Writers Toolbox Game

 Writer's Toolbox game for writing (similar to haikubes or paint chip poetry

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Frank Bruni - Our Semi-Colons, Ourselves

Getty Images - from the original article

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From NYT - Bruni - Our Semi-Colons, Ourselves 

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I suppose so. But it could have come across a whole lot better, and that’s one of the arguments for writing well — for taking the time and summoning the focus to do so. Good writing burnishes your message. It burnishes the messenger, too.

You may be dazzling on your feet, an extemporaneous ace, thanks to the brilliant thoughts that pinball around your brain. There will nonetheless be times when you must pin them down and put them in a long email. Or a medium-length email. Or a memo. Or, hell, a Slack channel. The clarity, coherence, precision and even verve with which you do that — achieving a polish and personality distinct from most of what A.I. spits out — will have an impact on the recipients of that missive, coloring their estimation of you and advancing or impeding your goals.

If you’re honest with yourself, you know that, because you know your own skeptical reaction when people send you error-clouded dreck. You also know the way you perk up when they send its shining opposite. And while the epigrammatic cleverness or audiovisual genius of a viral TikTok or Instagram post has the potential to shape opinion and motivate behavior, there are organizations and institutions whose internal communications and decision making aren’t conducted via social media. GIFs, memes and emojis don’t apply.

When my friend Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a frequent contributor to Times Opinion, took the measure of the influential diplomat Charles Hill for her 2006 book “The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost,” she wrote that a principal reason for his enormous behind-the-scenes influence was his dexterity with the written word. He took great notes. He produced great summaries. He made great arguments — on paper, not just on the fly.

Worthen noted in her book that “transmitting ideas into written words is hard, and people do not like to do it.” As a result, someone who performs that task gladly, quickly and nimbly “in most cases ends up the default author, the quarterback to whom others start to turn, out of habit, for the play.”

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Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.

Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.

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But show me someone who writes correctly and ably — and who knows that — and I’ll show you someone who probably also writes more. Such people’s awareness of their agility and their confidence pave the way. Show me someone who has never been pressed to write well or given the tutelage and tools to do so, and I’ll show you someone who more often than not avoids it and, in avoiding it, is deprived of not only its benefits but also its pleasures.

Yes, pleasures. I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve praised a paragraph, sentence or turn of phrase in a student’s paper and that student subsequently let me know that the passage had in fact been a great source of pride, delivering a jolt of excitement upon its creation. We shouldn’t devalue that feeling. We should encourage — and teach — more people to experience it.

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Bad at writing

 "Many people assume they are bad at writing because it is hard. This is like assuming you are bad at weightlifting because the weight is heavy.

Writing is useful because it is hard. It's the effort that goes into writing a clear sentence that leads to better thinking."   James Clear

Teaching and Care

 

Let’s be careful out there

Rafael Heller
January 24, 2022

Every job comes with its own set of interpersonal challenges. As a magazine editor, for instance, I work closely with authors to help them revise and polish the articles they’ve submitted for publication. If you’ve ever been asked to give people feedback on their writing, then I’m sure you understand how delicate and uncertain this work can be — delicate because most writers feel deeply invested in and sensitive about their writing; uncertain because no two writers are sensitive in the same way. Some crave feedback and others dread it. Some want friendly encouragement and others prefer firm guidance. In short, there’s no single best way to interact with writers. You have to build a different relationship with each one, trying your best to gauge their sensitivities, gain their trust, and find a good way to work together.

Yet, as complex as the relationship between writers and editors can be, it pales in comparison to the interpersonal drama of everyday life in classrooms and schools. At Kappan, I work with just 10 or 11 writers at a time, most of them for only a couple of weeks, interacting mainly by email. Teachers, though, are constantly “on,” wearing their teacher face for hours at a time and building and maintaining individual relationships over many months, with dozens of children at once — each with their own personality, cultural background, family history, social and emotional needs, fears, hopes, and random quirks. I can’t think of another profession that requires anything close to this amount of intense and extraordinarily complex relational work.

The opportunity to build relationships with students is precisely what draws so many educators to the profession and gives them a sense of joy and purpose in their chosen field. And many educators are highly skilled at connecting with children, reading their social cues, responding to their emotional needs, and figuring out how to motivate and engage them in their schoolwork. But while some teachers make it look easy, that doesn’t make the work any less remarkable.

Moreover, teachers don’t just build relationships with students. They must also keep a close eye on those students’ relationships with each other, helping them to create positive social norms, communicate effectively, and resolve conflicts. And, of course, teachers also interact constantly with parents and family members, as well as other teachers, staff, and administrators, even while coping with organizational conditions — top-down decision making, scarce resources, limited professional autonomy, and so on — that tend to put enormous stress on relationships.

In the face of such challenges, educators must respond with care, argue this month’s Kappan authors. Theirs is not the syrupy care of Hallmark cards and Care Bears, though. Rather, they speak to the imperative to take careful measure of the interpersonal dynamics at play in preK-12 education. At a time of COVID-induced mental health crises, escalating violence among students, and angry threats against school board members, we must take special care to think about the words we use in the classroom, the ways we behave toward our colleagues, and the working conditions we create in our schools and districts.

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This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 5, p. 4.

 

Personal Narrative NYT Essay Winners

 For a third year, we invited students from 11 to 19 to tell us short, powerful stories about a meaningful life experience for our Personal Narrative Writing Contest. And for a third year, we heard from young people across the globe about the moments, big and small, that have shaped them into who they are today: a first kiss that failed to meet expectations, a school assignment that led to self-acceptance, an incident at airport security that made the world look much less sweet, and more.  

You can read the eight winning essays here.

Alexis Wiggin's student-driven revision

 (from MM 872)

Here's my copy of her rubric

Enthusiastic, Student-Driven Revision

            “How do you get students to want to revise their writing?” asks high-school teacher Alexis Wiggins in this Education Week article. “That is the $64,000 question.” A few years ago, she had the idea of returning students’ papers with formative feedback on each standard on a comprehensive three-level rubric (she got the idea from her father, Grant Wiggins):

-    Publishable (A work)

-    Revisable (anywhere from a B+ to a D-)

-    Redo (completely missed the mark and needs a reboot)

Wiggins was delighted with the response: “My students largely worked their tails off to eventually move from the “Revisable” column to the “Publishable” column. The downside? It was killing me. I couldn’t handle the volume of revisions I was confronted with and the amount of comments I had to write out on every single draft submitted to provide adequate feedback to help students revise and improve.” This led her to abandon the idea after only a year, but she was stuck with the humanities teacher’s emotions about grading: “Dread, loathe, and avoid.”

            Ten years later, it occurred to Wiggins that the three-level feedback system would be workable if students did most of their revising themselves using a detailed, standards-based rubric as a guide. This rating scale is “designed backwards from the end goals,” says Wiggins: “persuasive, eloquent use of language and argument.” All she did now was check the level at which a student’s work was (Publishable, Revisable, Redo) and, if it wasn’t already Publishable, jotted the student a quick note on what needed to be done to boost the level on that standard. Wiggins tried this last year with her Composition and Film classes, and found that grading time was cut in half, even though students were submitting similar amounts of writing.

            The key point, she says, is that students don’t get grades for individual assignments; all they get is a Publishable/Revisable/Redo on each rubric standard. At the end of the semester, Wiggins decides each student’s grade based on a breakdown of how many assignments are in each of the categories. Students can revise as many times as they like before the due date (close to the end of the semester). The criteria are spelled out on the back of her rubric.

            Wiggins says the rubric and targeted feedback are “the best system I have ever experienced in my 20-year career, hands down… Students have reported nearly unanimously in surveys that they have improved, wanted to revise their work, and paid attention to teacher feedback more than ever with this new system. Nineteen out of 20 of my students said this was the best style of assessment they had ever experienced and that all teachers should use it.” That’s because they’re less anxious now that they’re in control of their grades, revisions, and what they learn. Why? When they got letter grades, there was an element of adult judgment that provoked negative emotions – and that happened to the teacher as well. “The reason I most dreaded grading before,” says Wiggins, “wasn’t so much the time commitment as the fear of how a student would respond emotionally to the grade I gave them.” Now it’s simply a joint effort to revise work up to the Publishable level – with students doing most of the work.

 

“‘Publishable’ and ‘Not Yet Publishable’” by Alexis Wiggins in Education Week, January 3, 2021; Wiggins can be reached awiggins@ceelcenter.org.

New York Times Writing Curriculum

 

Last year the New York Times Writing Curriculum got great.  Each unit contains prompts, daily writing prompts, guided practice with mentor texts (show don't tell, express critical opinions, quote or paraphrase experts, craft scripts for podcasts), Annotated by the Author commentaries, a contest that can be the final project, webinars.

What are the units?

 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER

Unit 1: Documenting Teenage Lives in Extraordinary Times

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER

Unit 2: The Personal Narrative

DECEMBER-JANUARY

Unit 3: The Review

JANUARY-FEBRUARY

Unit 4: Informational Writing

MARCH-APRIL

Unit 5: Argumentative Writing

APRIL-MAY

Unit 6: Writing for Podcasts

JUNE-AUGUST

Unit 7: Independent Reading and Writing

Schmoker - Simplify ELA Curriculum

From Marshall Memo 823

Mike Schmoker on a Radically Simplified ELA Curriculum

(Originally titled “Radical Reset: The Case for Minimalist Standards”)

            “In profound ways, literacy is destiny,” says author/speaker/consultant Mike Schmoker in this Educational Leadership article. “It is the single most important goal of schooling and the key to academic and career success.” The Common Core standards were a well-intentioned effort to pare down ELA standards and support effective literacy instruction, says Schmoker, but he believes the standards went off the rails – an important reason that American students’ achievement over the last decade has flatlined.

            What went wrong? “In the heady development phase, there was plenty to like about the ELA Common Core,” says Schmoker. “They called for vastly more content-rich, grade-level reading, discussion, writing – and writing instruction – across subject areas.” The Common Core ELA’s introduction and appendices are “inspiring and largely on-target.” However, says Schmoker, the detailed standards created by committees are “an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae.” The result is that many teachers have been spending far too much class time on strategies, skill drills, and worksheets, and students aren’t doing much real reading, discussing, and writing grounded in literature and subject-area knowledge. Hence the lack of progress at a national level.

            How can we return to the fundamentals that Common Core got right and “reset” literacy instruction in classrooms? Schmoker recommends that school leaders issue explicit public statements describing what went wrong so teachers and parents understand what isn’t working and why. Then schools and districts should go about reducing the literacy curriculum to the essentials. For starters, this means intensive, explicit phonics instruction so every student is able to decode text by the end of first grade. But this shouldn’t distract from the core of literacy, which Schmoker believes is “frequent, abundant amounts of reading, discussion, and writing” from the very beginning. He agrees with Richard Allington’s 2006 goal of students doing at least 60 minutes of reading and 40 minutes of writing (across the curriculum) every day.

Following this general injunction, what do simple, high-leverage standards look like? Schmoker suggests that teacher teams spell out “the approximate number, amount, length, and frequency” of reading, writing, and discussion for each grade level – specifically:

-    The number of knowledge-rich, grade-appropriate fiction and non-fiction books, articles, textbook selections, poems, plays, and primary resources students will read in each course (a high-performing network of schools in Texas and Arizona posted its grade-by-grade sequence at https://bit.ly/35FkPak);

-    The number of pages of actual text (minus illustrations) that students will read each year (for example, at least 1,000 pages);

-    The number and approximate length of inquiry-based discussions, seminars, and debates students engage in – that are “purposeful, grounded in reading, and aligned with simple criteria,” says Schmoker, “– for example, speak audibly, clearly, logically, and with civility.”

-    The number and approximate length of short writing assignments completed each day and week, and more extensive, capstone-like projects at the end of a grading period or year, all assessed with detailed scoring guides and supported by exemplars of high-quality work.

Are such short, basic standards (without detailed skill objectives) enough to guide teachers? asks Schmoker. Absolutely, he says, citing the gains of a number of schools and networks that have taken this approach. “So why wait?” he challenges. “Arrange, as soon as possible, for your school or district teams to develop provisional standards and expectations for reading, discussion, and writing. Then stand back and watch your students’ life chances soar.”

“Radical Reset: The Case for Minimalist Standards” by Mike Schmoker in Educational Leadership, February 2020 (Vol. 77, #5, pp. 44-50), https://bit.ly/2vouIvW; Schmoker can be reached at schmoker@futureone.com.

Research on Writing Instruction: self expression and interaction with peers key

There’s not a lot of quality research on good writing, but a recent report summarized the finding of 14 high-quality studies.  Here’s an article about the research and here’s one really interesting finding (my underline): 

Beyond a well-structured writing course, Slavin and his colleagues noted that in these studies of writing, the classes were “exciting, social and noisy.”

“Motivation seems to be the key,” Slavin and his colleagues wrote. “If students love to write, because their peers as well as their teachers are eager to see what they have to say, then they will write with energy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other subject, writing demands a supportive environment, in which students want to become better writers because they love the opportunity to express themselves, and to interact in writing with valued peers and teachers.”