Search results for: authentic writing

August 2, 2016

Harnessing the Power of Purpose and Audience: Authentic Writing in the Classroom – NVWP Summer ISI – Day 14

Welcome to the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s 2016 Invitational Summer Institute! I’ll be blogging the demonstration lessons and the various activities occurring during our four-week duration. Find out more about the NVWP and the National Writing Project.

Our final day of presentations begins with Sara Watkins talking to us about how she uses authentic writing in her high school classroom.

lead

Quickwrite: Think about a writing assignment you’ve given that your students enjoyed. Describe the lesson: what was it? What was its purpose? Who was the audience for the students?

Towards the end of the year I ran the students through a Flash Fiction mini-unit. We read examples, took them apart to see what made them tick, and tried to figure out what the genre was all about. Students then created their own examples of Flash Fiction. I had them concentrate on conflict types, economy of language, and otherwise following the genre rules we discussed. I wanted the students to gain practice with honing in on various conflict types, working through plot elements, and figuring out how to say a lot with a few amount of words. The audience, unfortunately, was just the class. By the end of the year students knew that pretty much anything they wrote would be put up on the walls to be read and discussed with classmates.

BTW, authentic writing is pretty much any genre of writing that is “found in the real world” and written for an audience outside of the school. Authentic writing creates links to the community. Writing for an authentic audience helps children believe in the power of their own voice and their own story. Here are some examples of genres of writing used by non-teachers:

examples

Sara passes out a Kelly Gallagher sheet on approaching one topic in 18 different ways. The left hand column represents six prominent purposes available for a topic. The right hand column offers some guidance on how to get started with each purpose.

File_000 (4)

Sara shows us a model of her own writing. She splits her favorite topic (dogs!) into the six purposes. Each purpose contains at least three topics about dogs. Yet another successful example of the basic guided release model (teacher walks the class through an already completed/in process example to show basically show students what to do. Then students are encouraged to do their own). Now it’s our turn to do the same! Here’s my example. I didn’t finish it in time. Sorry about the poor lighting.

We share out. It’s amazing what a wealth of information can come from just a single topic! Even if some of my/out ideas don’t fit squarely into each category, that doesn’t matter. What matters is generating tons of student-centered ideas from a single student-centered topic. The classroom is crackling with ideas and laughter.

I can’t wait to use this in my class this year. She ends up with a list of resources.

October 26, 2017

Writing Alongside My Students

Jorge jiggled his knee as I read over his story, his anxiety palpable. “It’s just… I mean… I know there’s a lot,” he said as he raked his hand through his spiky hair for the third time in as many minutes. He was right. By the end of the first page I counted at least eight characters and four drastically different settings. For feedback, I told him two things. First, that as a reader I was having a hard time figuring out who to focus on. Then I told him to listen as I read his story back to him. Which part of his story excited him the most? He zeroed in on a character (Tommy and his magical Book of the Dead) and left the conference with a more manageable scope to his story.

The rest of last week’s story conferences proceeded along similar routes. Sometimes the feedback was easy: insert a piece of dialogue that foreshadows the character’s conflict. Other times, it wasn’t. Helping writers nurture their strengths is a complex constellation of skills that I will probably never master. Anytime I felt stymied, I reached for Angela Stockman‘s fantastic Talking with Writers 2018. Talking with Writers devotes a section to responding to common problems in student writing. The strategy I used with Jorge came from Stockman’s work.

The ease with which I was able to apply this type of “See X? Try Y!” logic to student writing took me by surprise. As a committed member of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, I’ve always advocated for the power of writing alongside my students. And, following the work of Paul Thomas, I’ve also labored to try and become a scholar of writing. I’ve pursued composition pedagogy and history, written blog posts, and lead in-service trainings about the importance of knowing your theory.

However it wasn’t my understanding of composition or my status as a writer that helped me help my students. At least, I don’t think it was. Framed by schooling’s twin ideologies of efficiency and outcomes, every conference was compact and results oriented. Here’s what I see; here’s where you need to go; here’s a strategy to get you there. Does being a teacher of writing who writes provide any sort of advantage in this situation? Is this even the question to ask?

Normally, if my students are writing, so am I. It’s become an important part of my practice. It reminds me that writing exists outside of high-stakes accountability and the testing trap. It shows me that writing cannot be contained by formulaic essay constructions or meaningless assignments. But this method of instruction takes time, a teacher’s most valued currency. Every minute I spend writing alongside students is a minute I don’t have to confer with them.

During this last realistic fiction unit I chose not to write with them. I went with the more common alternative: work on something at home and bring it in as an example. I had more time to meet with my students, but I also felt disconnected, like a detached head floating above my students.

The debate over how best to spend class time isn’t new. In 1990, Karen Jost set off a firestorm within the secondary Language Arts community by arguing that the cost of writing with students outweigh the benefits. Students are best served by a teacher who meets with them and provides feedback, not by a teacher who labors over their own manuscripts. Jost lists the dizzying array of duties administrators and families expect of secondary teachers. With this list in mind, it is hard to imagine how teachers can confer with students, give daily instruction, provide written feedback, attend school functions, etc. and still find the time to sit down and write.

Ideally, we would do both. We would workshop their pieces with our students, in the process modelling authentic purposes, purposeful revision, and the writing life. As we did this, we would confer with students and do our best to guide them through the infinite complexity of composition. But there is not enough time to do both.

There is no answer. Or if there is, I don’t know it. But I do know that what we do shows what we value. The pedagogies we enact are inextricably linked to who we are as teachers, writers, and professionals. We make sure to share our reading lives with students. We give book talks, do read alouds, and converse with our kids about the books that matter to us. Can we say the same about our lives as writers?

———————————————-

-Image credit: CC0 Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

October 19, 2016

Becoming a Teacher of Writing: At Peace with Pedagogy

This is the conclusion of a three-part series exploring my growth as a teacher of writing. The first part can be found here and the second part is here.

The previous entries in this series follow a basic format of “I used to think X. Then I read Y and thought Z.” Although I regularly found my pedagogy being interrupted by whatever new theory I was reading, there was a certain linear security to my growth. I didn’t have to critique any claims or synthesize competing perspectives, just move from one system to the next. Dogma can be narcotizing to higher order thought. But the more I read the harder it became to sustain a singular methodology. In the last couple of months I’ve had to open myself up and attempt to honor multiple interpretations of composition pedagogy.

Instead of exploring the ramifications of a single scholar or book on my professional growth, this final post in the series explores how I came to rebuild my definition of what it means to be a teacher of writing through a variety of authors and perspectives. This is ultimately a story of turning outwards towards the community, of connecting with others, and of giving up the search for the elusive all-encompassing pedagogy fit to rule them all.

To review: by the end of the 2015-16 school year my composition pedagogy was in shambles. Fueled in part by a desire to escape the rigid prescriptivism of my early years working at a No Excuses charter school, I had launched myself into a form of teaching nearly devoid of direct instruction. Students read, wrote, and discussed, but I rarely tied their learning to specific skills. “As long as they’re reading and writing,” I told myself. Fluency above all else. And while this is of course true to a certain extent, as George Hillocks wrote, teaching requires a direct object.

Without that direct object, I was close to becoming the teacher caricatured in the opening chapter of Lisa Delpit’s book Other People’s Children.Delpit explores the failures of a particular brand of white progressive teaching. Talking about a certain teacher, one of the author’s friends says

What do they think? Our children have no fluency? Our kids are fluent. What they need are the skills that will get them into college. He needs skills, not fluency.

I had struggled with how to handle direct instruction and skills in my classroom ever since removing grades, quizzes, and tests from my teaching. I could guide children through the writing process all day, but if I wasn’t explicitly teaching students the literacy skills America would judge them by, I was derelict in my duty. The return to skills was bolstered by my reading of Class War: The Privatization of Childhood by Megan Erickson. Like Delpit, Erickson’s argument seemed tailored to my situation. She excoriates the contemporary unschooling movement, writing

Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream.

While this particular quote doesn’t touch on skills directly, it tapped into that part of me that used my understanding of expressivism as a retreat from my duties as a public school teacher. The writings of Hillocks, Delpit, and Erickson pulled me back into the reality of the classroom. It was time to reinsert skills and direct instruction into my pedagogy. But this time it would be on my own terms, in a way that made sense to me and reflected my agonizing yet productive journey through theory and reflection.

By the time I came to this realization summer was almost over. I put down the theory and returned to a portion of my book shelf I’d spent the last year ignoring: books by scholar-practitioners (Georgia Heard, Tom Romano, Katie Wood Ray, Penny Kittle, etc.). I cracked open my most recent purchase, Writing with Mentors by Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell.

The book offered an approach that incorporated almost everything I was looking for. It taught students the craft of writing through authentic genres and real world pieces. It was inquiry based and used student understanding to drive much of the instruction. The book also contained robust suggestions for handling classroom topics like grammar, media literacy, and lesson sequencing. Writing with Mentors keeps most of its theorizing underneath the hood; any analysis of the book’s contents, however, would uncover a pedagogy rooted in authenticity, inquiry, and collaboration. I ate it up.

With WwM finished and only two weeks left until the start of the school year, I had to act quickly. I chose my final book: Make Writing by Angela Stockman. I’d watched the maker movement saturate EduTwitter, and even though I’m wary of education trends, Stockman’s work has always been exemplary. Make Writing surprised me with its understated critique of the ways many teachers (myself included) have taught writing. Stockman illustrates how simple materials (white boards, sticky notes, wall space), tinkering with text, and a sense of play can reinvigorate the traditional writer’s workshop model. In the introduction, Stockman explains that Make Writing is about

pursuing outcomes in ways that support writers who need to move, build, mix, tinker, blend, sculpt, shoot, smear, and tack their writing together. Physically. Making writing obliges teachers to access the voices of those we serve and listen hard.

If one of my goals was indeed to push every student to learn to use writing to express themselves and shape their world, then I needed to put in place strategies that would help me reach as many young writers as possible. Stockman’s book helped me shake off my Peter Elbow asceticism, the belief that becoming a better writer required little more than sitting down, writing, reading, and rewriting. Just because I wasn’t interested in pipe cleaners doesn’t mean my students aren’t.

With Make Writing and Writing with Mentors finished, I felt ready. With a week to spare, I decided to reward myself with a copy of Karen Surman Paley’s I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing. I-Writing combines theory, composition history, and ethnography to make a case for the value and complexity of first person writing. Surman Paley made it possible for me to identify as a social expressivist; I was able to reconcile my predilections for the personal with the political necessities of certain forms of knowledge. I felt at peace with my pedagogy.

———————

“You seem to have a lot of epiphanies,” my mom said after reading a draft of my previous post. Her observation highlights my tendency to enshrine everything I read or come across as capital T Truth. I read something, become obsessed with it, preach it as gospel to whoever will listen, and then reorient everything in my life around it. Until the next book I read forces me to go into a spiral of guilt and the cycle begins again.

Up until now, every epiphany carried with it a total brain dump, an out with the old/in with the new mentality that forced me to repeatedly rebuild my schema from the ground up. At the end of every summer, my wife asks me whether or not I’m going to reuse any of last year’s lesson materials. Every year she becomes slightly more exasperated with my stubborn insistence that everything must be new. Some of this stems from a fundamental insecurity about my value as an educator. When you never feel good enough you become mired in the belief that your professional salvation can be found in the next book, in the next article, in the next technique.

Instead I’m learning to stand still, stick with something, and engage with the community. Allison Marchetti (Writing with Mentors) reads every panicked email I send (how many noticings should the kids be listing? When do I introduce the concept of touchstone texts? Am I doing this right?), responding always with patience and guidance. Similarly, Angela Stockman allows me to pick her brain about all things writing and making. Lastly, Katie Kraushaar listens to my lesson ideas and then improves upon them. How fortunate I am to connect with and learn from such wise colleagues.

Since the end of summer I’ve made the switch from theory to young adult literature. I miss wading through dense fields of text, spending hours on seven or eight paragraphs. I love the hermetic splendor of relying on nothing but the page, a highlighter, and my brain. But I know I’ll be back; my copy of Peter Elbow’s Vernacular Eloquence isn’t going to read itself.

October 7, 2016

Becoming a Teacher of Writing: George Hillocks and the Power of Disruption

This is the second part of a three-part series exploring my growth as a teacher of writing. The first part can be found here.

Many teachers of writing act as though writing is best done under some sort of compulsion, involving surrender to mysterious psychic powers that take place over the task of producing text. They believe that this state may be attained in a number of ways and order classroom activities accordingly, dimming lights, listening to emotive music, writing freely without inhibition

I was a quarter of the way through George Hillocks’s Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice when I read the above sentence. I put the book down, twirling my highlighter between my fingers as I attempted to come to grips with what I had just read. While I’d never lit candles in my classroom, my students would attest to my use of emotive music and inhibition-free writing. I started pacing back and forth in my living room, grinding the end of the highlighter between my molars until the blooming ache in my jaw forced me to stop. The opening of Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice was an indictment of everything I thought about teaching writing.

In my previous post, I described how I had willfully abdicated my role as the lead architect of student learning in my classroom. “Just write” became my mantra. No activities, no strategies; just the student, the pencil, and a sheet of paper. Any feedback students received from me or their peers took the form of “your piece made me think/feel X.” Students were writing more than ever, but I was laboring under the illusion that fluency was all that mattered. Just write.

Hillocks refers to this style of pedagogy as the “natural process,” the belief that the most effective way to become a better writer is merely to write more. This is exactly what I had spent the entire school year asking kids to do. I felt nauseated from guilt. Why didn’t I realize that Peter Elbow’s ideas (as presented in Writing Without Teachers) were no longer cutting edge? In my head my classroom was a space of raw expression and powerful freedom. I quickly understood that anything can feel revolutionary to the untrained mind.

The rest of the book outlines Hillocks’s “environmental approach,” a complete pedagogy combining creative activities with structured writing assignments. The ideas contained in the book triggered an immediate change in my brain. Within days I’d thrown together a flash-fiction genre study focusing on genre-specific writing skills and what Hillocks calls “gateway activities.” Gateway activities differed from the mini-lesson of a more standard writer’s workshop model.

Instead of using portions of a mentor text to help students isolate, analyze, and then apply examples of strong descriptive writing, I took a page from Hillocks and asked students to describe a series of eight generic waterfall pictures. The rub was that they weren’t allowed to use any color words or reference specific parts of the picture (e.g., the one with the cave). Students then traded papers and had to match their partner’s description to the correct waterfall image. We then engaged in a similar activity using shells. While my classes enjoyed the gateway activities, I was too scattered to check whether or not students’ use of description actually improved.

By the end of June I was a wreck. My classroom had become an uneven mess of freewriting, gateway activities, and genre study. In an attempt to get some closure, I reached out to my writing mentor Sarah Baker to ask her about Peter Elbow’s status in the academy. “Peter Elbow is old-school,” she said in an email, “his work is a required read, but we have to figure out what it means and how to use it within the current contexts.” She recommended that I pick up A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, a primer on writing instruction, to help me begin to understand the field of writing pedagogy. I loved the book so much I ended up writing a series of posts devoted to exploring its concepts.

I learned that Peter Elbow’s concerns with student voice and authentic writing were in many ways a response to the current-traditionalism pervasive in classrooms leading up to the sixties. And that he is/was just one part of a larger theory of writing complete with its own thought leaders, epistemology, and critics. For the first time I witnessed the depth and complexity of composition. I began to see how the instructional methods I employed in my classroom privileged certain ways of knowing and communicating and being-in-the-world. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies introduced me to what being a teacher of writing really meant.

In the introduction to Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice, George Hillocks reminds us that teaching is a transitive verb; it takes a direct object. In my final post, I’ll bring the reader up to the present moment and describe what that direct object is for me.

September 28, 2016

Becoming a Teacher of Writing: The Year of Peter Elbow

In the summer of 2015 I fell in love with Peter Elbow.

More specifically I became obsessed with the method he lays out in Writing Without Teachers, his landmark expressivist text published in 1973. Elbow positions his pedagogy as a corrective to the rigid structures of a traditional English classroom. He argues that we improve as writers by writing, not by practicing discrete skills. We should use writing to grow our ideas, not merely to record them. Writing Without Teachers articulates a method of writing instruction rooted in personal expression, freedom, and collaboration.

I had recently left a No Excuses charter school, a place where writing instruction meant test prompts, formulaic hamburger paragraphs, and grammar worksheets. At the time I understood writing to be a method of mental discipline, a way to force the mind to conform to conservative logics of perception and cognition. Although I wanted to engage my students with something more creative, I couldn’t see past the deficit ideology pushed by the school’s administration. Even when I allowed my students to dabble in poetry or expressive prose, it was always in the service of mastering literary techniques (I would come to learn later that the charter school’s approach to writing aligned with what composition scholars refer to as current-traditional rhetoric).

I stuck to many of my old assignments when I transitioned to a new school district a few years later. While I wasn’t enthralled with how I approached composition, I didn’t know how else to do it. During the summer of 2015 I purchased a battered used copy of Writing Without Teachers from an Amazon seller. I had just completed my second year of the Northern Virginia Writing Project‘s Summer Institute and decided it was time to get serious about composition. I fell hard for the book. Never before had I read sentences like

To improve your writing you don’t need advice about what changes to make; you don’t need theories of what is good and bad writing. You need movies of people’s minds while they read your words.

This is what I was craving: a composition pedagogy emphasizing dialogue, invention, and collaboration. The book was the opposite of everything I had been doing and I loved it. One of my favorite things about reading good theory is how it can resonate with you on a cellular level. Every chapter of the book spoke into being thoughts and feelings I didn’t even know I had. It set about centering my classroom around Peter Elbow’s ideas.

Some of the book’s strategies, such as freewriting, found an immediate home in my classroom. I told children to “just write,” modelling my own incoherent stream of consciousness on a document camera to reinforce the importance of writing without stopping. As someone who witnessed students wrestling with words on a daily basis, helping children to distinguish between creation and evaluation was paramount. We grew our writing by picking out the best shards from our freewrites and fashioning them into new ideas.

Elbow calls this process ‘growing.’ You start out writing X because you believe X. But by the time you’re finished X no longer feels right. You begin to see Y. Since encouraging students to discard whole sections of writing can be a tough sell, we started small, identifying our golden lines and lifting sentences from each other. The ability to grow an idea by writing, reading what’s on the page, picking out the best parts, and starting again still feels like alchemy to me.

While freewriting and growing an idea through multiple drafts have become standard practices in many English classrooms, I cannot say the same about Elbow’s concept of the teacherless writing class. Writing Without Teachers lays out the argument that a teacher’s position and status make it impossible for them to give authentic feedback. The teacher’s insider knowledge of the student and the assignment distorts the teacher’s perception. As a result, teacher feedback becomes artificial, divorced from the natural world of reader response. When I read non-student writing, for example, I’m creating meaning from the words on the page, not scouring every paragraph for errors or ways to improve.

As an alternative, Writing without Teachers builds the composition classroom around peer response. Instead of providing constructive criticism or making suggestions, the reader is responsible for explaining how the author’s words made them think and feel. I ate this up. I had my students practice Elbow’s specific response techniques with selections from their independent reading books before asking them to apply the same techniques to each other’s writing during their writing groups. My students enjoyed trying out each method of writing and responding, but I wasn’t able to build the entire class around them. As often happens I was trying out too many new things in the classroom. Changing everything all of the time is draining and ineffective. As my old charter school leader used to say, if everything is an emergency, then nothing is.

This was also the year I began removing grades and quizzes from my class. I became obsessed with rejecting everything around me. I eschewed any talk of writing standards or skills. No grammar. No vocabulary. No genre study. No rubrics. All that mattered to me was that students wrote a lot and talked to each other about their writing. The cultivation of unfettered personal expression above all else.

What I didn’t realize was that my new approach abdicated my responsibility as an English Language Arts teacher. I had nothing of substance to replace the traditional teacher identity I worked so hard to deconstruct. This realization wouldn’t hit me until a blog post by Paul Thomas led me to the work of George Hillocks. What I found within the pages of Hillocks’s Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice made it impossible to continue doing what I had been doing. Sick with guilt, I sent frantic emails to Paul Thomas, Sarah Baker (co-director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project), and my school’s assistant principal.

To be continued in the next post of this short series.

July 11, 2016

Writing Extraordinary Profiles of Ordinary People – NVWP Summer ISI – Day 1

A different person is the ethnographer for each day. This person is responsible for chronicling the day’s events in any format they choose. As a three-year veteran of the Writing Project, I’m tasked as the ethnographer. Mine is as follows:

Day 1 Ethnography: Summer is Here

Our Fearless Leader (referred to from this point forward as O.F.L.) lets me take the lead for the first ISI ethnography. I know from previous experiences that the first ethnography tends to set the stage for the ethnographies to follow. It typically takes a solid week for most of us to feel comfortable enough to create an ethnography in our own vision. This, of course, makes perfect sense. Purposefully ambiguous expectations, institutional pressures to conform, and the hegemony of the model text make mimicry an understandable solution.

So I’m going to make this inaugural ethnography somewhat short and to the point. I encourage you all to write the ethnography however you want. Personally I’m not really pushing myself. First-person non-fiction narration is where I feel most comfortable.

I survey the room. The future teacher consultants seem split 50/50 on the use of digital vs. analog writing implements. The presence of so many pens might also have something to do with the first day’s spotty Wi-Fi. Michelle, a notebook fiend, might also be unwittingly inspiring some of us to ditch the district-provided laptop in favor of colorful pens.

We’re sitting and writing. This is an abridged version of our morning pages routine, a daily chunk of time devoted to nothing but sitting and writing. I wonder what everyone is writing. I would imagine equal parts diary/journal stream of consciousness narration, checklists and schedules, and clandestine email checking. I notice that many of us are also scribbling away on sticky notes for the ice breaker. OFL’s equally fearless daughter created a neat ice-breaker activity, so many of us are penning our six word memoirs, pet peeves, sin foods, and etc. to place on large pieces of chart paper.

You can already draw a few conclusions about everyone’s personality based on how they chose to complete the sticky note icebreaker. Some place their sticky notes in nice and neat Jeffersonian grids while others prefer a scattershot approach. Some use drawings while others create elaborate mini-essays.

Jokes are made. Mostly of the semi-corny variety best suited for first encounters. I do my usual routine of saying non-sequiturs and mumbling sarcastic comments under my breath. The atmosphere seems pretty typical for this type of function. Light jitters. Appropriately subdued and managed levels of libidinal energy. But like the first day of school, everyone is definitely on their best behavior. I’m looking forward to learning more about everyone’s personality in the upcoming weeks. Ron makes some jokes that exhibit a decent sense of humor possibly sympatico to mine. He also drew a neat looking cartoon spider for his ice breaker.

Lauren Jensen comes in around 9:40. A Writing Project alum/mainstay, Lauren will be running us through the first demo lesson of the Institute. She gets us writing with a question about teaching non-fiction writing. There’s nothing I can say about her that hasn’t already been said by way more accomplished people. She’s hyper-literate, driven, organized, and frighteningly knowledgeable. Lauren comes prepared with a vast array of instructional materials for us. Her lesson is an enjoyable combination of air-tight sequencing with off-the-cuff moments of improvisational commentary. I’m not going to type out much more about it, but if you’re interested I recommend checking out my blog. The time is now a little past noon, and we’re starting to get peckish.

We eat lunch. Nothing too noteworthy to say about it.

Michelle Hasseltine begins our first afternoon session by preaching on the power of social media. I cannot cosign enough. Tweet at authors. Connect with teachers. Engage in conversations. Almost everything good that’s happened to me professionally has come in some way from my interactions with others on social media. Michelle is a force of nature. Great teachers have presence, the seemingly preternatural ability to attract attention in a room. Michelle has this in spades. All eyes are glued to her as she walks us through the blogging process for the Summer Institute. She makes a passionate appeal for everyone in the room to wiggle at least a big toe toe in the waters of social media.

Next O.F.L. provides us with a guided tour through the syllabus with special emphasis on the summative portfolio. Everyone will be writing blog posts, completing statements of inquiry, writing various reflections, and etc. We’ll be in writing groups, reading canonical texts, and more.

That’s it. No linguistic or textual pyrotechnics, no formal experimentation, just a straight-forward, chronological narration of the first day. You heard Lauren Jensen tell the room that the Writing Project was the most powerful professional development experience of her life. I’ve heard the same sentiment echoed by nearly everyone who has experienced the ISI. Personal growth often occurs in fits and starts. It’s my hope that what happens during the next four weeks will reverberate through you for years to come.

After morning pages Lauren Jensen comes in around 9:40. A Writing Project alum/mainstay, Lauren will be running us through the first demo lesson of the institute. This 3-week lesson cycle involves using profiles in the writing classroom (She gave a version of this during last year’s ISI, as well). She gets us writing with a question about teaching non-fiction writing. Lauren begins by asking us to write down our initial response to the question: What do you think of teaching non-fiction writing to your students? My answers will always be in red.

I love it! Non-fiction writing is perhaps my favorite topic/genre to teach. I’m immensely interested in personal stories, self-expression, and any kind of writing that draws its main inspiration from the stuff of lived experience. Similar statements could be made about all writing, for sure. But personal essay writing is just so wonderful to read, write, and teach.

When it comes to more traditional school-based non-fiction writing like research papers, I’m neither excited nor underwhelmed. I haven’t done a lot of research writing in the past simply because I haven’t spent a lot of time looking into how to do it well. I’ll probably look to remedy this omission in the upcoming school year. I’ve read a few nice essays examining the benefits/pitfalls of classroom research writing and I feel more comfortable wading into those waters.

We share our answers out. Some of us approach non-fiction writing with trepidation while others say they enjoy the structures of fact-based compositions. It’s clear that teachers and students alike hold strong opinions about this. The beginning of successfully teaching non-fiction is unpacking what we mean by the genre. She takes us through quotes from past students who all speak to the point that teachers have pretty much ruined non-fiction for most kids. They find it boring, pointless, and requiring way more editing and revision than it’s worth.

She next points out the disconnect between what many of us have our students read (literature) with what we then ask them to write (5 paragraph essays). So she wants to introduce more “real world” writing, composition that’s rooted in authentic audience, genre, and process. That’s where non-fiction profiles come into play.

She begins by tying her portfolio unit into whatever her students are studying at the time. Portfolios are malleable. They can fit into most units because interesting people come from all walks of life and are found in most texts. Portfolios are also found in a wide array of periodicals such as Rolling Stone, In Style, and the New Yorker. As a result, this unit, although quite complex in nature, allows for differentiation, incorporates pop culture, and pushes students into some pretty complex levels of thought.

She introduces us to the genre with a spirited reading of Susan Orlean’s Show Dog. It’s awesome. We then discuss what we noticed about the genre. It’s creative, it uses facts, it’s funny, there’s an element of narrative, it’s non-fiction, it requires research, etc. It’s a wonderful blend of methods and styles. Above all else there’s a sense of intimacy. Intimacy between both the author and subject and the author and reader. Here’s her process.

Writing a Profile: The Process
1. Profile genre study: What do you notice? Immerse yourself in the genre. Read a lot of them. Talk about them, etc. This is a basic component to most inquiry models.
2. Find interview subject and write a letter of invitation: family, friends, family friends, friends of family. They have to learn how to go out into the community and ask people. Plenty of opportunities here to make bridges with the community.
3. Write contextualization essay: 3-4 paragraphs. Requires each student to do some research and acquire important background knowledge about the interviewee and their topic.
4. Practice with recording equipment: pretty self-explanatory. Never assume that students are familiar with technology. Always teach.
5. Conduct mock interviews / craft interview questions: Practice interviewing people who give 1-2 word answers. Go through a few common archetypes. Problem solve in the moment and try to foresee problems.
6. Transcribe interview and select quality quotes: they transcribe the best part(s). It shouldn’t go beyond two pages.
7. Craft lessons: (based on student work and student requests, like how to select quality quotes) This is a great way to help students practice skills within the context of their draft
8. Draft and revise:
9. Write thank you notes to interviewees: actual notes on actual stationary – the thank you note is a valuable genre!
10. Compile portfolio and class publication / public reading with distinguished guests

You see how the process is multi-layered. It leans on the community. It builds and values empathy. It requires research, reading, and writing. We partner up and go through a genre study using some mentor texts Lauren provides us. The portfolios lend themselves to skillful inferences on the part of the reader. They’re rich in description (about the subject, the setting, the events, etc). Parenthetical asides. These portfolios are masterclasses in studying tone, mood, and writer’s voice. How to select important information from a sea of writing. They’re a great way to start talking about writer’s craft.

Handout

The last step of the process is to write out our questions and then interview each other. At the ISI we introduce each other using the information gained from these portfolios. Like a drop of soap in greasy water we immediately scatter to the corners of the floor to find some peace and quiet in order to interview each other. After that we spend the final pre-lunch minutes debriefing about the lesson cycle. While having someone as powerful and polished as Lauren present first can increase the intimidation among participants, kicking off the Summer Institute with such an effective demonstration lesson sets the tone for the rest of our time together.

A few of us share out what we’ve written on our profiles before the ink is even dry. A few of us sandbag our reading with “This isn’t that good…,” a common mea-culpa among growing writers. A few of us who have done this before know how to handle it; we shout out “shut up and read the crap!” We’ll no doubt repeat this mantra multiple times throughout the Summer Institute. By the final week anyone silly enough to begin with such a self-deprecating aside will find themselves on the receiving end of a rowdy vocal chorus. Shut up and read the crap.

August 10, 2015

I read so you don’t have to: Katie Wood Ray’s ‘Study Driven’ – Part 2, The Inquiry Based Approach to Writing

*The IRSYDHT series is a place for me to give detailed summaries of professional books I’ve read.*

Check out part 1 here.

So, here’s a chart that summarizes Katie Wood Ray’s Inquiry approach:

This post will run through KWR’s comments on each step.

1. Gathering Texts:
-Always be on the lookout for possible mentor texts. Always read like a writer on the lookout for something class-worthy. KWR recommends keeping hard copies of everything in a large binder.
-Length is part of the inquiry. Once you’ve gathered a good stack of a certain kind of writing, one of the questions you’ll ask is ‘How long are these?’ That way you and your students can discuss length in an authentic manner.
-Look through magazines (KWR recommends (USA Today), magazines (Muse, U.S. Kids, American Girl, Boy’s Life, Cobblestone, Click), picture books, the Internet (Rotten Tomatoes, East of the Web), and more.
-Make sure that children examine the graphical layout of a text along with its content.
-Go for breadth (enough examples so students can see a good range of writing in the world) and depth (a few texts that anchor the study, select these with care).
-Use authentic texts, not writing created for schools (textbooks).
-Go for high interest. Invite students to help you find them. Keep an editable Google Doc, perhaps.
-The text must be at least semi-readable.
-Each text must be a wonderful representative of the genre and pregnant with opportunities to study content and craft and process.

2. Setting the Stage
-The goal here is to establish predictable routines. Each study starts with a short stack of texts that show writers doing whatever it is you want to study.
-Make sure the students understand that you will expect them to finish a piece of writing that shows influence of the study.
-Students need to have routines down pat. Think about beginning of the year mini-lessons that help students know how to research, get in and out of groups, collaborate, confer with teacher, and use independent time wisely.
-Preview texts, read a mentor aloud, talk with students, chart things.
-Create a handout with requirements and expectations. A sample is below:

-From their first encounter with the text, you want students thinking, ‘I’m going to write something like this.’ This is key.

3. Immersion
-First off, students should read what they want to read during independent reading time. Immersion in a genre is for specific times when you expect students to partake in intentional reading.
-Plan ahead of time how long the immersion phase will last. Typical immersion time goes from a few concentrated days to a week(s).
-Create guiding questions! As students read, you want them to begin making notes of things they are noticing in response to the text. If you’re in a craft/process unit, your questions will be narrow: how do writers use punctuation in powerful ways to craft their texts?, for instance.

If you’re in a larger genre study, then go with the same three questions: What kinds of topics do writers address with this genre and what kinds of things do they do with these topics?, What kind of work (research, reflecting, etc.) does it seem like writers of this genre must do in order to produce this kind of writing?, and How do writers craft this genre so that it is compelling for readers?
-Remember, you are teaching students to go through this line of questioning for everything they read.
-Students can write down their noticings on the text, on charts, on sticky notes, in their writer’s notebook, etc. Consider charting the whole-class discussion yourself.

4. Close Study
-After reading deeply and widely in immersion, it’s time to dig in with your students and become articulate about how writers craft this genre so that it is compelling for readers.
-Just like with the Immersion phase above, have a plan in mind for how long you want the Close Study phase to last. If you don’t set a limit, it’s easy to get lost in this phase. KWR recommends at least a few days.
-Remember, the point is to get students Writing under the Influence (see below).
-Consider moving between three different ways of working:

1. Working from a whole-class list of student noticings across texts: Make a giant list together and select an issue or two from the list. You won’t know exactly what it is until you’ve done it with students, so take the leap of faith.
2. Returning to individual texts for close study: Spend a few days as a class on a single text. This means the text must be “teaching full” and able to carry the weight of lengthy discourse.
3. Working with a specific question in mind. (i.e. What particular language is striking? What can we learn about language from studying this?)

5. Writing under the Influence
-Set a date when you want students to begin their Writing under the Influence draft.
-Writing workshops include significant stretches of time when children work independently as writers. They shouldn’t be spending all of the time on their “main” draft.
-Balance “main” drafting with independent writing.
-Students need to do as much talking and visioning as possible before they begin writing under the influence.
-Make sure students have what KWR calls “back-up work,” other pieces of student-generated writing that they can return to whenever they’re stuck, bored, etc. BUW is anything a student wants to write. The bigger the better. You don’t do much with BUW.
-Make sure students show a record of their process. Have students reflect on what it is they’ve done, how they’ve done it, what craft and process growth they’ve made, etc. This is essential!
-Revision and editing should only take a few days at the end. Focus on the issues you’re seeing during your conferring.
-Today’s draft can become next unit’s BUW.

That concludes the summary of KWR’s five-step Inquiry process. I’m going to include additional pertinent information below.

Evaluation: Remember, teach the writer, not the writing.
-Think about asking students to show evidence of: working through the process (evidence of work spent wisely, attention paid to dates), choosing and growing an idea (evidence of deliberate topic selection, using the writer’s notebook to grow an idea, etc.), drafting and revising (evidence of thoughtful planning for drafting, being engaged in purposeful revision, etc.), and finishing (evidence the writer paid careful and strategic attention to spelling, etc.).

Learn the Process by Living the Process
-Students need to live through the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing) many times throughout the school year. They should be talking about their process and writing about their stories of writing like a writer.
-Consider units of study on the process: using talk as a tool to improve writing, where writers get idea, using a notebook as a tool to improve your writing, what writers think about and do during revision.
-When planning for a process study, use a similar format of immersion, close study, and writing under the influence. Students can work on any genre as long as they’re immersed and under the influence of a particular process question or aspect.
-The Internet is a great place to find interesting quotes and anecdotes from writers about their own craft and process.
-Just like in a product study, give students an assignment sheet up front with the expectations and dates.

Turning Talk into Text:
-This method requires the teacher to create a new order of experience, a new curriculum that comes from the students.
-Use their talk to find your content. For instance a student observation about illustrations turns into a piece of curriculum on how writers should think a lot about the placement of text with illustrations.
-What you study comes from what they notice. This is essential (and perhaps the hardest part).

This book is amazing. It’s one of the most effective professional books I’ve ever read. KWR weaves in theory, philosophy, activism, and pragmatism into a single book. I cannot recommend this enough!

In addition to housing mentor texts, this website is also regularly updated with new material. In fact, KWR Tweeted that many people will be adding to the mentor text list starting in the end of August.

July 20, 2015

Teaching Persuasive Writing through Op-Ed Genre Study: NVWP Summer Institute – Day 9 pt. 1

Our first demo lesson is Amy Carroll.

Finding Your Passion: Teaching Argument through Op-Ed Genre Study

Amy begins talking about how her school handled writing instruction in an overly prescriptive way. Some call this TEEEC (topic, evidence, conclusion), the hamburger paragraph, the Jane Schaffer program, or, in Amy’s case, the Proper Paragraph format. Standardized and rationalized. Many heads nod in our room. We’ve all experienced this in some form or another. This sort of 5-paragraph didacticism is often coupled with groans and moans about how today’s students can’t write. There is a definite relationship between these two ideas. Now isn’t the time to suss it out. Amy decided to go rogue and immerse the kids in a genre study using op-eds. A proactive vs. reactive approach.

She gets us writing with a quickwrite:

Q1: What do you think when you hear the words “persuasive essay”? What are some topics of persuasive essays that you have written in the past?

So, I sort of have to sit and think about this one. Normally I can unleash my inner logorrhea at a moment’s notice when it comes to these things. So, what is it about persuasive writing that stymies me? I didn’t have my students do really any persuasive writing last year, now that I think about it. As freshly-awakened teacher, I didn’t want to do anything that reeked of traditional school writing. Traditional school writing, to me, is a prompt about whether or not students should wear uniforms. Or if cell-phones should be allowed in schools. Of topic, evidence, connection, conclusion. Inauthentic statements written for nonexistent audiences. I associate persuasive writing with the kind of anemic, formulaic composition I wanted to get away from. This is, of course, not really true, Anything can be exciting; it’s all about how you approach it. So, I’m looking forward to hearing about how to use persuasive writing in an exciting way. That last sentence definitely reads as a conclusion but we’re still going, so I need to type more. It’s hard just riffing on something! Ok, that’s it.

Then we turn and share with our partners. My neighbor has a slightly different take. She remembers the feeling of excitement when a teacher gave her the assignment of writing about whether or not her school should teach a particular book. She also says that all writing is persuasive in a way. We share out to the whole class. We’ve all assigned the cell-phone/uniform topics, probably because we thought they would be interesting! Others share out their own experiences as a student with persuasive writing. Some talk about persuasive writing as a tool of autonomy for students. Some of us talk about how these prompts lead students to write what they think the teacher wants to hear. Or that much persuasive writing forces us into false dichotomies. Is X good or bad? A sort of all-or-nothing thinking that severely limits the scope of dialogue.

Amy uses Edmodo, btw. She talks to us about living a paper-free life. I must admit, I’m currently incapable of thinking rationally about education technology. Ever since I started reading Audrey Watter’s blog, I have a knee-jerk reaction to ed tech. This is another example of how naive my understanding is of, like, everything. I have to progress through this naivete before I’m capable of thinking about technology in the classroom in an un-extreme way.

She recommends using Law and Order episodes to help teach introductions and conclusions. Amazing.

Amy talks to us about Reading Like A Reader vs. Reading Like A Writer. Reading with a sense of possibility, a sense of “What do I see here that might work for me in my writing?” I’m reminded of Stephen King’s admonition that the only way to become a better writer is to read more. Obvious tie-ins with the segregated way we typically approach reading and writing. As separate beasts, never the twain shall meet. I hear “read like a writer” often, but rarely do I hear “write like a reader.”

Amy passes out the model text for today’s demo lesson, a NYTimes piece about vaccines, Disneyland, and Measles. This is standard operating procedure. A whole-group read aloud without purpose for the first run. Just to get into the rhythm of the piece. The language. Read through the piece first. Then, read it as a writer. What do you notice about the sentence structure? The punctuation? The organization? We talk aloud through the ‘Reading like a reader’ questions. What is happening in the piece? Who is involved? What conflicts, if any, are presented? What info am I getting in this piece? A set of questions to really help us get our feet wet and wade into the article.

Then we move into ‘Reading like a writer.’ She projects the article on the board. She makes her thinking public (also known as Think Aloud Protocol) as she reads through sentence by sentence. “When I see this, I notice that…” “I see the author did ____ by _____.” We see the figurative language, the use of pathos. So what we’re doing here is a close reading. This is the power of the mentor text. To allow students the opportunity and space to notice. She tells us to go through the rest of it to pick out elements. Pick a lens and go at it. What are you interested in as a writer? Communicating a particular tone? Using evidence to prove a point? Narrow your gaze to that and see how the article does it.

Amy tells us to make sure you start your genre study out with an unassuming, unclever piece. This makes it easier to figure out what the defining characteristics of a genre are. Amy takes weeks to go through mentor texts in a genre study. She puts them up on Edmodo.

Once we’ve gone through the mentor text stuff, we try to find our own passion. Passion isn’t necessarily a love thing, just anything you feel a massive emotional charge about. We think of a couple of examples of things we’re passionate about.

Passion Organizer

Then, we move through a few well-constructed organizers taking us from passion to editorial topic to writing controversial questions to thinking about your evidence. She then has us cut it up. Rearrange words, paragraphs, sequence, etc. It’s a cool way of writing and prewriting and revising. You don’t have to start with X. No two editorials are the same using this method (which works for pretty much any other genre, btw).

Amy has many shout-outs. Penny Kittle, Jim Burke, the Serial podcast, Katie Wood Ray, and more.

What a fantastic presentation! Time for a quick break before we’re back into it.

If you tell your students what to say and how to say it, you may never hear them, only the pale echos of what they imagine you want them to be. -Donald Murray

July 15, 2015

The Writing Goes Where it Needs to Go – Using Progoff Journaling to Look within for Writing – NVWP Summer Institute – Day 7 pt. 2

Let’s continue!

Dialogue Journal: Writing an honest dialogue/conversation with someone we know well. The process of writing the dialogue allows the relationship and aspects of the relationship to emerge and move forward. First step is make a list of persons you would like to have a dialogue with (Progoff said people die but relationships don’t.) This should be with someone who you know well enough to write their own stepping stones. Someone you’re familiar with. First step is to list people you’d like to have a dialogue with.

Mother
Father
Sister
Uncle David

The point of making the list first is to have a menu to select from. So pick someone. My Uncle passed away yesterday; I’m going to select him. Next write a focus statement.

Focus Statement: Two to three sentences about why I want to have a dialogue with this person. Why did I choose this person?

I want to have a conversation with you, Uncle David. We never really talked or got to know each other. I know this sort of goes against the requirement of knowing the person well, but that’s OK. It’s my writing.

Arbogast talks about the difficulty of conversations. About how we are typically listening only to respond. An I-It relationship where we’re centered on ourselves. This contrasts with an I-Thou relationship that honors the other person. The trick in writing a dialogue is to get to the I-Though relationship. We do this by writing out the stepping stones for that person. Write them in the first person to get a sense of what it must have been like to walk in that person’s shoes.

I’m pretty sure the writing I’m about to do is an I-It relationship. I’ll do my best to follow the instructions.

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1960s. I graduated from college (where I had an amazing time) and moved out to Texas to work for a big company. I took care of my mom for a time. She came to live with us in Texas. She loved the pool. I married, had a daughter, and developed cancer. I spent the final chunk of my life battling the disease.

There’s one final step before we write the dialogue. We close our eyes, relax, and let the imagery present itself to us. Observe the Twilight Imagery and record it.

-Well greased hair
-Tennis outfits
-Sadness, regret, loss
-My mother’s tears
-A big booming voice calling out ‘Pete’
-Hale physicality
-Fuck cancer
-Cancer

Just use initials (to move quickly) and don’t bother with quotation marks. Imagine you’re in the presence of that person. Greet them and let the dialogue go wherever it goes. If it grinds to a halt, imagine that person is sitting with you to see if something emerges. Read back over that person’s stepping stones. Opening line: I Just read your stepping stones and it made me feel…

Into the silence

P: I just read your stepping stones and it made me feel, well, sort of empty.
D: Empty? That’s an odd thing to say. What do you mean?
P: Well, like, I couldn’t remember much about you. Or about us. Or about the family. Why is that?
D: You weren’t really around. I moved halfway across the country. And you know how much this family hates moving.
P: Yea, I don’t want to get off topic, but what’s up with that? It’s definitely a trait of mine. I don’t even like leaving the house past 7:00 pm, much less relocating my physical body multiple states away from home base.
D: I’m not sure. But I don’t think we’re here to discuss family migration patterns.
P: You’re right. But I’m not sure what I want to talk about. I don’t know you. I never really knew you. What invisible bonds does blood create? What tethers us together? Is a family characterized by distance and unknowing still a family? Now that you’ve passed, how should I feel? Last night I conjured up your face. But all I could think about was my mother. Her pain and sadness. The passing of her first sibling launches her into a phase of life that scares me in its finality. The regrets she has about never providing a close-knit extended family. This wasn’t her fault, of course. But I know, or at least can guess, at just how badly she feels.
D: So it sounds like you’re asking me if it’s okay not to miss me.
P: I guess it is. I’m sorry.
D: Why?
P: For never reaching out. For never taking the initiative to instigate some form of communication with my dying uncle. For thinking about you less than I thought about characters on a TV show. How do I remedy this? What penance must be paid for my willful ignorance, my turning away? How can I make this right?
D: You can’t. I’m gone.
P: I’m sorry.

This is intense stuff. We take a break to clear out some of the emotional charge still sitting on top of us.

Inner Wisdom Dialogue is the last activity we’re going to do. The inner wisdom dialogue is one in which we have a conversation from history or mythology or an ancestor or a deity or fiction. Someone who inspires us in a connection with a meaningful life. Make a list of wisdom figures. People who you want to speak with about the big life questions.

David Foster Wallace
Mario Incandenza
Hal Incandenza
Coach Taylor (Friday Night Lights)
Paul Thomas
Alfie Kohn
Trent Reznor
John Dewey
Diane Ravitch
Thom Yorke
Maynard James Keenan

Look at the list. Maybe you’re drawn to one. Maybe you’re pushed away from one (that’s probably the one you should speak with, btw). So pick one. As with the other dialogue, write a focus statement. A simple declaration of a need or a question. What do you want that figure’s help with? I’m going to choose Alfie Kohn.

Focus Statement: How do I sustain a progressive philosophy of education (and life) in the face of such overwhelming odds?

Imagine the figure is walking towards you. Greet them and let the dialogue unfold. The figure might change in the middle of the dialogue. If that happens, go with it.

P: Mr. Kohn!

A: Hello there! It’s so nice to see you. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog posts and your Twitter feed.

P: Really? That’s amazing!

A: What can I do for you?

P: How do I know what I’m doing is the right thing? How do I know I’m on the right path? I read your books. I read your blog. I read your articles. Yet I often feel like everything I experience day-to-day goes against your wisdom.

A: Join the club. I’ve felt that way my entire life!

P: But then how do you know what’s right? How do know that the opinions you’re giving aren’t misguided?

A: Well, why do you ask? Although I’m pretty sure I know the answer already.

P: Because I don’t know what’s right. I don’t know how to teach. Grade or no grades. Test vs no tests. Preparing students for life, for college, for vocational positions, for academia. These tracking systems we have in our society are so ingrained. How do I know what to teach each student?

A: Keep going.

P: What if I’m only doing these things because I think they’re right independent of studies and research and “best practices?” Isn’t that selfish of me?

A: I can’t answer these questions for you.

P: Why not?

A: Because the answers can only come from you. Like you said, this is your system of ethics you’re developing. Your personal philosophy of how education should work.

P: But I want to do what’s right. But what if rubrics are the best way to improve student writing? What if John Dewey was wrong? Or, more accurately, what if I’m only partially right? What if this tiny sliver of knowledge I’ve gleaned over the past twelve months is a misreading? Maybe I’m in over my head. Maybe I only have my own best interests in mind.

A: Do you think that’s true?

P: I don’t know! That’s what I’m asking you! I want a mentor. I need a mentor. I need someone to tell me that what I’m doing is the right thing to do. That I’m heading on a path of authentic experience. That I’m going to make a positive difference to something or someone outside of myself. Or maybe I’m taking this way too personally. I feel like I’m placing myself up on a pedestal of solipsism. A pedagogy of narcissism predicated upon masquerading my own interests as what’s best for students. I’m afraid I’m not good enough for all of this. That I just don’t have what it takes to carry on a progressive, learned approach to teaching and learning. That I have nothing to fall back on. That I’ll look back in five years and hang my head in shame at the misguided techniques I used in the service of some false progressivism I didn’t even know enough about.

A: Keep walking the path. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep thinking.

P: That’s it?

A: That’s it.

P: I had a feeling you would say that.

Phew! We share out. Tears galore! Mucous out the wazoo!

This is the raw stuff that becomes amazing writing. These journal prompts work really well with students. It helps them generate ideas to write about. Come back to it throughout the quarter and semester and year. Turn these ideas into fiction by changing names. Using the images and phrases to start and end poems. Personal narratives stemming from any of the stepping stones. Poems for two voices with the dialogue. Using the dialogue to help students write…dialogue. Use a literary character and write out his or her stepping stones. Keep recording! Mindfulness! To practice coming home to your body. To becoming aware of existing in a space.

Now we run, partially hollowed out by the emotional purge, to lunch.

August 9, 2015

I read so you don’t have to: Katie Wood Ray’s ‘Study Driven’ – Part 1, Groundwork for an Inquiry Approach

Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop
Katie Wood Ray

TL;DR:In this book, Katie Wood Ray lays out a complete vision for implementing an Inquiry-based approach to writing. The study driven framework grounds student writing in real-world examples. Student discourse becomes the curriculum. The following chart summarizes KWR’s five-step approach to an inquiry method. Students read authentic writing, determine what makes each genre tick, then write under the influence of the genre.

I will explore and summarize the book throughout two blog posts. Part 1 lays the ground work. Part 2 goes through the process.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Framing writing instruction as ‘study’ represents an inquiry-based stance to teaching and learning. An inquiry stance repositions curriculum as the outcome of instruction rather than the starting point. In this particular set of practices, the students’ noticing and questioning around the gathered texts determine what will become important content in the study (the teacher doesn’t determine this in advance), and depth rather than coverage is the driving force in the development of this content.

Although this idea of “uncovering curriculum” isn’t new, it takes on heightened significance in an age when school districts expect teachers to map out dense scope-and-sequence plans and curriculum maps before children even enter the building after Summer Break.

Student responses to teacher questions aren’t just filler to provide a moment of engagement before the teacher tells the students what they should actually think. The teacher is obligated to do something with student responses. They are the important stuff, not the way to get to the important stuff. There is no content until the children start talking. There is no study without the students.

Chapter 2: Making a Case for Inquiry Study
This chapter explores a few popular alternatives to teaching from an inquiry stance.

-Guided practice: Use school-world examples of writing. First, teachers give a generic definition of the kind of writing they want students to be doing. Then, the teacher gives the students a graphic organizer or two to use when creating this type of writing. The teacher next models an example, writing a piece to lead her students. Lastly, students are let loose to write their own.

-Partial inquiry: Use real-world examples of writing. But instead of studying the texts with students, teachers would have previously planned out where they wanted to go with each text. This model allows teachers to plan units of study ahead of time for use in their own class or someone else’s. I’m reminded of the standardization work many counties expect from their teachers. In my county, for example, teachers use PLCs to create common end goals for a given unit.

-Lesson-Delivery: Traditional. Teachers assign writing for students to complete, turn in, and get back with a grade. There is no study or learning in this stance, simply mindless compliance. Teachers often ground this type of writing in “mythrules,” those desiccated writing rules that don’t really exist outside of a classroom setting. For instance, every paragraph in a piece of expository writing must begin with a main idea/topic sentences. This part-to-whole orientation provides teachers with a sense of comfort and control. Managing a classroom becomes much easier when you know exactly what everyone should be doing ahead of time.

-Study-Driven Inquiry: KWR posits that an inquiry stance is better than these other forms of instruction. It teaches students about the particular genre or writing issue that is the focus of the study, and also to use the same habits of mind experienced writers use all the time. They teach them how to read like writers. Instruction is grounded in how texts actually function and how authors really use words.

Big Shift – What role should modeling play?
Teacher modeling is an essential component to writing instruction. Teachers often use model more in the noun sense than in the verb sense. They want their writing to serve as a model for what the students will write. An Inquiry stance, on the other hand, uses real-world texts as the examples. This allows teachers to model the process, not just the creation. Teachers can make their thinking public about what decisions they’re making, the how and the why and the where of the writing process. Students learn to write from reading rather than teaching.

Closing thoughts on teaching from an inquiry stance:
-asks students to read like writers, developing a habit of mind that will potentially teach them how to write well throughout their lives
-ensures that the content for writing is grounded in realities of both the writing process and product
-expands the teacher’s knowledge base
-helps students develop a guiding vision for writing before they engage in revision
-asks the teacher to model the process, not the product

“When what you know about ‘people who write’ becomes what you know ‘as a person who writes,’ what you know changes.” (32)

Chapter 3: Before Revision, Vision
This chapter makes a case for helping students develop a vision for their writing.

Students should always be able to answer the question, ‘What have you read that is like what you are trying to write?’ For purposeful revision to take place, students must have a clear vision of what they want to accomplish in the first place. The content that each writer decides to pursue can be individual, but the vision for the piece comes from the larger world of writing. Students should look at a range of kinds of writing they can do inside a particular mode or genre and then decide what kind of article they want to write.

Before vision, intention:
One of the key responsibilities of the writing teacher, therefore, is to help each student develop intentions as writers. This means developing purpose, passion, and reason to write something.

This leads to a tension: whole class genre study forces the intention to come from the vision of a kind of writing, and not the other way around. This is important. KWR accepts this tension, however, for two reasons. First, the tension is grounded in the reality of some writers’ real world experiences. Many authors must meet deadlines and create different types of pieces that start from somewhere else other than within. Second, genre study exposes students to the wide variety of writing that exists in the outside world. Genre study helps students fulfill intentions they might not have known existed in the first place.

“Units of study other than genre (like one on punctuation) should therefore be carefully folded into the year.” (54)

Chapter 4: Understanding the Difference between Mode and Genre
This chapter explains how to use ‘mode’ and ‘genre’ to help students compose meaningful pieces.

Modes describe the meaning work that a writer is doing in a text. They come from the influence of traditional studies in rhetoric. Genre is the thing people actually make with writing.

If there are clearly defined and professionally accepted labels for the kinds of writing teachers want from their students, use them. But this often isn’t the case. Don’t shy away from certain kinds of writing because you don’t know what to label it. As long as you can gather a stack of texts fulfilling similar intentions, then you’re good. Let the definition come from the characteristics those texts share. Clarity of vision comes when writers say as much as they can to describe the kind of writing they have in mind.

Different Modes at Work (within the same text)
Authors often use several modes in a single piece of text to accomplish their purpose. Most pieces, regardless of the genre, switch off between description, persuasion, narration, and exposition. KWR states that although this might be commonly understood, schools have a tendency to gloss over complexity of modes within a single text. KWR argues that this oversimplified notion of mode is detrimental to curriculum.

The fix is simple: use genre (instead of mode) as the point of departure for a piece of writing. So instead of teaching students to do persuasive writing and descriptive writing, have students write opinion pieces and book reviews and novels and commentary. Know what kind of thing you want students to write, then show it to them. So, start with genre.

“The thing to remember is that mode is a descriptive device, not a prescriptive one.” (61)

Part 2 coming tomorrow! Thanks for reading.