It's Time

I am the most pitiful personal blogger. I've been meaning to get back into it, but the Ozarks Writing Project and other teachers blogs seem to be taking up most of my time. Today is the last day of the Summer Invitational Institute, and we have the teachers blogging--for at least the second time. We are working on incorporating the blog as a larger piece of our Summer Institute. We need to make the blog and a wiki the cornerstone of our writing in the 2009 Institute.

This is all I can muster today.

Mini-Lesson on Titles: The Seagull versus The Woodcock: Which Would You Read?

I was watching CBS Sunday Morning, and they had a segment on a book called Why Not Catch-21? The book discusses the origin for titles, and once I did a little research, I discovered there is weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. The segment discussed the importance of titles. It's the first thing we notice about a paper, and it's usually the last thing that we deal with. I can't remember where I read this (Atwell? Moffett?), but the author suggested writing down 50 titles and then narrowing it down. The first twenty titles probably aren't very good. You really have to go beyond and dig deep for a great one. Occassionally, a great title might pop into our heads, but usually not.

I usually go back to my manuscript and look for key words, or I think about the main idea I want to get across to readers. Usually a great title has two parts with a colon, especially in college, right. So, the first part is the main idea and the second part after the colon goes into more detail. It's also great to insert humor or word play, if at all possible.

Let's look at some sample titles:

1. The Course of True Research Never Did Run Smoothly
2. Young Adult Literature
3. I-Search Paper

Which paper would you want to read? As teachers and readers of writing, titles will be very important. The first impression is the most important. All writing deserves a title, and hopefully a great title. We want to engage all of our readers.

In a mini-lesson, I would have student write down 30-50 titles for their paper. They will think it's impossible, but I would encourage them to just write and not worry about whether the titles were good or not. I might also lead them through how I would come up with a title. As an anticipatory set, I might share some of the stories from the book I linked to above. Does Catch-18 sound as good as Catch-22? Would either title be sufficient? You could also include in this mini-lesson information on punctuating titles. Think about how important the title was to the poem "The Kitchen Shears Speak."

Lurking on a High School Blog

I was invited from the very beginning. I will visit my friend Larry's blog (an Ozarks Writing Project Teacher Consultant), and when I visited last week, there seemed to be something different. It's because someone posted this comment to the district website:

Posted 01/12/2008

I looked at all the blogs in Alice's Restaurant. Rather than teach students to post a podcast to the web, which they will more than likely not need to do after they leave high school, I think they should have been taught better COMMUNICATION, through better writing skills. I read this was an Applied Communications class. It appeared, from their writings, the students need to learn how to communicate through writing. To be quite frank I think some elementary students can write better than this. All teachers need to start teaching better grammar to students, especially English Teachers.
To end on a more positive note, I thought the "Coach Stokes Interview" was humorous. (I will say I didn't look at the writing skills of the interview.) Ninya Biznez

Well, the part that broke my heart was that the students replied, "Yeah, we know we're not good at English." They went on to explain that they were learning and doing a lot more than they ever had before. How could he/she write that the students write like elementary students. They are seniors in high school.

Here was my reply. The students were really glad I posted. One of my favorite comments was this:

I am glad that you like what we are writing and what we are doing. It is nice to know that some people don't just look at what they see on paper, they look beyond it to see what we have really accomplished. Also i agree with what you said about the sentence-level and concern. There is much more to writing than missed spelling words and punctuations. Thanks for your kind words and encouragement.

I saw Rick Wormeli at the Write to Learn Conference. He discussed assessment as looking at the central tendency. So, you will find typos and grammatical errors on this blog, but what is the central tendency? Are students improving reading and writing? Where did they begin? Where are they know? Actually, as I write this, it makes me thing that this is the research project. What kind of writing development do students have? It would be interesting to look at a writing apprehension scale from August to May, and also to analyze their posts. Hmmmm.

Writing Across the Curriculum

I went to a meeting today expecting to be able to sit quietly without having to say anything. I plan on doing that until I get tenure (just kidding, but the thought had occurred). I was sitting there minding my own business when the "writing across the curriculum" came up. This was followed by discussion of the "disastrous state of student writing in the university"--veering toward the edge of apocalyptic. What I heard in the conversation was that clarity was more important than ideas, and that these teachers were spending a lot of time editing for grammar and sentence structure.

It was an interesting conversation, and my main point was that we weren't discussing writing as a way to learn and think (Emig, 1977 among others). I wanted to make the point that we ask students to write for reasons other than summative or transactional purposes. We can do that, but do we offer formative assessment before asking them to turn in that final paper? What are the purposes of the writing assignments we ask students to do? Is it to think and figure out the ideas in the discipline? Or is it a grammar test? This is not to say that students should not be required to polish papers in a final draft and make the paper ready for presentation.

But, why aren't students taking pride in the paper in the first place? I think we have to look at our assignments. What are we asking them to do, and why are students' having problems?
The great thing about writing across the curriculum programs is that teachers who don't have a background in writing instruction and research can be presented with writing to learn strategies.

The part that scared me about the conversation occurred when someone looked at me--the lone English person--and said, "So why aren't you teaching them grammar in English 110?" I think I handled myself well in the face of that, and I was forced to speak.

Bob Tierney's study of his science class showed that students who wrote frequent, informal pieces of writing retained more information and did better on final assessments, even months after the class ended. Bob's essay is a wonderful example of using writing as a process for discovery.

We're lucky in Missouri to have a pioneer in W.A.C. I admire her and her work, which is so influential.

I am worried about the state of W.A.C. after reading the interview. One part of the interview I do want to remember is this:

What advice do you have for The WAC Journal readers who may be asked to defend WAC pedagogy and/or assessment?

mt: Read the now-voluminous research. Talk to scholars at institutions that have WAC programs. Heed the findings of Richard J. Light in Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (Harvard UP, 2001), who reports, “Students identify the courses that had the most profound impact on them as courses in which they were required to write papers, not just for the professor, as usual, but for their fellow students as well” (64). Heed the findings of Langer and Applebee in How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning (NCTE, 1987) who report, “there is clear evidence that activities involving writing (any of the many sorts of writing we studied) lead to better learning than activities involving reading and studying only” (135). And for those who require quantitative data, read Alexander Astin’s “What Really Matters in General Education: Provocative Findings from a National Study of Student Outcomes,” Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 1, Fall 1992, pages 23-46, especially Table 13, “Effects of Taking Courses that Emphasize the Development of Writing Skills.”

W.A.C. Programs
University of Missouri

Back in the Saddle

When I began to write a dissertation about blogging, I could no longer face a blog. I just couldn't even go to the site. It was like I had to completely break myself away and focus completely on the task at hand--writing about blogs. I'll post another time about what I found, but right now I just want to focus on getting back in the saddle in terms of blogging myself.

I have a methods class for pre-service middle and high school teachers, and we have a blog.
We meet once a week, and it has replaced weekly handwritten responses which would only be returned with teacher feedback alone every two weeks or so.

An eighth grade class at a lab school invited us to visit their blog and respond to their stories, so my class is doing that right now as well. We also commented on Casey's students Senior Projects. They are researching, writing papers, and presenting to the community about a topic they have chosen. They work over a year on it.

If anyone should ever happen on to this blog, I want to point out my new fascination with Library Thing. I have a spot on my blog for it, and it's merely a way to catalog what you are reading. Here is my bookshelf. Please share yours. My friend from north Missouri shared her bookshelf with me. I don't see her much, but every time I do, I pick her brain about what she's reading. Now, I have her "bookshelf" online all of the time.

The weather is cold and nasty here, and I went to YouTube to look for a segment when Seinfeld is on Saturday Night Live. He's a history teacher leading a class discussion. It's a great segment to use with teachers to begin a discussion about discussions. While I was on YouTube, I decided to search for Taylor Mali's poetry slam on "What Teachers Make." I found those two items, and couldn't stop. He has a great poem (slightly dirty) called "The Impotence of Proofreading."

Something happened yesterday that I have to share. A good teacher friend and NWP Teacher-Consultant uses a blog, podcasts, and film in his Applied Communications class. On the blog, an anonymous person from his school district posted that the kids writing was terrible, and there was no way that blogging or podcasting could have any benefit. The major slam came when the person wrote, "I think elementary students could write better than you." All of the students responded, and one of the saddest things to me is that the students said, "Yeah, we're not very good writers, but we are a lot better than we were." This is sad to me because the only thing her comment did was make them say, "Yeah, we're not good." Now, on a positive note, those kids wrote some incredible responses to her comments. They can write well, and they just don't have confidence. They are learning. How could she put down those high juniors and seniors? Well, for what it is worth, I responded.

Well, this is a start. I won't wait another year to write.

Writing for Myself: Writing to Teach

I always really enjoy reading Will Richardson's posts. I do, I really do. I think he's advanced a lot of educators' thinking about blogs, but I'm crinkling up my face today as I read his latest post. Actually, let's go back a few weeks ago to the "teaching is dead" post, and now we have the "reading is dead" post along with his vast assertion that most, if not all students see Of Mice and Men as irrelevant.

If students see Of Mice and Men as irrelevant, then it is the fault of teachers. Are they giving them quizzes everyday over "who is the 'prince of the ranch'?" Are they creating opportunities where students can converse and write in a variety of genres about what they are reading? Are teachers allowing students to read in class--to show students that reading is not just homework and that it deserves a valued place in our classroom. This may sound like a slam against teachers, and it is not. I'm really arguing that Richardson is wrong. Reading is not dead, and just because blogging is exciting it doesn't mean reading is dead and classic books are irrelevant.

Why is he such a naysayer all of a sudden?

Writing for Myself: Writing to Teach

I just read Barb's post about the NWP/NCTE convention which you can find at the Teaching with Blogs link. Barb and Laura went to these cool sessions, and I attended some very practical sessions that weren't related to the classroom. I went to a session that explained how to collect and input data for the NWP Inverness surveys that they do each year to get federal funding. This will be helpful because I can use that information to show how many contact hours our satellite has with teachers, how many students our teachers work with, and how many counties and school districts we are impacting.

On Friday, Barb and I presented about the blog and the data I've been collecting. I think Barb and I both felt very proud. We've learned some good stuff about educational blogging and we have insights that we can share with teachers. I saw a lot of attendees nodding their heads as spoke, and Barb and I both had several people come up to us who wanted to exchange emails and find out more.

Will Richardson's been depressed about whether or not school's will shift to accept this technological presence. He's mostly thinking "not" right now. There are huge obstacles for teachers who want to try something new--like blog with students. Don't get down, Will, but we may need to take baby steps for awhile.

It can be done though. There are many people in higher ed who blog with their classes, and they share with one another. One insight that Barb had was that anyone researching technology tools in a classroom spent very little time talking about or with the teacher. She was right. They focused on the student, and the teacher was an afterthought. The students' perspective is important, but in our research, if we don't address the teachers' perspective--the people who have to change the way they have thought about teaching and learning--then we aren't helping other teachers to initiate this change in their teaching.

Thursday afternoon Diane from UMSL and I shared how the Missouri Writing Project Network set up the Literacy Academies in collaboration with DESE. The audience was people from other sites who wanted to know the steps that occurred as we started these academies. We created a timeline for the presentation, and it was a good process to sit down and record what had happened in the last year.

I missed a blogging session at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday. I went to a session on New Teacher Initiatives presented by Winthrop Writing Project. Thank goodness Laura went to the session, so she can update me. I also attended Roy Fox and Amy Lannin's session on MMEET--Mizzou's Men for Excellence in Elementary Teaching. They shared the research they are doing with a group of male teachers--interviews, classroom observations, blogging, and focus groups. It was interesting to hear some of their early observations. Several people from Kansas State were there.

From 12:00-2:00 on Saturday, Jane from Prairieland, Amy from MWP, Diane from Gateway, Dr. Fox, and I met to discuss writing a research grant for some work the MWPN is doing.

Sunday morning I attended Lanette's session. She included information on her session. Her dissertation was on girls' personal blogging practices. In her presentation, she explained how what she learned their could be incorporated into the classroom.