Introduce Your Town to the World

Click here
 to see our video introduction.

Introduce your town to the world with an activity adapted from Paul Janeczko's Favorite Poetry Lessons. He uses an example poem "What to Do in Rudd, Iowa" by two high school students, John Grosshoeme and K. McCullough to illustrate that interesting details can paint a picture of what life is like in your community. This is an activity with an authentic audience for an authentic purpose.

Students in all four of my sixth grade classrooms added lines, all lines contributing to the description of a sleepy town in rural Missouri.



Things to Do in Fair Grove, Missouri
Watch the trucks and trailers pull out for the race on Saturday night.
Wave at the guy on the tractor.
Praise the Lord at the Methodist Church.
Go to the rodeo and watch the little boys ride sheep.
Examine the exhaust pipes at O'Reilly's Auto Parts.
Thank your favorite waitress at Sheila's.
Hang out at Kum and Go and buy a blue Gatorade.
Count the toilet paper at Dollar General.
Get a new style at Modern Waves.
Smack a pie in your best friend's face at the Fall Festival.
Pop open a book at the library.
Watch them milk at Buckner farm.
Wake up and see the deer grazing in the open field.

I compiled a long list of the lines that would be suitable for a photograph and invited students to take pictures. Two students took me up on the offer and I used their photos, plus three or four pulled from the Internet, to create a PhotoStory.

Our original intention was to send our introduction to a soldier stationed in Iraq who had promised to correspond with us and get a number of other soldiers to do the same. We excitedly sent our video to him, plus letters from each of the students, but never did hear back.

No matter. Our school community liaison sent our video to the Community Foundation of the Ozarks (a grant-funding source for our school) who in turn sent it out to the Rural School and Community Trust, a national nonprofit, where it appeared for some time on their website home page.

Laurie from Laquey High School suggests that students could exchange video introductions with students in other schools. I am thinking that our video could be linked to Fair Grove's Chamber of Commerce or city websites and get continued exposure.

What is there to do in your town?

A New Year for Reluctant Writers

If your first semester with students has you convinced that they can't or won't write, a new semester offers a fresh start and an opportunity to engage those reluctant writers. I am convinced that all students have something to say - and will say it if we can find the prompts that engage them.

Kelly Gallagher (2006) claims that in order to get his students to write he must "first work on breaking down the negativity that many of my students carry with them regarding writing...Job one is to get students interested in writing. Until students warm up to writing they will never work hard developing their writing skills...I want them to have tons of safe practice under their belts."

This post will offer some safe practice ideas. Future posts will discuss how to offer some choice in writing assignments. I will also provide text structures that have prompted some powerful student writing

Power Writing Rounds

Jeff Anderson, in 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know, offers a first chapter on getting and keeping writers motivated. His Power Writing activity diminishes the "I can't" voice. Betsy Quist comments on the strategy here; you can find several more takes on Power Writing by Googling Jeff Anderson and Power Writing.

• Teacher displays two words.
• Students select one.
• Teacher says, "Write as much as you can, as fast as you can, as well as you can in one minute. Go!"
• Students write for one minute.
• Teacher calls time: "Stop writing. Draw a line underneath what you just wrote. Count the number of words you wrote."
• Students record word count under the line.
• Teacher records class results for each round on chart.
• Repeat for a total of three rounds.

Free-writing

Many of us have discovered that beginning the class period with free-writing moves students toward believing they are writers. Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, offers the following rules for a free-writing session:

• Set a time limit.
• Keep your hand writing until the time is up. No pausing.
• Pay no attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, neatness, or style.
• If you get off topic or run out of ideas, keep writing anyway.
• If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that.
• When the time is up, look over what you've written, and mark passages that contain ideas or phrases that might be worth keeping or elaborating on at a later time.

You can offer students a topic, calling the session a focused free-write. Students follow the same free-writing rules.

Loop Writing

• Reread your free-writing and underline the sentence or phrase that seems most important or most interesting.
• Put that sentence/ phrase at the top of a clean page.
• Write from that sentence/ phrase to dig deeper. Write to surprise yourself.
• Continue the looping process several times to push for insights or innovative thinking.

Writing Territories

We can assist our students in finding topics for their free-writing by helping them establish writing territories. Nancie Atwell introduced the idea in her book In the Middle. It is simply a long list, which is continually added to, of topics that a student has a personal interest in. I include the time I stood next to a bank robber and my mistake in naming my son in my writing territories.

I prime the pump for students by asking them to compile a class list of things we all know about: birthdays, holidays, the first day of school, weather, etc. The class list is available for all to see and from this list students develop lists of personal topics for writing about later.

Writing Reasons

Kelly Gallagher (2006) offers eight reasons for writing to keep students motivated. He expands on these reasons in his book Teaching Adolescent Writers.

1. Writing is hard, but "hard" is rewarding.
2. Writing helps you sort things out.
3. Writing helps to persuade others.
4. Writing helps to fight oppression.
5. Writing makes you a better reader.
6. Writing makes you smarter.
7. Writing helps you get into and through college.
8. Writing prepares you for the world of work. a

The simplest change we can make in our curriculum to respond to the demands of college ready writing is simply to write more. The above activities promote safety and develop fluency. What has worked in your classroom to get students to write more?

Anderson, Jeff. 2011. Ten Things Every Writer Needs to Know. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Atwell, Nanci. 1998. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gallagher, Kelly. (2006) Teaching Adolescent Writers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Goldberg, Natalie. 2010. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala.

Taking Care of Ourselves

One of the core principles of the National Writing Project (NWP) states that teachers are the best teachers for other teachers, so in writing project sites across the nation, current and former teachers like me are employed to share their expertise. I spent 25 years as a teacher in grades 5-8, and I happily share my experience in narrative and informational writing. My students wrote well in these areas, with many awards and publications to prove it.

But when it comes to argument writing, I am dancing as fast as I can to stay one step ahead of the teachers I mentor. I am part of a grant program that aims to improve the quality of college and career writing; I work with teachers in two schools in southern Missouri.

My own students did some obligatory persuasive writing, but their writing was shaped by my experience with it: Start with a claim and find evidence to back it in order to change someone's mind. Our service work did yield some writing that I now recognize as argument writing. We started with a question and gathered evidence before making a claim. Student writing was fueled by passion but lacked organization and citation of sources.

Now the narrative and informational texts on my shelves are giving way to texts on argument writing, and my learning curve is steep. I spend my days studying how to teach students to thoughtfully consider both sides of an issue. However, I do not have my own classroom to hone my lessons, to practice them in the relative privacy of a closed door classroom. I practice them in other people's classrooms with other people's students, and they watch me stumble.

For two days now, I have been ruminating on how I have failed one of the teachers I work with. She is a first year teacher and missed all the professional development we offered in the first year of the grant. This was my first collaboration with her. She is kind and generous and says she is pleased with the thinking evident in their papers, but I am disappointed with my work.

I developed a mini-unit based on her desire to examine a question central to the book her class is reading, The Giver. "Are group rights or individual rights more important in shaping government policies?" I tried to be faithful to the format and strategies of a mini-unit provided us by the national leadership team, but I was in a hurry to prepare a lesson on argument in order that it could be observed by a researcher tracking the progress of the grant. I was also in a window of time before we were given the clear directive that the mini-units should be delivered exactly as given to us.

We began with Spock's words in his death scene on the Starship Enterprise: "The needs of many outweigh the needs of a few." The students, when called to respond in writing to Spock's words with a reaction of their own, quite naturally began "According to Spock,". (I am horrified to add that I did it, too, even though I know that a work of fiction can't appear as an authoritative source for an argument and even though I cautioned the classroom teacher about it.) This misstep could have been fixed with partner talk to illuminate their responses to his words instead of a response in writing.

The order of the texts can also be easily switched with an article written by two ethicists on the common good following the video clip and next replacing a generalized article about individual rights being trampled with a specific current event text about individual rights (e.g., response to Ebola, assisted suicide, gun rights). Easy fixes and we have a strong mini-unit for use next year. Easy fixes, but I'm still feeling bad.

So now I get it - put a damper on the creativity in order to maintain the integrity of the grant work, but I had to make mistakes along the way to fully understand it. The stakes are high. We have but two years to develop writing instruction that will make a difference in college and career ready writing. (And I thought I had escaped high stakes pressure - the talk of tying teacher evaluation to test scores - by retiring!) Creativity and innovation serve me and my students well in my own classroom, but in my new role as teacher mentor, I must listen and collaborate and support - step back sometimes instead of charging forward.

My first thought is to bristle at the confinement, but once again writing has served its purpose and given me a focus (and a claim!). I have reached the end of this piece with a way of moving forward and a way of retracting my tongue-in-cheek offer to resign. We are engaged in stressful, ground-breaking, important work, and we must address our needs as facilitators. Our writing project had the foresight to hire an expert in adult learning and professional development, and we can lean on her when we waver. Door prizes and laughter, stress busters and tall drinks for us! Our next planning meeting needs a director of fun and a continuing commitment to care for ourselves, too.

What are you doing to take care of yourself?

I Bought More Books

Nobody who knows me will be surprised that I bought more books. I salivate at the thought of the library's semi-annual book sale. I have a routine that I have established over several years: weed my collection to make room for new-to-me books, stand in line for doors to open to the public on the first day of the sale, haul in a rolling cart since I intend to buy a lot of books, head to the education section first, load my cart with $1 books, head to the better book section for some real treasures for which I am willing to pay a few more dollars.

This year I scored big on books that I can use in my current job. I facilitate professional development in two rural schools, so I was thrilled to discover a wide assortment of recently published books that support my work with teachers. I suspect someone retired and generously donated a professional library to the book sale.

And Now I'm Thinking...

The team leaders at the National Writing Project are engaging us in some fascinating online lessons about teaching argument writing. Two recent lessons had us layering texts, messing around with how an idea might change. We participated in the text examination and the writing just as we would have our students do in order to prepare us for what might happen in the classroom. However, I was not prepared for the deeply personal lesson I was to experience.

We began with a quick free-write exploring what we thought about reality TV. My first thought was that I watched very little--I have no idea on what channel the Real Housewives reside, and the desert island survivalists have faced all those challenges without me watching. But then I remembered the years I have faithfully watched Dancing with the Stars and my list expanded to include Master Chef, Design Star, Food Network Star, American Idol--shows that demonstrate anyone, including me, can become a superstar.

I viewed these shows benignly. What's wrong with imagining that I can do anything--design the perfect room, create an amazing dish, sing in public?

But then I began examining texts, and I watched my thinking evolve. In a promo for Dance Moms, I noticed the scowling female adult, dressed in black, fronting the beaming girls and their mothers, all dressed in white. The trophy held by the mean-spirited instructor has been snapped in two, supporting the theme that second place is not acceptable. I read a study conducted by the Girl Scouts showing that girls who watched a greater number of hours of reality TV were meaner, and I began to think about how my favorite reality shows edit their productions to highlight the whiners, the untalented, the participants willing to throw the other contestants under the bus. Master Chef encourages strategizing to take advantage of a contestant's lack of knowledge of a particular culinary style.

In another text, a blogger suggests that reality TV is the new family TV, drawing busy families together in front of the television set. For a brief moment, I agreed with the author and cheered this Ward and June Cleaver family moment, but then I thought of my own home and what gets displaced when I sit with my husband in front of the TV, foolishly thinking these are the moments that hold our marriage together. When we watch TV on the opposite ends of our double reclining couch, we are not eating together, walking together, or talking together. Let's bring back family dinners instead.

Realizing that my TV watching habits were unexamined, I have quit watching TV.  Indiscriminate TV watching is not in keeping with the life of mindfulness I wish to live. After a long period of being away from the piano, I startled myself by playing for extended periods of time. I finished another book and prepared a Greek dish that requires an hour of preparation and numerous cooking pots. I am gleefully considering a long list of other activities for which I now have more time.

For about a year now, I have been thinking and writing about my values and trying to align my practices with them. The majority of television shows, and reality TV shows in particular, do not support collaboration and cooperation, and I am increasingly recognizing the value of those practices. I was raised a pacifist; it's time to pay more than lip service to my upbringing. This year I won't be idolizing any fresh-faced singer, and the stars will dance without me. Messing around with text has sorted itself out after all.

Field Notes 1/24/14

There are no field notes for the debriefing session held yesterday with a group of seven middle school teachers and one administrator. The graduate assistant, who records hours of what is said in mentor lessons and the debriefings that follow, was back in the classroom delivering the lesson so that the host teacher could sit in with the group. We forgot to turn on the mike that would record our session, and we failed to get exit slips. No typist, no recording, no exit slips.

Just as well. This retelling will be quite enough honesty for me. I'm glad I won't have to reread a transcript of the session. These field notes are written following a night of reflection.

I"ll follow three threads here: the opposing filters through which we view these lessons, problems posed by the lack of a common vocabulary, and our delivery system.

Monthly, we step into a host classroom to deliver a lesson; we do our best to tailor the lesson to the host teacher's curriculum. We hire substitute teachers so that the other teachers in our program of professional development can step into the classroom to observe. Observations are followed by a group discussion which is supposed to be guided by some questions we have carefully considered. We are trying to create a model of observations followed by conversation which can be sustained by the school after we leave.

Yesterday's lesson was derailed by a lack of common vocabulary. I was to be in a social studies teacher's classroom. He is a model teacher in that he sees himself as a teacher of writing; he embeds extended writing assignments into his units. He has welcomed our help since he has to read 140 student essays, and he wants to read interesting, engaging lessons. We arranged for me to step in after students had done a first draft of a retelling of the Boston Massacre with a required 25 sentences, ten facts, and five uses of propaganda. Most of the pieces were drafted as first person narratives from the point of view of a Loyalist.

I prepared a lesson designed to help students understand the power of revision to "give them something to say" rather than "having to say something." (Thanks, John Dewey.) Students did three five minute rewrites of their drafts changing the point of view, genre, and audience. The student writing, shared with me on Google.docs, was crisp and entertaining and peppered with the required facts and propaganda. They offered clear possibilities for revision.

However, I had known my lesson would be problematic even before I left for the school. I had gone online to check homework for these students and learned that they had been writing for four days on this project and were required to have been finished the day before I arrived. The host teacher's concept of a first draft was a paper that was finished except for editing, as opposed to my idea of first drafts which are messy first runs. I was stepping into his classroom at the wrong time, confirmed by the student who volunteered the comment, "I wish you were here when we started writing!"

I certainly wish I had picked up on our different stances on first drafts in our back and forth email conversations, but at that point the lesson wasn't entirely off the tracks. A perceptive teacher noticed how much the radical revisions related to RAFT prompts: role (point of view), audience, format (genre), and task (retell the Boston Massacre.) We could have pursued this in debriefing as a way for the content area teachers to adapt this lesson and left the session with some positive vibes.

However, the protocol questions for debriefing were abandoned. In the time for clarifying questions, a content area teacher asked me if I expected her to teach this lesson in her classroom. I think she went on to give reasons why she couldn't. A yes or no question, certainly, but I slipped into awkward defenses and justifications. I was painfully aware that I lack the necessary skill to redirect the conversation. A team builder at the beginning of every debriefing and another look at our protocol are in order. We clearly don't have the model for a classroom teacher to sit where I sat yesterday. I wouldn't want any teacher to feel bruised and battered.

I saw yesterday's lesson through the filter of belief that I should be teaching students directly. I make it a point to leave the classroom with student writing in hand, demonstrating that almost all students have something to say and will say something. There's nothing wrong with that if I were the classroom teacher. But the teachers at yesterday's school have been repeatedly asking me to deliver lessons that speak to the teachers--very specific, targeted lessons that they can use themselves. How ironic! I deliver a lesson in revision, and these teachers ask me to re-vision, look again, at the way I deliver my own lessons.

Our conversation with the principal following the debriefing gives me a vision for a different form of delivery. After all, we are here to make decisions about what innovative professional development delivery looks like. The principal had been considering ideas to get all teachers on board with increasing writing in their classrooms, but he was concerned his current ideas were too rigid. He spoke of requiring his teachers to try one Write to Learn strategy per week and visiting about the implementation of the strategy in the collaborative teams that have been established at his school. He would like to see discussion of what good responses look like. We left the conversation with our offer to provide such strategies weekly, with specific ideas for the teachers we serve. It is possible for us to check homework online so we can offer a RAFT idea to the teacher studying skeletal systems or the Boston Massacre, admit slip ideas for the teacher studying Japanese internment. The mentor lesson could feature a teacher using one of the strategies, the debriefing could focus on the implementation of the strategies.

It's not easy to move from classroom teacher mode to thinking partner mode. It is not easy to change my concept of professional development from one of the expert drops in one time to one of I"m here to listen to you. I am extremely grateful that the team is bringing our trainer back on board. I began this blog post thinking that I had failed the program, but am a little gentler on myself here at its close. I'm making missteps, but I'm paying attention.

Zentangling Will Heal Me

And today, another very personal post as I try to figure out how I subverted my hopes of blissful retirement and stepped into another job where I work far too much. I currently have the perfect job for which I'm well suited, but I still haven't learned to set boundaries for my work hours. I was up at five again this morning to start writing and expect to be on the job most of the day when I am only supposed to be working part-time.

Previously, my extended working hours as a Middle School English teacher gave me a place to hide from a family member's alcoholism. But he is in recovery now, and my retirement poem speaks of wanting to restore a marriage, spoil a grandchild, and plant gardens. I am afraid I am becoming increasingly unavailable, consumed by another job I find fascinating.

There is most certainly a happy balance; I've seen it in the lives of women I admire. In the past, writing has served me well in helping me arrive at solutions. Let's see what happens here.

I am paid by the job. I deliver professional development (PD) sessions and demonstrate lessons in the classroom, for which I am paid enough that I am afforded some bragging rights. But we have missed some PD sessions due to inclement weather; my co-facilitator and I were instructed to make up those sessions by offering to meet individually with the teachers we serve. These instructions opened the floodgates of possibilities since I had already been moving in the direction of individual planning conferences with teachers we serve.

(I wrote a long list here, but it doesn't serve any useful purpose except make me tired!)

I'm pretty certain that although accolades for our work are nice, I am not doing this for pats on the back. I have been paying attention to the adrenaline rush I get from discovering something new. That's what I'm addicted to. I'm equally addicted to zentangling, the art of meditative doodling and would like to pursue it further, but I'm caught in the quagmire of having over-committed to my teachers. I am hoping that detailing the commitments will allow me to look at them as a whole, following through on all of the current commitments, but offering a glimpse of what I can commit to with ease.

It won't be easy for me to let go of workaholism. You should see have seen my father, who measured his worth by his accomplishments achieved through unending labor. I have spent a lot of time writing about how his measure of success has shaped my life in ways that make me feel deeply flawed.

I am asking my primary reader of this blog post to be the lovely woman who trained us to deliver world class professional development. We meet with her today; I am anxious for her wisdom and counsel.

Oh, I am weary! I think a session of Zentangling will do me a world of good!