What is required for better answers?

Recently I delivered a less than perfect lesson in a professional development session. It was developed in response to teachers who wanted better answers from students on constructed response prompts.  My first mistake was trying to hurriedly condense an entire book (Better Answers) into an hour presentation. Second mistake, I used the background story and prompt supplied by the book; it was intended for elementary students. I did not take the time to find content and prompt suitable for the upper grades that I serve.

And my biggest error--I failed to convey how much my thinking on the topic of better answers had developed and moved past the original author. With a little prodding from my director and a lot of intense study, I came to believe that a mini-argument could be made in response to a test prompt. In other words, I extended the author's Better Answer structure of introduction, details, and conclusion to include claim, evidence, and warrants. I did not make this case with the participants. I know that when I practiced writing a prompt response with a mini-argument structure, I did not stop with the details. I made a claim that was pushed forward by the details/evidence, moving a step further in my thinking.

I have just returned from the NCTE (English teachers) convention in Boston. I purchased the book Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay, met the author and listened to her presentation, and read the book on the plane ride home. It is clear to me now that I was offering just another formula for responding to constructed response prompts, a clear departure from my usual practice of encouraging teachers to offer structure but steer away from formula. "...reliance on formula limits students' thinking and focuses their attention primarily on the structure of their essay rather than on what message they are trying to convey" (Campbell and Latimer 2012, 93).

I have revised my thinking. I now believe that students who are well-versed in writing an argument can apply the same thinking to short answer constructed response prompts. Examine the evidence in the text, compose a claim, and supply the warrant to tie evidence and claim together. No cute sandwich formula needed. Unfortunately, the sandwich formula offered a quick solution to improved response on test questions when there is no quick solution. I am withdrawing from the notion that there is such a thing as a one hour session which will move students toward better answers; the notion seems audacious to me now. 

What then does it take to move students toward better answers? Campbell and Latimer say it takes lots of previous writing in support of thinking before they encounter test prompts. "Asking students to write during reading provides a low-stakes forum for strengthening their abilities to analyze what they read, to identify and develop their own opinions about what is important in a text, and to discuss the text with genuine understanding and curiosity" (61). They go on to suggest that low-stakes writing also offers teachers an additional formative assessment tool.

I will be spending time rethinking how I offer help to teachers who would like students to respond in depth to their prompts. It will require a dismantling of the PowerPoint I presented and a shift toward low-stakes writing ideas. In the end, perhaps the greatest help I can offer is my modeling of the reflection after a finished lesson. Better thinking creates better answers.

Campbell, Kimberly Hill and Kristi Latimer. 2012. Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse.
Cole, Ardith Davis. 2010. Better Answers: Written Performance that Looks Good and Sounds Smart. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse.

Watching Myself Grow

Last week I spent some time in a school delivering professional development. For two days I taught lessons, on Wednesday in a 6th grade classroom and on Friday in a 7th grade classroom. I taught in front of a dozen teachers, two principals, an assistant superintendent, and about 160 students. On Thursday, I played host to visiting teachers while my colleague Heather taught a lesson in high school. I am feeling a little raw around the edges.

There is no reason for me to feel battered and bruised. Heather and I undergo a debriefing protocol that includes norms cautioning the teachers to start with positive remarks and remain focused on the lesson, not the teacher. The teachers were kind, and their constructive criticisms were spot on. The host teacher in the 7th grade classroom gave me an easy method to determine if students had understood the lesson (thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down to indicate degree of understanding). I was in total agreement that my sloppy method of asking what they had found successful and confusing seemed to be an afterthought in my lesson. The debriefing conversations were interesting and focused and served the purpose of refining my lessons and helping the teachers who had observed me to adapt the lessons for their own purposes.

So why the self-doubt? I didn't experience a love fest, and I had been setting myself up for one. We are charting new territory in delivering professional development (PD), and I, being a retired teacher and having achieved some success in the classroom, was hired to be one of the two teacher facilitators. We are receiving some outstanding training ourselves so I set out to deliver only the finest lessons and world-class PD. I spent hours anticipating the needs of the teachers, embedding strategies into the lessons, and considering an engaging delivery. I wanted to offer the school something special; indeed, I thought I had to.

It turns out that the most significant contribution was to myself. And I believe I can make the case that this is what our method of delivery is all about. We are all teacher leaders. In a few months, their teachers will be conducting the lessons with other teachers observing and then they will sit in the very seat I sat in for debriefing. I am a model for what the powerful experience of debriefing can deliver--a time and a method for reflection on classroom practices.

Sure, I got kind and supportive comments, but even more important were the insights I gained for myself because I was placed in a position where I had to observe myself and my lesson. I was very conscious of the immediate changes I had to make because I hadn't considered that the goofy narratives 7th graders tend to write don't readily adapt to expository writing. (Can a man-eating donut lend itself to an informative lesson? Only if you have the insight to change it to "man eating a donut" and write a treatise on obesity.) I was thrilled to realize in my fourth coverage of the lesson that I always insert narrative into my own writing of expository pieces which confirmed my belief that if students develop informational pieces from their narratives, their pieces will be more interesting to read. Finally, my most important assertion for teachers was that we should all be modeling our messy first drafts in front of students instead of only sharing our finished pieces. It took an act of courage for me to develop and deliver a lesson that required cold writing on my part, but I was delighted when I discovered I could think in front of students and didn't have to do all my thinking after class.

I might not always deliver a stellar lesson, and I am inching toward giving myself permission to not demand it of myself. Instead, the most important thing I may be offering teachers is my observation of how the process of teacher reflection works. I will continue to observe how I change as a teacher and watch myself grow.

Note: The lessons I delivered were adapted from Jeff Anderson in Everyday Editing and Gretchen Bernabei and Dottie Hall in The Story of My Thinking.

Help! There's Only One of Me!

I am currently offering professional development to teachers. At a session last Friday, we broke into small groups to discuss quotes about classroom practices such as using mentor text and teaching argument writing. The discussions were lively and the feedback forms showed that participants liked the small group strategy we employed, with the three facilitators each being discussion leaders. However, one participant left us a question in the parking lot, a poster where questions written on Post-its can be "parked" so the questions don't meander around in your brain.

The question asked how can the activity be duplicated in a classroom where there is only one facilitator, the teacher? My response--

There are ways to nurture students so they can also become facilitators of small group discussions. You might begin by modeling a small group discussion using the fishbowl strategy, in which an inner circle is surrounded by an outer circle consisting of the rest of the class. (You might participate in the inner circle during the earliest discussions, and, as students become more comfortable, you move to the outer circle.) The inner circle engages in discussion while the outer circle observes, takes notes, and, following the discussion, asks questions of the inner group. There are guidelines for the discussion including taking turns and only allowing statements that can be supported, and there are guidelines for the observation. Follow the link for complete explanations.

Assigning some of Kagan's cooperative roles (found on pp. 14:10-14:12, with a paragraph about team discussions on 14:12) is a remedy to a discussion in which one or two students do most of the talking. Assign a Gatekeeper who makes sure all participate and a Taskmaster who makes sure the discussion stays on topic. Additional roles could include Recorder, Reporter, and Encourager. The work of the recorders and reporters can be instrumental in determining the quality of the small group discussions.

We encourage teachers to write along with students, and so, too, we invite them to participate in small groups, rotating on a schedule that works for them. Students will learn to function without the constant presence of the teacher if they can count on an occasional, but regular, presence.

Take the risk of training students to be facilitators, and you'll discover the rewards of a fully-engaged classroom with students who are learning to share your passion for your subject.

Kagan, Spencer. Cooperative Learning. San Clemente, CA: Resources for Teachers, Inc., 1994. Print.

Sterling, Shirley, and Laura Tohe. "Teaching Strategies: Fishbowl." Annenberg Learner. Teaching Multicultural Literature, n.d. Web. 4 Sep 2013. 

Sure, You Can Study Me

When I resigned my position as a middle school English teacher, I told people I quit just to see what would happen next. I now offer professional development (PD) to teachers. It's supposed to be a part-time job, but I can't quit after the allotted twenty hours because this job feeds into my passion for creating--lesson plans, webpages, blog posts, book reviews...

There are perks. I quip that I can take a bathroom break whenever I wish, and I don't have to let a pile of ungraded papers dictate the time I go to bed. But I do entertain the thought that I shouldn't have quit a job that I was good at and I was comfortable in.

I accepted my current job because I wanted to discover what I was capable of if I pushed myself into unfamiliar territory. At the beginning, I did not think I had the skills to offer high-quality professional development, and I was fearful of being a dreadful presenter. I'll never forget the female who came dressed in overalls to deliver a topic related to brain-based research, and I feared that my work would be held in as little regard as I held hers. However, even though I thought excellent presenters were born that way, I hoped that I could learn to be a confident facilitator of learning.

It was a revelation to discover that there is professional development to train a teacher to deliver professional development. My co-facilitators and I are being trained by an experienced trainer. We now carefully script our PD sessions, working out times and transitions, to seamlessly deliver world class professional development. I have found the strategies so purposeful and effective that I apply them to a Sunday afternoon poetry class I offer to the women of Al-anon.

That confidence, however, didn't readily transfer to my new work. I still faced the kickoff event of PD, even though it was just an hour, with trepidation. My partners seemed to converse more easily, and I was sure they didn't have to rehearse as much as I did. Heather falls into ready conversation with new people, and I hesitate to introduce myself.

I survived the event. My biggest mistakes were revealed in the field notes. I should have embedded some time during the team builder to actually get to know one another better, and I struggled with time management at the end. However, I felt pretty good until the debriefing two days later when my partner made a comment to the tune of "It was good but we should work on being more transparent." I had little idea of what she meant, but I didn't ask for any clarification. I just went into defensive mode which means I shut down and went home to cry about it later.

I'm being painfully honest because I've said yes to a research question posed by our co-director. How does a facilitator of adult learning grow professionally? What are her attitudinal changes? What are the activities that lead to such changes? I am interested myself. I'm of retirement age. I could be planting gardens and sewing aprons, but I choose to reinvent myself. What is it going to look like?

I did cry, and I wrote a lot. I wrote to acknowledge that Heather and I have some organizational differences that lead me to conclude we come from separate planets, but I will have to learn how to value the differences. In order to process what she is thinking, Heather will talk at length around and about a topic while I remain silent until I have an idea. Then, I am afraid, I must appear to be impatient and overbearing when I spout my idea. Heather uses meeting time as a shared thinking time, and I prefer to do my thinking at home. I want to get immediately to business. I'd like to learn to relax and enjoy the community building of a shared meeting time.

With my co-facilitator, I have the opportunity to practice patience and to learn to affirm others in such a way that they will feel I am filling their buckets rather than making a withdrawal. I have a lot to learn. I am my own research project. Let the study begin.

A Peter Elbow Prompt: A Time When the Writing Went Well

I'm co-facilitating a group of twenty wonderful teachers who have come together in a Writing Project Summer Institute. We're using the Peter Elbow book Writing Without Teachers as our common text and using some of his prompts to guide our daily writing. Today's prompt was "Write about a time when writing went particularly well or badly. What was the topic, and who was the audience? Try to tell in detail how you went about writing and what happened. What can  you learn from this example?"

Back when I was a young wife, I did some freelance writing. My steadiest gig was writing a newspaper column about living simply; I wrote pieces about a woman who milked a single cow for the family's needs, a family who had no TV, how to shop for Christmas in the local town, and so on. I had a small following of devoted readers, but I did not consider myself a writer.

When my children got older, I returned to the classroom. I was a teacher who wrote occasionally with her students. It took my own experience in a Summer Institute to convince me I was a writer, and after the summer of 2009, I started identifying myself as a writer who teaches.

I quite vividly recall the evening when I decided I could write. I had just finished some required reading about writing episodic fiction. I have no talent for writing fiction, but I was interested in telling my story. My life certainly felt like fodder for a made for television movie--husband falls for another woman and wants to love us both. I couldn't sustain a long running narrative, but the idea of writing episodes appealed to me, so I curled up on the couch--my favorite place to write--and started writing with the purpose of discovering why I was attracted to alcoholics. Since I was raised in a non-drinking home, I thought that writing the story of meeting and marrying men who disappointed me would offer me insight.

I could not tell the story in prose; instead, writing my story in compressed lines that fell on the page like poetry came more readily to me. What emerged on the page was a poem that recounted what my father had said about the men who spent time in the local tavern. And it occurred to me that these men who could relax in the afternoon offered a stark, and appealing, contrast to my workaholic father.

I was pleased with the first poem and went on to write many others during the four weeks of the Institute. In the safety of our group, I shared poems about events of which I had never spoken and felt the power of writing as an agent of healing. The director of the Writing Project was kind enough to encourage me and helped me get the attention of the director of creative writing on campus. He read my work and called me witty.

Witty! That word was so far removed from any words I would have used to describe myself: calm, organized, trustworthy, reliable, steady. Witty opened the possibility that I could imagine myself as someone who was creative and joyful--qualities I had longed to claim as my own.

I have come a long ways from the meek and under-developed poems I wrote four years ago. Now my poems have sharper edges. I make no apologies for writing about living with an alcoholic. My husband struggles to maintain his sobriety and works his own program, and I have found that writing poems enhances my own understanding of the Twelve Steps. (My sponsor is an English professor and requires that I write my way through the Al-anon program.) I have shared my poems in the safety of another small group of women who study the Twelve Steps together. With their encouragement, I am considering writing a book with the working title A Poet Walks Through the Twelve Steps.

Today I shared a poem with my writing partner. She responded with "Wow!" Enough said. I'll keep writing.

Musings on Hewett and the Teaching of Writing

There were two spots in Beth Hewett's The Online Writing Conference that were so significant to me I marked them with Post-its in addition to highlighting the passages. The passages prompted me to wish for a do-over in my own classroom--things about which I had the very best intentions, but which, according to Hewett, I should have considered more carefully.

Hewett gives teachers credit for doing an increasing amount of writing with students, but she also writes, "However, when it comes to students having the opportunity to view the actual unrehearsed act of writing at the basic, early draft stage, I suspect that it is rare for instructors to do much sharing" (65). I did quite a bit of showing my students my own writing, even showing them all the cross-outs and revisions I made, but I generally showed them a final product. I didn't let my students actually watch me write because I was afraid of writer's block and of doing less than my best. And that is exactly what my students should have been doing--observe a writer falter and pause and look for the write word or watch a writer pen something that stinks. What a missed opportunity!

Certainly once I had a computer and projector available to me it would have been very easy for students to give me several topics about which to write, and they could have observed me struggle. For it's very likely I would have struggled; I am not very good at off the cuff writing. I like to take the time to think, which is why I practiced the pieces I required of students at home.

Hewett speaks of direct and indirect speech on pages 106-108. She advises teachers to avoid indirect instructions-- "because they [teachers] communicated their 'commands' indirectly, students considered them to be suggestions at best and felt free to disregard them" (108). I used indirect speech in my face to face conferences, frequently asking "What would happen if..." or "Have you considered..." Students almost always accepted these queries as something they should try, but I am well aware that with my eyes and body language I was communicating that their piece held great promise and would only become better if they were willing to consider something they hadn't thought of before.

After reading Hewett, I understand that without body language an indirect statement can be ignored. The online writing teacher should aim for directness and explicitness.

Hewett, Beth L. The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2010.       Print.

Authenticity

Recently I met with a team of educators responsible for implementing a grant for improving middle and high school teachers' practice in the teaching of academic writing. We will accomplish that by a) increasing the amount of time spent on writing and the number of extended writing assignments, b) increasing the use of research-based instructional strategies, c) increasing the use of writing to learn strategies, and d) improving the quality of writing assignments. I've decided to distill that into "more writing, based on research, for authentic audience and authentic purpose." I agree with Regie Routman who writes, "Writing for a real audience (not just the teacher) is one of the best ways to get quality writing" (145). I, too, was convinced when I saw "the quality of students' work and what was possible when students wrote for meaningful purposes and real audiences" (145).

The DARE essay is a rite of passage for fifth graders across the country. It can easily fall into a rehashing of statistics from the DARE book. A colleague says the DARE essays of her students were lifeless while the purposeful writing they did was alive. "When students are focused on constructing paragraphs and sentences to comply with a program or format, they may learn to write to a standard, but we often lose the voice of the writer in the process" (146).

Luckily, I had a DARE officer who encouraged me when I asked to break free of the prescribed formula found in the exercise book. The persuasion of the DARE piece can be embedded in many different genres. I encouraged poetry, memoirs (some of them heart-breaking), letters begging a loved one to quit addictive behavior, and skits with fairy tale characters adversely affected by alcohol and drugs (the Big Bad Wolf couldn't blow a house down because he smoked and the Gingerbread Man couldn't run fast enough to get away.) The high school drama department performed some of the best pieces for DARE graduation which meant that more students were recognized than just the overall classroom winners.

Our annual letters from Santa project was another project giving student writers authentic audience and purpose. The first grade teachers sent their students' letters to Santa to us, and then we wrote responses to them. Our letters were rich with humor and carefully selected words. The high school got involved as well because they typed all the letters with matching font so our handwriting wouldn't let children wonder if there was more than one Santa.

Our service projects also were authentic writing projects. My students decided having an extra supervisory adult on board school buses would decrease bullying and wrote to the governor with their recommendation. They successfully lobbied the principal to allow students to carry water bottles to class.

Can I craft online writing projects with as much authenticity and purpose? I have written an online assignment with personal value to me--exploring where my beliefs come from and developing that into a podcast--but much of  the authentic work in the face to face classroom was charged with a spirit of collaboration. How do I bring that to an online writing course?

I will have to think carefully about how to use shared documents, forums, and assignments to expand the place writing has as a purposeful activity, with the power to "be the change." How have you brought purpose and authenticity to an online writing course?

Routman, Regie. Writing Essentials. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005. Print.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Only the journey matters..."

"What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?" (Routman 82). I would sing in public, play the piano for my son's wedding, publish a book of poems, learn Latin dances, and cultivate huge gardens. I can say all that, but still the possibility of failure is attached to the task and I hesitate to try. With the chance of failure inherent in everything we do, I reframe the question: "What would you attempt if you knew it was okay to fail?" My culinary attempts aren't always deserving of a place in a cookbook, but at my house it's okay to fail knowing that my husband will graciously eat anything. So I keep trying and take enough pride in my cooking to blog about it.

My acupuncturist heard a lot from me in the hours I spent being needled on his table. He knew that I was frustrated with teaching and, in particular, a poetry writing class I was taking. I felt that my work wasn't up to the quality of the more experienced writers in the class. Knowing that I was a perfectionist and accustomed to good grades, he proposed the related questions, "What if you gave yourself permission to fail? What risks would you take?"

I started writing poetry with more abandon and took risks because I was writing out of my own need with myself as audience. (And I didn't fail the class since I was writing for authentic purpose and audience.) I have increasingly been willing to take risks--quitting my job being one of the bigger ones--and the rewards have been more joy and satisfaction.

So what do my ramblings have to do with our students? We need to give them permission to fail and encourage them to write so much that they can indeed expect some less than perfect pieces of writing. We can't expect to read everything they write anyway. "If you're reading everything your students write, they're not writing enough" (Routman 65). We can structure our assignments so students can submit their best work for the grading period as opposed to requiring that they submit for a grade all assignments they've tried. (If you wish, give participation points for having tried the exercise.)

It's time to celebrate risk-taking in our classrooms as a way to promote excellence. I've substituted "writer" for "photographer" in a Harry Callahan quote to make it apply to the English teacher's classroom: "To be a writer, one must write. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of writing. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an writer. Only the journey matters..."

Routman, Regie. Writing Essentials. Portsmouth,NH: Heinemann, 2005. Print.

Ready to Get Messy?

I taught myself a new skill this week and it was messy. I wanted to create a promotional video for our upcoming talent show, but I hadn't planned ahead far enough to capture some really great pictures. All I had available to me was the audition video created with a Flip camera, shot by some 8th graders. It served the purpose of helping us select performers for our event, but it wasn't the quality needed to be a stand alone promotional video. So I spent a day learning how to create a finished product. I got messy, and here's my desktop to prove it. The process was exhilarating overall, and the product was satisfying. Am I willing to let my students be as messy?

Our community talent show is in its third year of making money for projects that serve students in the school. As adviser to the Junior National Honor Society, the sponsoring group, I am in charge of the event. With my current break from classroom duties, I've had some additional time to add digital tools to make the job easier. I maintain a wiki for the group, applications and ticket sales are online courtesy of GoogleDocs forms, and audition times were scheduled online with Doodle.  I created a MovieMaker video to solicit entries in the talent show.


I was familiar with MovieMaker. I staged the pictures with two willing NJHS members and used PicMonkey to make the photos black and white for a unified look. It was only my second try at adding narration, but I was not learning something entirely new. The only thing that I had to learn for this video was how to upload to YouTube so it could be shared easily.

The movie I created from the audition films required me to learn two things: how to capture still pictures  from the video and how to clip audio files from the videos. I resorted to the snipping tool to capture pictures--not completely satisfying because the severely cropped pictures ended up with a lot of black space in the MovieMaker frames. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if we had taken still pictures the night of auditions.

I got so frustrated with the audio portion that my husband wisely avoided me while I googled for help.  When I read that audio can't be separated from video, I was ready to quit. In the end, what worked was JUST MESSING AROUND! I dragged the entire video to the audio track and then shortened and faded the audio on the track.

It's had 39 views in the day that it's been up, and I believe I have viewed it at least that many times just out of a sense of accomplishment. 

When speaking about people who make things, Mark Frauenfelder says, "Most people loathe failing so much they avoid trying things that require pushing past their current abilities. It's no coincidence that many of my favorite DIYers either dropped out of or never attended college. A few even dropped out of high school. Maybe they were lucky to have escaped the educational system; in school, mistakes result in punishment in the form of poor grades. Because we've been trained to believe that mistakes must be avoided, many of us don't want to attempt to make or fix things, or we quit soon after we start, because our initial attempts end in failure" (20).

The day I spent learning to make a one minute movie was exhausting and messy. I have yet to order the chaos on my desk, but I am certain that I will make more attempts because the result was so satisfying. I was present when a group of high-school students watched the piece, and there was an audible "Oh" when the cute preschooler appears. Precisely the reaction I was hoping for--people will come to the show to watch cute kids!

I prefer order. What does my classroom look like if I let my students get as messy as I did?

Frauenfelder, Mark. Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-it-yourself. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011.

Changing a Culture of Violence with Digital Writing

Last year, some of the teachers at my school spent a Saturday learning how to deal with intruders, and I returned to school on Monday to discover that the training had been very realistic. The high school science teacher thought he had a foolproof hiding place in the ceiling of my classroom, but the intruder flushed him out along with a few ceiling tiles. I thought I had "dodged the bullet" of training, but as a result of the Newtown shootings, intruder training may very well become mandatory along with gun safety classes for first graders.

I am a pacifist and should I be required to participate in such drills, I would hope to have at the ready some non-aggressive ways to deal with violence and a persuasive argument to get opted out of the training. I have wanted to craft a response to the numerous Second Amendment posts, but I have never felt sufficiently eloquent--or bold. I waited, hoping that someone would speak for me.

Poka Laenui, executive director of the Wai'anae Coast Community Mental Health Center, has said what I wanted to say.  The author of  "Violence, Guns, and Deep Cultures" says we choose to focus on what is different about the perpetrator of violence and we then go on to exclude that person or persons. Laenui blames our culture of "domination, individualism, and exclusion--or DIE" for tragic events like the shootings at Sandy Hook. Whereas others would counter violence with a focus on treatment for autism and other mental illness, Laenui says our focus should be much broader.

"The very deep culture of DIE itself must be replaced with...a culture of inclusion, loving, caring and sharing...We would find group and individual achievements and excellence praised, rather than superiority or domination. Tests would be taken by groups helping one another get to the correct answers, rather than separating children and ranking one higher or smarter than the other after the tests."

Laenui would certainly agree with Richardson who writes, "Learning has traditionally assumed a winner-take-all competitive form rather than a cooperative form...Networked learning, in contrast, is committed to a vision of the social that stresses cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit, and social engagement. The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine" (133).

We watched the involvement of social networking in the Arab Spring uprising, and we know the power of digital writing to create change. Can we imagine our use of digital literacy as a factor in moving our own culture away from violence?

Laenui, Poka. "Violence, Guns, and Deep Cultures." Yes! Spring 2013: 11.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2010


 

Teacher Isolation in the Digital Age

When I want to know something about technology, I don't pick the brains of my colleagues in Fair Grove even though my school is taking some giant leaps into the digital age. Wi-fi is available, there's an active technology committee, the talk is that every student in high school will get an iPad, and every classroom has a projector. But there's an RCET workshop taking place at the school on Tuesday at which an elementary teacher will speak about setting up a classroom blog, and I sincerely doubt that she knows much about my experience with blogging. I know that she has a lot of talent when it comes to technology, but other than an RCET class I took from her, I never visited with her to ask her for help. There is a go-to person I can count on, but she is employed part time and stretched thin to help the teachers in the entire district.  It ends up that I frequently look for help outside the school when I suspect there's a world of knowledge available right in the district.

So why don't we heed the prophet in our own land? There's nothing sinister going on. I may suspect that Joe in the high school has achieved computer geekdom and I know he prides himself on using technology in the classroom, but I don't have the time to engage him in a sit-down conversation. And my notion of what he does in his classroom is so vague, I wouldn't know how to begin a conversation. "Hey, Joe, what do you do that I can take to my classroom?" lacks focus; only pure luck would yield a useful answer. We're so busy that when I do speak with him, it's about our shared chess club sponsorship and upcoming tournaments or the slogan on a chess t-shirt. 

I've learned a lot in some chance conversations at conferences while waiting for the next speaker or event--no students or lesson plans to disturb us. I don't recall how the conversation started, but I do remember learning a lot about wikis from Kyle Wallace at a conference on campus. I immediately went home and put his suggestions to use.

So I want to know what my colleagues in my own school know--how our pooled knowledge can advance what we're doing individually. The solution seems pretty straight-forward and only occurred to me as I was writing this blog. I propose a Yellow Pages of in-house tech experts: I know how to set up a classroom blog to use as a class portal; Mark can do some wizardry with a wireless mouse; Heather has expertise in classroom publishing. This directory could be supported by a discussion board where we post our tech questions and everyone benefits from the answers.

Richardson says "a great entry point for Weblog use is to build a class portal to communicate information about my class and to archive course materials" (21). That's what I can offer as my expertise. I also was able to use the class blog as an effective e-portfolio for student work, but I would have benefited from someone's knowledge about tagging and labeling to make it even more useful. Another question I would pose to my colleagues is how to deepen the collaborative conversations that a blog can make possible. "...the Read/Write Web opens up all sorts of new possibilities for students to learn from each other..." (Richardson 23). We lacked the purposeful commenting that could have pushed our writing further.

Technology is not the only area where teachers work in isolation--sometimes it feels like my individual classroom is a world unto itself--but it's the area where I feel most adrift. Send in the lifeboats.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2010

Creating an Online Persona

Because I’ve deliberately taken some time off for reflection and reinvention, I’m called to a deeper examination of my teaching style. What worked? Where would I like a do-over?

If you asked me the first thing I’d like to make amends for, I’d say my teaching persona as it relates to making connections with students. I’m not the warm and fuzzy type and not a likely candidate for a degree in elementary education, but at the time I got my degree, I didn’t have the imagination to try anything else. Like many other women my age in rural Iowa, I was foreordained to be a farm wife and the teaching degree was a back-up plan. Well, my marriage failed, and I had to go to work, a fifth grade teacher.

Keep in mind that I was named my school’s Teacher of the Year in the third year of the award and I was also Missouri’s DARE educator of the year, so I’m no slouch as a teacher, but I never felt close to my students. Imagine my sense of failure when I read this statement by Regie Routman: “We can and must bond with them all. This is not a choice but a duty and responsibility.” (2003 p.12) Wow! A duty! She includes a list of what bonding looks like and I felt like I could only give tepid answers to her questions. Well, I kind of celebrated them; I kind of knew their interests.

So I wasn’t a rah-rah cheerleader, but I did connect with students through their writing. When our fifth grade departmentalized and the job of English teacher fell to me, I found my niche. Many a student will say I helped them believe they were writers; I felt close to a student when I sat down with him or her for a writing conference.

I’ve been a facilitator for Ozarks Writing Project for the past two years, working with teachers to make them believe they are writers. A blog posting by one of the participants made me come to value what I could offer people. He wrote, “She listens. Plain and simple. Perhaps this is the key reason that her feedback is always helpful, always purposeful, and always well-received (even if it's semi-corrective).”

I’m reserved and here was someone who valued that in me. I think this kind of connection through listening and facilitating is transferable to an online writing class.

Scott Warnock writes, “…the personality we adopt to communicate textually in the electronic realm might differ from the way we customarily think of ourselves. As writing teachers, this difference can be a good thing and can help us reconceptualize ourselves.” (2009 p. 2) Imagining myself as someone whose reflective style is a suitable fit for an online writing course is indeed a good thing.

Warnock says it’s worth spending time to consider your online voice (3). Here again, I am fortunate to be taking some time off and spending my time writing online in a number of spaces: a personal blog, a professional blog, a blog and wiki for student use, Blackboard and a wiki for teachers, a wiki connected to the school website, and Facebook pages for service groups—each reaching a different audience and calling for a slightly different voice.

References

Routman, Regie. Reading Essentials. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers English, 2009.