paus(ed): Happy Talking and Writing with Academic Conversations

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Academic Conversations, Write Around, Written Conversations

In my work with the Write for Texas initiative, I go to two San Antonio middle schools to facilitate academic writing in English classes as well as Science, Social Studies, and Math classes.  The book we use to guide our work with content area teachers is called Content Area Writing: Every Teacher’s Guide.  Authors Harvey Daniels, Steven Zemelman, and Nancy Steinke have filled this great text with wonderful ideas to promote student writing in all subjects.

One of the suggested activities is called a Write Around. In a write around, students read an academic text, and then work with a small group to have a focused written conversation about the text.  When one of the teachers I collaborate with tried the write around in her classroom, she said the students didn’t have much concept of what to write about the texts they had just read.  As a result, she found their writing to be an unfocused regurgitation of textual facts.  She stated her desire to have students move to a deeper level of understanding based on their written conversations. I told her I would think about some ways to support deeper understanding of the texts when students engaged in the written conversation.

After she and I talked, I developed a model lesson based on the conversational moves in Zwiers and Crawford’s book, Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings.  While the book is about classroom talk, I thought that the framework would apply equally when asking students to write.  The authors created some visual and hand symbols related to different ways to respond to texts, and I showed the students these symbols and taught them the hand motions to go with them. We then completed the write around, in which they wrote responses to a text by elaborating and clarifying, supporting with ideas or examples, building on or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing.

I modeled this lesson in an 8^th grade Social Studies classes, 2 6^th grade Social Studies classes, and a 6^th grade Science class.  After I taught an example class, three of the teachers then used the graphic organizer and presentation material to continue the work with the rest of their classes.   One of the teachers told her students, “You know how you always like to pass notes?  Well, this is a way to pass notes that won’t make your teacher mad.”  The students really responded to this, and many of them stated that they liked the legal note writing in their reflection on the activity.

Here are some of the other things I noticed in my examination of the student’s work:

“How can potential energy store a lot of energy?”

All of the students generated interesting questions, but the students in the science class asked some high-level questions about this text related to kinetic and potential energy.  One student asked, “I wonder if when assuming its usual position, there is no energy stored in bow.”  Having this question in writing gives both the teacher and the student group a great venue for topic exploration.

“How potential energy stores a lot of energy.  Like a bear.”

Many students made the connection between the scientific concept of potential and kinetic energy to human or animal energy.  I thought this was noteworthy because analogy or metaphor building is an opportunity for the teacher to shape conceptual knowledge; knowledge that is fluid enough to be remembered and applied to multiple contexts.  In the Social Studies groups, many made connections to movies they’d seen (one student compared our text on WWII to the movie World War Z), books they’d written, and to their own lives.

Student 1: “It was a sad story.  Because kids died.”

Student 2’s Response: “You need to think about is what you think if it happened to you.”

Students responded to these texts with emotion, especially in the Social Studies classes.  When looking for mentor texts to use in my work with these students, I follow a couple of criteria.

• I try to find texts about kids their age. I want them to be able to see themselves in the place of the children in the text.
• I look for texts that speak to real life, either in the historic era, or in the contemporary society of a certain country.

I want to find text that will spark an emotion in students, because emotion and memory are tied.  If students know that in Bolivia, a law was recently passed allowing ten year olds to work, they are more likely to have an interest in the economy, geography, and important historical facts related to that country.  I constantly ask the question, “Why is it important for students to study this?”

“I never saw that there for (an) example.  I think you are getting confused.”

Finally, students encouraged and corrected one another gently and with great respect.  Anyone who has encountered a twelve year old knows that children this age display primitive levels of diplomacy and tact.  However, when given a framework to politely disagree with one another based on evidence within the text, they were able to do so in socially acceptable ways.  Perhaps this is the greatest reason to support conversations around texts; they learn the skill of holding one another accountable without tears or trauma.

“I know what you mean and I agree with you my friend.”

The children that I work with constantly surprise me with their generosity, openness to new ideas, and desire to learn.  I’ve said this before; when we give students the support they need, they will flourish.  This support is what will lead to happy times and happy talk in your classroom.

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Paus(ed): Finding Poems at Christmas

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Christmas, Christmas Poetry, Education, Found Poem, poetry

See the torn cover on this much loved tome?

Let’s face it. Students come back from the Thanksgiving holiday with one thing on their minds.  How long until the Christmas break?  This is not the time to assign the first thirty chapters of War and Peace or the fifteen Latin declensions of the root par including past, past perfect, and pluperfect iterations.

(Note: I wouldn’t know what a declension was if it bit me, but it sounds like the sort of snooze worthy assignment guaranteed to kill peace and goodwill among all nations.)

At this time of year, there is a delicate balance between providing enough cognitive load to ensure learning and keeping the content light enough to engage distracted, sugar laden young brains.

Writing poetry fits nicely into this time frame, because poems can be drafted, revised, edited, and turned in within two or three days, and because it gives the student an immediate sense of success and accomplishment.

I like using the literature we are already reading to have students create found poems. To produce a found poem, students borrow words or groups of words, rearranging to create their own poems.  When generating a true found poem, students should add punctuation only, and none of their own words. This is more challenging than it may seem at first, but almost every student can find lines, words, or groups of words that appeal to them, and almost every student will be able to complete this assignment.

I really liked this teacher’s explanation of the found poem.  It may give you some more ideas about how to get students to think of the found poem assignment as word play.  He even says that words are toys at one point in the video.  Students will listen to toy related talk any time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0czPlqh4DEo

I used Christmas literature during December, because there is no shortage of well written mentor text on this topic. I always had other literature available for students who did not observe the holiday, and it never presented a problem in my classroom.  If your school district has policies against using Christmas literature, just let students use the great literature you are already reading with them

Here’s the found poem I wrote last week.

With so much great Christmas literature out there, I’m sure you already have some of your favorites, but here are some of mine. . .

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson- Best first line in a book, ever.

Santa Calls by William Joyce: This book has a letter in the back of it.  You could also use this book as a springboard to write some Christmas letters.

Santa’s Twin – Dean Koontz

How the Grinch Stole Christmas By Dr. Seuss.

The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg

What Child is This? A Christmas Story by Caroline Cooney

Happy Finding!  If your students write great found poems, send them to me.  I’d love to see them.

paus(ed): If you build it, they will write.

Tags

creative writing, journaling, scaffolded learning, writing, writing prompts, writing skills

Here’s an example of the kinds of work students contributed to the stuck box.

My Stuck Bucket (I wrote about it earlier this week in the Daily Discomfort) is a self-made scaffold.  Everyone needs a strategy for getting unstuck, and that’s what a scaffold is, really, just a hand up, a means of moving further up the writing road. Here are the types of things I put in my stuck bucket.

• The list of potential topics I made before I started blogging, all cut up, so I can pull out one at a time. Some of the things on the list have already made their way onto the blog, so I’m not putting those in.
• Ticket stubs from events I’ve enjoyed with loved ones.
• I love buying old photos at antique stores.  I like it even better if the antique store is really cluttered and junky.  That’s where you find the best stuff.
• Maps from trips we’ve taken.
• A candy wrapper I found when I went to get the mail.
• Notes people have written me. (Write me a note and I’ll put it in my Stuck Bucket.)

When I was in the classroom, I put many scaffolds in place for student journaling.  For the first two or three weeks of school, students worked to put resources in their journals.  These included brainstorming activities about people in their lives, places, important objects, and animals.  The brainstorming was written in (or glued into) the journals, and students were free to pull from those tools anytime they had nothing to write about in journals.  Since I asked students to write for five minutes every day about the topic of their choice, this scaffold helped minimize the number of I-Don’t-Know-What-To-Write abouters.

Although I didn’t call it a Stuck Bucket, I also had a big box in the front of my room that we added artifacts to every couple of weeks. It contained many of the same types of items I’ve put in my own stuck bucket. If I went somewhere interesting over the weekend, I brought an artifact and showed it to the class, speaking about it briefly before putting it in the box. The students sometimes asked to add artifacts, and they were welcomed.

In addition, we added artifacts related to the language skills my students needed. For example, when I noticed my students didn’t know parts of speech, we read Ruth Heller’s beautifully illustrated series on parts of speech.  Students would then write their own interesting adjective, adverb, noun, prepositional phrase, etc. on three by five cards and decorate them. Those cards then became a part of our collection of artifacts.  Even though they had resources right in the front of their journals, I was able to use the big box as a means of encouraging students to transfer discreet language skills to their own writing.   It also gave my wigglers a chance to get up and stretch their legs while finding something to write about.

 I’ve spoken to many teachers about giving students the opportunity to write about whatever they want, and most of the time, the teacher’s response is, “My students would never be able to do that.”

To that I say, Poppycock!  Yes, they can! Just give them the scaffolds they need, and be patient.  You’ll be surprised at the interesting, important, and unique ways they view the world.  This daily five minutes will enrich your student’s lives.  Write with them, and it will enrich your own.

Here are some mentor texts you could use to develop student journal artifacts:

• Parts of Speech: Ruth Heller’s Parts of Speech books.
• Alliteration:  Animalia by Graham Base
• Onomatopoeia: Batman Videos from YouTube
• Personification: The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt
• Conjunctions:  Just Me and 6,000 Rats, by Rick Walton
• Hyperbole:  You Don’t Always Get What You Hope For by Rick Walton
• Antonyms: Straight and Curvy, Meek and Nervy by Brian P. Cleary
• Homonyms and Homophones: How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear?  By Brian P. Cleary
• Similes and Metaphors:  Skin Like Milk, Hair of Silk By Brian P. Cleary

I taught sixth grade, but if you teach a higher grade, don’t let that stop you from reading these great children’s books if you see they will quickly demonstrate a language skill that you notice students need to develop more fully.  It’s a painless way to reinforce the learning and the students will love it.

Paus(ed): The Comma, Can Change Everything.

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Gallagher's Write Like This, sentence construction skills, Sentence of the Week, writing skills

The playful title of today’s post, contributed by an eighth grade student, is so true.  The comma can change everything, not only in a sentence, but in our lives.  When he handed me the piece of paper with this statement written on it, he didn’t know that I’m on a year-long comma.  And one of the things I love about my comma is the opportunity to work part-time with children just like him.

This school year, I’m working on a wonderful and timely project called Write For Texas. Part of that job is to go into schools and work with teachers and students to improve both the quality and quantity of student writing.  To that end, I try writing activities with students that may not have been tried before.

Last week, I modeled an activity I called Sentence of the Week, sentence imitation work   adapted from Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This.  Gallagher contends that students learn more about how sentences are constructed when they engage in both simulated and integrated practice.  When I designed the SOW model to use with Middle School students, the sequence of events was as follows: 1. Students simulated by copying three example sentences taken from a mentor text. 2. Students noticed what the three sentences had in common, discussing these similarities with a classmate and then with the whole class.  3. After a brief mini-lesson describing the type of sentences they were looking at (Compound sentences for the 6^th graders, Complex for the 7^th and 8^th graders), they practiced writing these sentence types, first with a partner, and then alone.  I then encouraged them to use these sentence types in their future writings.  If these were the students in my classroom, I would require that they use compound or complex sentences in their writing for the next week, thus integrating their learning into their own writing.  I’m hopeful that their teachers will incorporate Sentence of the Week type activities into their lessons, because I feel that it’s a much more effective way to teach grammar than asking students (who know very little about how good sentences are constructed) to correct sentences that are written incorrectly.

http://www.amazon.com/Write-Like-This-Teaching-Real-World/dp/1571108963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414617158&sr=8-1&keywords=write+like+this

I always try to get feedback from the students before I leave, asking what they liked about the activity, what questions they have, and what they learned.  Students made some interesting connections and observations about this activity that I’d like to share.

Nuts and Bolts

Some of the student feedback referred to the nuts and bolts of sentence construction. They talked about putting commas before conjunctions, and that there were commas in the middle of sentences that started with subordinating conjunctions. While their ideas were not fully developed, the ability to make the connection between a 20 minute lesson and a concrete action on their own part is encouraging.

Thinking about Thinking

Students told about their own thinking, with one student referring to the fact that this activity had made his brain work.  Even though these comments may seem unrelated to the activity, it’s clear that the students who responded like this were thinking about their own learning rather than someone’s teaching.  That’s what they should be thinking about.

Questions

The students didn’t ask too many questions, but the questions they did ask indicated a real curiosity about how sentences worked.  They wanted to know why the conjunction and comma were used in a compound sentence, whether or not there were other ways to formulate complex sentences than the examples I showed, and other techniques for writing sentences.   I have twenty-one years of teaching experience.  I’ve never done a grammar worksheet, grammar correction exercise, or sentence diagramming activity that generated questions like this.

Confidence

If you believe you can do something, you can do it.  That’s why I cherish the type of feedback that indicates increased self-belief. Students indicated that the model was easy to understand and that the sentence types were easy to write.

Part of the personal comma is to take a close look at what’s working and what isn’t.  When I do this activity again, I will make several changes based on the student feedback.  However, I could clearly tell by looking at the comments the students made that they found the activity valuable and worthy of their time.  But I’m one of the lucky ones.  I’m getting a paycheck to try new writing activities with students. I’m trying to help, but their teachers are the ones who have to live with the intense pressures of testing and the overwhelming demands of teaching. Teachers need the comma too, to stop and think about what’s working for their students.  And they need the freedom to respond to what their students are telling them.  That’s the comma that can change everything.

pau(ed): If you have 1 you have 18 brainstorming for Why I’m Selfie-Conscious

Tags

Brainstorming, Selfies, writing, Writing Process

I  used Kelly Gallagher’s   1 topic = 18 topic brainstorming technique to think on paper before writing, “Why I’m Selfie-Conscious.”  Gallagher’s book, Write Like This, has been absolutely instrumental to the work I’m doing with the Write for Texas initiative.

My 1=18 Pre-Write
Express and Reflect: How does this topic affect my own life and experiences? How does the topic speak to my past?
• I do not like to take selfies, and what this says about me and my place in society.
• How I feel about the attachment to the phone that the selfie-selfish implies
• My thinking about how selfies have affected the learning environment
Inform and Explain: What’s my main point? How can I present this information in a surprising way? What is unexplored about this topic? What new take can I give it?
• The etymology of the word “selfie.”
• The history of the “selfie.” Is this really new? Or maybe the historical roots of it?
• Story of Myselfie- a biography the selfie. ( Maybe personify it- what would its personality be like?)
Evaluate and Judge: Is this good for me? For my family? For society? How do I judge whether this is good or bad? What is my criteria?
• The Kim Kardasian model: Selfies are sooo bad
• The Parisian family model: Selfies are benign, and sort of sad
• The 13 year old One Direction fan model: Selfies are good and fun.
Inquire and Explore: What’s the question? What’s the problem? How should it be handled?
• How far should parents go to monitor their children’s use of and receipt of selfies?
• Why do celebrities feel the need to take embarrassing selfies and then publish them to the world? Do they not feel any responsibility to be role models?
• Or what happened to the concept of role models?
Analyze and Interpret: Why is this so difficult to understand or explain? What makes it so complex?
• Why do I hate taking selfies so much? Why am I selfie-conscious?
• What’s the big uproar? Isn’t this kind of like Elvis or the Beatles?
• Why has the selfie phenomenon reached critical mass now?
Take a Stand/Propose a Solution: What should we do about this issue? Why should you (the audience) do what I want you to do?
• Proposal: Improved parental controls on children’s phones(i.e. a “kill” button to use during school hours, a parental approval of all outgoing materials on your child’s phone.)
• On why Kim Kardashian should never ever take a picture of herself again.
• Why old folks like me need to get with the program and start taking selfies so that the young folks will go off of them like they did with Facebook.
My 5 Minute Brainstorms
Express and Reflect
On Mother’s day this year, my daughter sent me a beautiful scarf. I texted her to let her know that I had gotten it and was wearing it to work that day. She texted back and said, “That’s great. Take a selfie so I can see it.” This was the first time I had even considered taking a picture of myself. I had to find the button on the phone that turned the camera around to my face, and no matter how many times I tried to take the picture, I looked awful. No I mean it. I’ll show you the picture. There was something very different about taking my own picture. It’s hard enough to make my face and body look acceptable to me when I’m getting my picture taken. Now there’s the added disappointment that I can’t make myself look like my mind’s eye view when I’m taking my own picture. I am selfie- conscious and I wonder why. It could have something to do with my age, but maybe it’s also about the world I grew up in. I could probably find a way to blame my mother for this. That would be convenient.

Inform and Explain
As long as there have been little girls, selfies have existed. I think my mother used to call it “mooning.” The British would call it swanning I think. When I was 8 or 9 I vividly remember looking at my reflection in the picture window at my grandmother’s house and taking note of the expressions on my face as I sang “Autumn Leaves,” a very contemplative piece that was too deep to belong to my childish repertoire. My daughter went through a phase (several times) in which she took pictures of herself with a camera. We’d go to the Walmart and pick up the pictures thinking they were of our latest vacation to Old Faithful or whatever and there’d be a whole roll of pics featuring the 100 faces of Amy. So I don’t think selfies are new. Only now two things are happening: these ad hoc representations of id get posted to the whole world before id has had a chance to formulate, and people don’t seem to be growing out of the fascination with their own faces. Maybe that’s why I don’t like taking selfies; it’s been years since I admired my own face freshly cleansed by intense emotion in the mirror.
Evaluate and Judge
My husband was recently in the airport in Paris. He watched as a family of four took out a device that looked like a long arm and attached their camera to it so that they could take better group selfies of themselves. While I think using our cameras for the purpose of taking family or friend photos is pretty benign, isn’t it also a little bit sad? The last time I visited Paris with my husband, we asked a stranger to take a photo of us on the steps of the Sacre Couer. Part of the expression on my face was related to the joy I shared with the stranger taking our photo. That photo says to me, “Here we all are, on this planet together, sharing this beautiful day in this beautiful place.” Have we lost that? Are we too afraid to let strangers into our lives for long enough to release the private experience for a more planetary one? This makes me feel sad.
Inquire and Explore
What happened to the idea of being a role model? My theory is that reality television has created so many celebrities that have no talent, no purpose, no ambition, that the idea of being a role model has been pushed aside for the idea of playing a role. Even though folks with notoriety are starting to reap some of what they’ve sown (Ray Rice) it seems like the only thing that is really expected of those who make a lot of money as athletes, actors and actresses, or celebrities is that they not get caught doing anything too bad. I deplore the idea that celebrities think it is okay to take naked pics of themselves and then protest when they are publicized.
Analyze and Interpret
Why has the selfie phenomenon reached critical mass right now? Or maybe it’s just that I started contemplating it just now. Maybe that is the definition of reaching critical mass and moving over into the cannon of what is a real cultural thing. Somewhere in a small town, a middle aged woman recognizes a cultural idea for the first time. Maybe that’s the tipping point. Or maybe it’s when a writer pitches a show about a selfish girl who alienates all her friends with her irresponsible use of social media and says the show will be called “selfie,” maybe that’s when we know we’ve started to reach critical mass with a new cultural thing. Of course, when it becomes a real thing, and not just something the teenagers are doing, the teenagers will find a new “thing,” that isn’t part of the mass consciousness.
But Hip-Hop is still around so who knows?
Take a Stand/Propose a Solution
From what we know about brain research, children’s brains don’t really fully develop for a long time. Some people are 24 or 25 when their brain becomes a full blown adult brain. And the last center to develop? Judgment. That’s only one of the reasons why it’s important for parents to protect their children from the Carnation Instant Breakfast philosophy. To a child, snapping a picture of yourself with your cell phone and sending it to your friends or posting it on Facebook is just something you do without thinking about the possible future consequences. Children don’t think about things like consequences, because they lack judgment. This is why I love my father’s saying: “The most amazing thing in the world is a grown man.”
________________________________________
This tool has been very helpful for me, because it gives me the freedom to explore the topic fully. Now I know that when I sit down to write about selfies, I will not only have a choice about the purpose I want the article to achieve, I will have other ideas I might not have thought of had I just started writing cold.
If I was asking students to try the “If you have one, you have 18,” activity, I would stand in the room and show them my own writing as I was doing the writing. Gallagher says that modeling has the most impact on the quality of student writing of anything that he has ever done in his classroom, and I agree. I also agree with him that it’s important to show students polished writing doesn’t come from anyone’s first draft. The sloppy copy is where all the ideas (and all the learning) reside, and students need to see sloppy

Wednesday’s Education Post.

On Wednesdays, I plan to post to the paus(ed) page, the page I’ve created for the teachers, parents, and deep thinkers in the crowd.  I’ll write about how the brain works when it learns (I’ve called this Brainy Stuff), trends in education or education research, writing processes, and activities my students have enjoyed through the years I’ve been in the classroom.

Today I proudly make my first post to the paus(ed) page.  It’s about procedural and conceptual thinking, and why we need to be able to do both in order to truly learn.  For those who haven’t died of boredom from the explanation, I invite you to join me for today’s Brainy Stuff convo on the paus(ed) page.

paus(ed): No Pain, No Brain

Tags

Conceptual Learning, Education, Learning Theories, Procedural Learning, scaffolded learning

Do you remember when you first learned how to hit a baseball?  The first time you held a bat in your hand, you were probably six or seven.  Unless you were a kinesthetic genius, you didn’t hold the bat the correct way the first time you tried to use it.  Remember how frustrated you felt when someone tried to take the bat away from you to show you what you were doing wrong? What you wanted was time to learn how to do it yourself.  Any number of people could have told you the procedure to use in order to hit a ball with a bat.  However, the only way to learn to hit a ball was to try, again and again.

In order to hit a ball with a bat, a person has to know more than procedure.  They have to understand the concept of how to hold the bat, how to swing the bat, the plane that the bat comes across, and how fast to swing the bat in order to make contact.  In order to build that conceptual knowledge, you have to take what you’ve been told about procedure and practice it until the concepts behind hitting a ball take hold in your brain.  Once you have conceptual knowledge, you can hit a baseball with a baseball bat repeatedly, for your whole life.  Without conceptual knowledge, you have to re-learn the procedures of hitting every time you pick up a bat.

In his book, Concept Rich Mathematics Instruction, author Meir Ben Hur states that when we build conceptual knowledge we actually adjust our schema, creating physical changes in our brains!    Here is a link you can follow to read more of what he says about this.   http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106008/chapters/Conceptual-Understanding.aspx  

I’m still in the pre-amoebic phase of learning about social media.  I have a cursory procedural knowledge of the buttons to push to make pictures or video appear, but I don’t know why I’m pushing those buttons.  I don’t know how portions of the internet, like facebook and pinterest, relate to one another.  And forget html.  What’s that?  Somebody poked me the other day and I had a serious moment.  Am I supposed to poke back or what?  In order to change my brain, I have to keep trying new applications related to social media.  I have to think about how those applications relate to one another. I want that new brain, because I know that without sufficient conceptual knowledge, I won’t be able to grow this blog, or sustain it as social media changes.

It took time for me to learn how to hit a baseball, and learning how to blog will take time as well. Teachers have students forty-eight minutes a day, five days a week for nine months.  We have a mountain of objectives that our States expect us to teach.  However, my teacher buds, try to remember that the only way to learn how to hit a baseball is to hold the bat yourself, miss the ball multiple times, and continually try until the process becomes automatic.  Ask yourself this question: Who is holding the bat in my classroom?