What can I possibly say to make this class understand?  What can I show them?  What can we do so that they “get it?”

We spend a lot of time asking these kinds of questions–searching for that breakthrough moment, the key that will open (for the class) the door to understanding.

Of course, it almost never works that way.

Lessons, guided practice, presentations, project based learning activities– all these succeed (or not) one student at a time.  We plant the the seeds, and slowly, they take root and grow–one at a time.

Students demonstrate growth one at a time.  One at a time, seals are broken and understanding seeps in. Doors open and light bulbs turn on, sure, but rarely all at once–usually (often painfully) one. . . . at . . . a . . . time.

True, we are moving mountains.  But if you’re showing up each day expecting the earth to shift under your feet–it’s going to be a long year.  Yes, there are times to focus on the mountain, but the real progress is being made with the stones at your feet–one at a time.

One student at a time doesn’t grab the headlines.  But it’s the way this works.  Success and failure.  Excellence and mediocrite.  We are winning or we are losing.  And it’s all happening one student at a time.

Related posts:

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2. Motivation and learning: practical teaching tips for block schedules, brain-based learning, multiple intelligences, improved student motivation, increased achievement.
3. Listen up! Boys and girls hear, read, learn differently

Good writing is good thinking.

Well written is well thought out–which is to say that it’s well planned, well organized, speaks to an audience, has a clear and unique voice and just the right words strung together in just the right way to have just the desired effect.

One of the challenges in teaching writing is helping students to internalize what all that actually looks like.  Change one variable–your audience, your purpose, the topic, even the media–and your target shifts.  Writing is a complex task requiring the management of multiple variables, strategies, and processes.

A blank page means anything is possible.  As writing teachers, we need to narrow that down a bit–quite a bit.

Teaching Writing on the Ground

The bottom line, of course, is that we want our students to become better writers.  As we get closer to the actual meat and potatoes of the process (instruction and assessment), the choices we need to make, though many, become clearer:

• What type of writing are we going to focus on (this time)?
• What media will we be using?
• Who is our intended audience?
• What is the prompt?
• Is this something that involves research?
• What are the elements we want to see in the piece?
• How often will students “produce.”
• How will I provide timely and meaningful feedback?

These are just a sampling of the “instructional design” choices a teacher has to make.  And they’re vitally important, because you always want to get the most bang for your buck.  You always want to design the most effective instructional plan.  And then, when it’s all said and done, somehow, you always want to cement new learning with some type of reinforcement–so that it sticks.

That’s what I want to show you today: a way to pour cement so that we might firm up the foundation of new learning you’ve established in your instruction.

Relevance: The Rubber on the Road

At this stage in my development, I’d have to argue that good writing instruction includes what I’ll call a range of relevance.  What I mean is, from a student’s perspective, some assignments (read practice) are more real and some less real.  In other words, we aren’t publishing everything.  We aren’t actually sending every letter, or submitting every opinion piece to our local paper–nor do we want too.

To write and share our ideas with a real audience, for a real purpose, is what we’re working toward. It’s the game day for which we’ve been preparing.

So, what that means is: We Need Game Days!

And I would argue that, once we’ve reached a certain level of writing–we need them as often as we can get them.  There is a reason writing is such a valuable skill.  And it’s not to impress a teacher.

So how do we do that?  How do we consistently create unique, meaningful, relevant writing opportunities for individual students–without completely losing our minds?  Because, let’s be honest–this can be a lot of work.

I would argue. . . let them argue.  I’ve written about this before.

Most often, the most relevant writing tasks are not graded assignments, but opportunities that spontaneously present themselves–you just need to be able to recognize them.  How?  Here’s a tip: They almost always center around something a student wants (or does not want).

Like:

• A detention
• A field trip
• A grade
• A due date (for an assignment)
• An assignment
• A point or points on a particular test, quiz, project, or assignment
• The ability to choose (a partner, an assignment, a due date, some element of a project)
• The right/privilege to eat or drink or chew gum in class
• The right/privilege to listen to music
• To go outside
• The list goes on and on!

The key here is that students MUST have the ability to actually create change with their writing. I strongly caution teachers against merely pretending that students have some control.  This is not a semi-relevant prompt in which only the problem is real.  

Do that–only go half way–and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.  Part of the opportunity here is to show students the very real power of quality writing.  And therein lies the second key. The student must produce quality writing in whatever form and at whatever level of expectation you’ve already established.

As writing teachers, we know we have a problem when it comes to skill transfer.  Students will write well in a Language Arts, English, or Writing class–but ask them to produce a quality lab summary for Science and it all falls apart.

The piece itself–or I should say, the reason for the piece–may have nothing to do with your class.  In short, we are demanding transfer of skills.  But, again, in order to pull this off, quality must be king.

I’ll close here with an example.

At the beginning of the year, we supply each of our Middle School students with a planner. Recently, a girl in my class came to me with a request.  She’d lost her planner, and she knew I had a spare.

Initially, her approach was to make a verbal plea.  Bingo. This was my chance to create an opportunity for her to reinforce what she’d already learned about persuasive writing.

I told her that I would consider giving her my extra planner if she was able to produce a persuasive essay convincing me to to do so.

Below, is her actual handwritten essay (and below that, because it might be hard to read, I’ve supplied a typed version).

Please keep in mind that I offer this up, not so much as an example of quality (there’s plenty of room for improvement here as you will see), but as just one example of an almost limitless number of simple, yet very relevant opportunities to reinforce the elements of quality writing that you’ve established in your instruction.

I think it’s a great supplement to an already rigorous instructional plan.  And on top of that, it’s always fun to read what students will create when it really counts.

 I pledge, yup that’s right, pledge to be a more organized student.  For years I have been a disorganized student and the messiness has to stop.  I can’t stress this enough.  I can’t be a well organized student without a well organized assignment notebook.  And that is why I strongly believe that I should have the nice new neat assignment notebook kept in your planning page box.

Let’s think about this.  As a teacher, you encourage kids to improve in there weak spots, like reading and writing , and you try to help them in whatever way you can.  So if you think about it, you would be helping me in my weak spot by letting me start over in a nice new assignment notebook.  You know, you would really be helping me succeed.

In my own defense, I have to say that you’re not actually using the assignment notebook.  You did say so yourself.  So by giving me the assignment notebook, you would be saving paper and giving it to a good cause.  ME!  You could be a really eco friendly man.

And last but not least, I am going to say that this is no joke.  I’m not going to rip it or write dumb stuff on it, like my last one.  I promise.  And trust me, Mr. Wondra, I never break my promises.  I also promise not to lose it or let anyone draw on it.  I will guard it with my life.

Mr. Wondra, giving me that assignment notebook would give me a chance to be more organized, which not only is extra stress off my back, but also it will help with my grades and so much more.  You will see improvement in my organization right before your eyes if you just let me have your assignment notebook.

Related posts:

1. Mining the internet: a space for “writing without writing.”
2. Research on writing conventions: U R what U write.
3. Using toilet humor to teach writing

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An Annotation by Laurie Walsh

The authors, researchers at Educational Testing Service, have been testing the impact of assessment for learning.  They have introduced teachers to the idea through a three-day summer workshop, taught the teachers strategies, met with the teachers once a month during the school year and observed their classrooms.  The research shows that there are “five broad strategies that are equally powerful for teachers of all content areas and at all grade levels: clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success; engineering effective classroom discussions, questions and learning tasks; providing feedback that moves learners forward; activating students as owners of their own learning; activating students as instructional resources for one another” (20).  I am most interested in their findings on engineering effective discussion.  Teachers should use “range-finding” questions to discover what students know at the beginning of a unit.  At the “hinge-point” in the lesson, teachers use questions to check on student learning.  The article continues to discuss the problems with traditional classroom questioning: lack of engagement and only hearing the thinking of one student.  The authors suggest using a randomizing device for calling on students, instituting a “no hands up, except to ask a question” policy, utilizing white boards for all students to respond simultaneously, and providing students with four cards – they hold up one when the teacher asks a question in a multiple choice format.

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1. Assessment as learning. Earl, L
2. Classroom strategies for interactive learning. Buehl, D.
3. Active learning: creating excitement in the classroom. Bonwell, C.C. & Eison, J.A.

In Part 1 of this series, I told you that students’ brains can’t take in a lot of new information, that they’re prone to conflict, and that their brains aren’t yet ready to function at an adult level.  Does this mean that we should just give up and let them fend for themselves in our classrooms?  Though there is much more to learn about our brains, there is still a lot of information out there that can help teachers understand better ways to teach to their students’ brains.  So while researchers are learning why adolescent brains work the way they do, others are researching how to best approach the beast of the adolescent brain.

Feedback

Feedback is one of those things that most of us know we should give regularly, but it is so much easier to get papers graded if we simply put “good job” on the A papers and “you’re almost there!” on C or lower papers.  However, specific, helpful feedback is a needed part of brain enrichment.  “Because feedback reduces uncertainty, it increases coping abilities while lowering the pituitary-adrenal stress responses” (Jensen, 1998).

Lowering stress responses?  Sound familiar?  As stated before, it is one of our jobs, as teachers, to keep teen brains as low-stress as possible so that they are still able to function properly and be able to organize the information given to them.  The teen brain doesn’t always understand why it  got an A on one paper, but then get a C on the next.  This is stressful.  By explaining what was done well, or what needed to be improved on, teens are more able to take that information in and will have an easier time knowing what to do in the future.

By providing feedback, learners feel more capable and confident in their abilities.  The one key idea to remember, though, is this: “If it [feedback] is hard to get at, or the performance cannot be altered once feedback is received, the brain doesn’t learn quickly” (Jensen, 1998).  So while feedback is a very useful tool, it has to be provided before the final grade is written in stone.

Though I first saw this statement as an obstacle I couldn’t overcome due to time constraints, it’s important to remember that feedback doesn’t always have to come from the teacher, and it can be given throughout the process, instead of just at the end.  Feedback can come from the student that created the work, or by any number of peers.  By providing students with checklists, rubrics, and partners as vehicles of feedback, students’ brains will be able to better understand the work required, give the students more confidence in their work, and because of those qualities, students will be able to create a better final product.

When students know how they’re being assessed, they are much more able to accomplish the task.  The simple idea of feedback will enhance the classroom environment, making students more comfortable with each other, and giving them more perspectives on their work, instead of just theirs and that of the teacher’s.  Feedback gives students a chance to see where their work can be improved before a grade is given.  This gives a chance to practice self- and peer-assessment, which helps them think critically and understand the assessment process.

Feedback is something that I have not consistently given students, and when I have, I have given them their feedback with their grade, giving them little chance to learn from the feedback.  I feel that my recent research has been very helpful in explaining the need for feedback during the learning process, instead of at the end.

And that takes us to the end of Part 2 in this series.  Stay tuned for Part 3, in which I discuss the roles that relevance and experience play in the outcome of good teaching and learning.

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1. The Teen Brain Pt. 4: Movement
2. The Teen Brain Pt 5: Making Learning Meaningful
3. Teaching the Teen Brain.

An Annotation by Laurie Walsh

This is a practical and theoretical look at using Socratic Seminars in the classroom.  It provides information on room set-up, writing pre-seminar and seminar questions, general guidelines for Socratic questioning, student preparation and responsibilities, the rules for seminar, and charts and rubrics for students responses.  This is an incredibly helpful text!  It is obvious that Ms. Ball is an English teacher and Ms Brewer is a principal.  They know what teachers need to help them try something new!

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2. Motivation and learning: practical teaching tips for block schedules, brain-based learning, multiple intelligences, improved student motivation, increased achievement.
3. Questioning formats. In open-ended questioning: a handbook for educators. Freedman, R.L.H.

Earl, L. (2003). Using Assessment to Motivate Learning.  In Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximize student learning. (pp. 67-77). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

The idea here is to move from our traditional system of rewards and punishments (grades) and more toward an assessment model that is more motivating because it is relevant, imaginative and scaffolded.  Relevant assessment helps students to make connections between curriculum, assessment, instruction and student’s daily lives.  It challenges while reinforcing what they’ve learned.  Open ended, imaginative assessment allows for a range of responses and solutions and can tap into students’ individual interests.  Scaffolding allows for appropriate challenges that nurture growth without fear or discouragement.  It builds confidence by being ongoing and timely.  It happens in the middle of teaching and learning.

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“How’s it going guys?” I asked as I approached, kneeling down to their level.

Travis spoke for the group. “Mr. Wondra. We don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get, Travis.”

“We don’t know what to do,” said Travis, frustration wrinkling his brow. I could tell the rest of the group was getting a little stressed as well. The class had been working on this assignment for ten minutes, and many other groups were by now well on their way.

The activity I had assigned that day was a creative expansion of a reflection I had done with some colleagues during one of my St. Mary’s weekends. The activity we had done called for us to look back at a semester’s worth of learning and then visually represent that learning by creating a large poster or mural using a road and traveling metaphor. I thought the activity was great because it gave us a chance as learners to come together, each remembering and relating to the instruction in a different way, and create a product that helped us to cement this new information by attaching it to a metaphor.

If Howard Gardner were to talk about this activity he might say that it encourages deep learning or understanding by revisiting the information through the interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, and visual intelligence lenses. Daniel Pink, Thomas Friedman and Yong Zhao might call this a perfect example of “mashing” by using new information to create a novel story of our semester of learning—blending logical, analytical and creative thinking

Anyway, I thought the activity would be a great way for my students to reflect on their first quarter of eighth grade—particularly the experiences and learning that took place in language arts. Our St. Mary’s facilitators asked us to relate to our learning using a “journey” metaphor. While I could have done this, some of my pre-assessments, indicated that most of these students didn’t yet fully understand what a metaphor was—to say nothing about how to use one.

This presented me with the unique opportunity to combine new learning (metaphor), with recent instruction (what we learned in the first quarter). So after some additional instruction on metaphors and how they can be used to create understanding, I asked students to come up with their own metaphors to represent their experiences of the first quarter—linking important language arts concepts to it.

Also realizing, however, that as eighth graders, my students were also having countless meaningful experiences outside of my classroom, I invited them to include/attach other important events, milestones, and learning that they experienced in other areas of their lives as well, be they family, extracurricular, or social. In this way I hoped to honor, validate, and link their lives holistically to my language arts curriculum.

But Travis and his group were struggling, so I chunked it up for them.

“Well, what do you remember learning in here so far this year? What do we do in here every day? What does language arts in the eighth grade look like?”

“Um. Well, we do planning pages every day,” said Travis.

“Great! What else?”

“We have vocabulary,” said Sarah.

“Now you’re getting the hang of it. Alex, start a list.”

“Ok. What about mind-maps. Does that count? And the multiple intelligence stuff? And the important pattern? And chapter club?”

“Awesome. Now, I want you to keep brainstorming. Then once you get your list, see if you can come up with an image that all of these ideas can be a part of.” I then gave them another example and let them have at it.

About a week later, each group having had the opportunity to share and explain their metaphors, all the posters hung around the room. It was quite a sight and a fun way for the parents, who where coming and going during parent-teacher conferences, to see what we had been up to during the first quarter. But I didn’t fully realize the impact that this simple activity had had until I met Travis’s mom, and she asked if she could have the poster when it was done hanging in the room.

It turns out that Travis was so excited and had taken so much pride in their creation that he had talked about it at home and wanted to keep it and hang it in his bedroom.

It’s possible, but I’m not sure this level of excitement would have manifested through my teaching before I started the program. While my curriculum remains the same, the instructional tools I now have at my disposal have been greatly enhanced. In addition, a deeper understanding of both theory and practice has given me a confidence in myself as a professional that I’ve never experienced before.

Among other things, this new-found clarity stems from an understanding that:

• Backward design works and that I can (and should) shape my units around essential concepts and understandings. Allowing the content of my instruction to flow from a limited number of core concepts has helped me to stay much more “on message” or focused throughout the course of a unit of study.

• Reflection will slow the pace of instruction but allow for deeper understanding. I am now allowing more time and space in class for reflection of various forms—products (as in the above example), surveys, exit slips, critical incident forms as well as written and discussion.

• Formative assessment creates a valuable ongoing loop of feedback, decreasing time between an event and the feedback and increasing feedback opportunities, which, in turn, increases student engagement and motivation. I am now developing and using many more rubrics, checklists, and peer assessments and activities than ever before in an effort to make assessment more useful.

• Written instructions and “half-sheets” are valuable instructional tools for clarity. Instead of only verbally explaining what I may feel is a fairly simple assignment or activity, I now also find myself typing up a simple explanation in much the same way that my St. Mary’s facilitators do. These simple adjustments to my instruction have greatly increased students’ confidence in that they understand exactly what is expected. This is another example of a practice that also makes sense on so many theoretical levels.

• It is more important than ever to meet students where they are. Allowing opportunities for students to succeed using such theory as Multiple Intelligence, Meyers-Briggs personality, Brain Gym, Essential Understandings, Brain Based, Gender Based and Emotional Intelligence has become a major part of almost every lesson for me. Maybe one of the most valuable parts of the St. Mary’s experience for me is how it has helped me to better see my teaching through the critical lens of my students. Allowing students to access learning through their own aptitudes as well as encouraging them (by allowing play and failure) to experiment with abilities with which they are not as proficient greatly enhances their engagement levels in my classes. To this end, I now search for ways to include movement and technology as much as I can in my lessons. Skits, Web 2.0 technology, graphic organizers, and storyboards and varied reading topics as well as other environmental parts of my physical classroom have greatly enhanced my instruction.

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