.  My first year.  And my second.  And my third.  Go back.
3. Assumption! Go back.
4. You should read the whole thing.  Really.  Go back.
5. And it shouldn't have been.  Go back.

Break-up

Hey baby!  Do you have a minute?  Let me buy you a coffee.  You want your usual carmel latte?  Alright, I'll be right back.

So.  Baby.  I've been wanting to talk to you about something.  I mean . . . you know I love you, right?  I love all your curves and indentations in exactly the right places.  I love how you listen and let me write the story I want to tell all over you, how you give my thoughts organization and my writing purpose.  You know I love that about you¹.

But sometimes I feel like I want something more, that I'm holding myself back.  I feel like there's more out there than formulaic, five paragraph essay structures.  More than the same transition at the end of every paragraph.  More than a simple restatement of the thesis.  It's not you baby; it's me.

Oh, come on baby, don't cry.  You're great, the way you gave students clear-cut organization.  We had some great times together.  Like when we made Josh realize he actually could write - remember?  He wasn't even going to write an essay.  It's those memories I'll hold onto, baby.

But seriously, any teacher would be lucky to have you when they're up against five paragraph essays.  Just because it didn't work out between us doesn't mean you won't find another teacher out there.  There are plenty of fish in the sea, right?  You could even say there are schools of them!  Get it?  Schools?

What's that?  Oh, you're going to go?  Oh, okay.  Well, good luck.  Maybe I'll see you sometime.  No?  Oh.  Okay.  Bye.



1. This makes no sense unless you look at this. Go back.

OCTE Fall Conference Resources

For those of you who attended my session Young Adult Literature and the Traditional Canon, here are the resources you requested (better late than never - sorry!).  If you have additional questions or ideas to share, please add them to the comments.

Also, you may want to check out the Pedagogy in Practice Wiki - there's a section on young adult literature with synopsis and helpful information on books you may consider choosing for your book club.  There are also some handouts from when I was a student teacher, which are good, as we discussed, if you want to see what not to do :)

Presentation Handout
PowerPoint Presentation

Leigh's Awesome Book Club Selection Sheet

Here are a few other items you might find helpful:
Book Club Letter Example
Book Club Meeting Record Sheet

Summer Reading 2012

This summer, like last summer, I'm brushing up on some professional development reading I've been meaning to get done.  Also like last year, I'll be tweeting my thoughts while reading with the hashtag #PiPreading.  Unlike last year, I'm choosing only two books and keeping the readings to an average of 30 pages per week so I can realistically get through it all.

Consider this your notice to get these books, read along, and share your thoughts on Twitter - if you dare.

Dana, N. F. & Yendol-Silva, D.  (2003).  The reflective educator's guide to classroom research: Learning to teach and teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

(There's also a second edition by Danna and Yendol-Hoppey.)

First heard about this book here via Bud.  Dana and Yendel-Hoppey take readers step-by-step through the planning, implementation, and publishing of an inquiry project, helping teachers complete their own research as to how their students learn best.

I love classroom research because I'm a nerd like that.  I had thought I'd have to take some statistics courses and get a doctorate in order to do any legitimate educational research of my own, but the first chapter of this book has suggested I can just do a different kind of research¹.

Winslade, J. M. & Monk, G. D.  2007.  Narrative counseling in schools (2nd ed.).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

This was on last summer's list, but I didn't get past Marzano.  A suggestion from my partner Jennie from the place where social work and education meet.  Narrative counseling is talk therapy that places problems outside the individual - rather than the student has behavior problems, behavior problems affect the student.  "If we are located in a school story line as dumb, mischievous, or a bad egg, there is a tendency to live our lives according to the contours of the problem story laid out before us by such a description" (p. 3).  The objective of narrative therapy is to help the student rewrite that story line.  I would argue that teachers are the ones most responsible for writing the original story line to begin with, so who better to help the students rewrite it²?

Here's my proposed schedule - I'm going to start this week so those of us who start school before Labor Day³ won't have much reading to do once school has started back up.

The Reflective Educator's Guide to Classroom Research

• By Monday, June 25th, read to page 48. 
• By Monday, July 2nd, read to page 63.
• By Monday, July 9th, read to page 106.
• By Monday, July 16th, finish the book (p. 148).

Narrative Counseling in Schools

• By Monday, July 23rd, read to page 22.
• By Monday, July 30th, read to page 70.
• By Monday, August 6th, read to page 122.
• By Monday, August 13th, read to page 174.

I'll be commenting on my reading @bleckley with the hashtag #PiPreading.  Hope I'll hear from you too⁴.

1. We'll see how it goes.  Seems much more subjective research and I'm not sure how I'd mitigate my bias for wanting my planned lesson to work.  Go back.

2. Okay, besides great school counselors and social workers.  Go back.

3. Suckers.  Go back.

4. Because last year it was just my dad.  Which was awesome.  But he didn't tweet.  So it was a very one sided conversation.  Which was fine, since I do like to hear myself talk . . . er, tweet?  Go back.

Giving Essay Feedback

Six years ago, as a student teacher, I used Audacity to record feedback for students on their portfolios by reading their essays aloud and giving them feedback as I went.  Students each received an audio CD with their feedback.

This was great.  Students were way more engaged in the feedback I gave them, because it was clearer, or it involved technology, or for some other reason I haven't thought of.  Students could also hear someone reading their paper aloud and pick up on my enjoyment of beautifully crafted sentences or my confusion when they forgot to proof read.  No more did students turn to the last page of their essay and look for the grade - they went through their feedback first.

But the method had it's downsides.  It was time consuming, even more so when burning the audio to discs.  Also, once I'd burned one piece of feedback, that CD was toast - I couldn't go back and add more tracks unless it was a CD-RW.  And for the student, they really had to follow along in their paper word for word; as the reader, I had to be very specific in describing what I was talking about in the paper - they only had my voice to guide them.

This year, however, I started using VoiceThread to give feedback on major papers, and as you can see below, it has some specific advantages that neutralize these issues.

VoiceThreads can be private, shared so that only those with a link can view it (for my students), or made public (like this one).

Episode 6 - Grouping Students, (Not) Leveling Readers

Today's podcast contains some thoughts I've been tossing around regarding grouping students for reading and responding to Romeo & Juliet.  As I mention, I've got a longer post on how I'm teaching the play this year.

It's a Bud the Teacher style recording, done on my ride into work.  You can hear the mighty roar of my 4-cylinder Corolla in the background.  I'll have to play around with microphone placement for next time.

Also, I think I mentioned in the podcast that it's been two years since my last podcast.  This is incorrect.  It's actually been five years.  And what I thought was episode seven is actually episode 6.

Welcome February 2012 EdCampPDX Participants

Here are some links we can reference in our discussion - please leave more in the comments, at the edcampPDX wiki, or on Twitter @bleckley.

The books I used for my "What is Love?" unit:
How I Live Now
Son of the Mob
Upstate
My Heartbeat
Hard Love
Romiette & Julio
Street Love

Why?
Common Core Anchor Standards for Literacy in History, Science, and Technical Subjects

Where to Find the Books
Tagmash on LibraryThing.com
NoveList database at multcolib.org

For Example:
A science unit on genetics
A social studies unit on the Great Depression

Fostering Meaningful Discussions
"November"