Rubric Response

I am now completely convinced that I need to use rubrics more in my teaching. Previously I viewed rubrics as simply a way to justify the grade I gave a student; now, I see them as a tool for teaching and guiding my students' learning. A well-designed rubric helps them know what they should be working toward. It provides a standard to measure up to. I would like to try designing rubrics with my students, as recommended by the article, but it sounds tedious and time-consuming.

I am happy to have learned about rubistar, as well, because it gives me a starting place for designing my own rubrics. I had never thought to have rubrics for performance attendance, but it is a great idea I plan to implement.

Emily Duvall Workshop Response

Emily's workshop and article

Emily's workshop really opened my eyes to ways we can help prepare students for state writing tests. I appreciate that writing-test writing was considered as its own genre. This helps students separate it from their normal class writing.

I also liked how she helped us see that we can really write about almost anything. Doing these exercises frequently will help students pick a topic or stance quickly when they are taking a writing test. This activity also helped us keep humor in our writing process.

It was also interesting when she helped us to discover that almost any topic will work in almost any genre and mode. Again, this was liberating because it made me realize that a test prompt can be answered in many different ways, most of which are far more interesting than anything I would have written as a test-taker.

Personal Writing Book, part 2

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Three points from the second third

On building dialogue: "You listen to how people really talk, and then learn little by little to take someone's five-minute speech and make it one sentence, without losing anything." I think that in order to become skilled at writing dialogue, I need to actually write down what people say and go through this process, hanging on to their voice but compacting the ideas they said.

Lamott asks the question, "How do you know when you're done?" As I have tried to finish up my writing pieces over the past few days, this question has frustrated me. Like she says, it is similar to tucking an octopus into bed. It is impossible to have all of the loose ends tied up perfectly. There is no such thing as perfect writing; an author could revise over and over and never be completely satisfied with the result. Lamott's solution is that you are done when there is "no more steam in the pressure cooker." I've felt this, and I think she said it very well.

This section of the book also contained some helpful tips for thinking like a writer. First, we should always be looking at the world around us as potential material. To go along with this, it is beneficial to carry index cards at all times so that we can write down those perfect phrases or bits of dialogue or description we think up at random moments. I think this would be easy to put into practice, but it would be harder for me to always have a pen nearby. This is something I want to work on. When we were backpacking last time, I had some great writing ideas but no way to record them, and it was very frustrating to sit down and realize all of the ideas are gone.

Bonnie Warne Articles Response

Teaching Conventions in a State-Mandated Testing Context

In this article, Warne does a great job of demonstrating ways to connect student learning of literature, writing, and testable conventions. When students are immersed in good examples of how to use different conventions, they will begin to imitate and include these ideas in their own writing. The teacher just needs to be deliberate about naming the strategies and conventions that the students are working with. I am not sure how much this applies to my current classroom, but I know it is important that I expose kids to listening examples of the concepts I am teaching them to use in their own playing. Including the proper vocabulary not only helps them to do well on assessments, but also allows us to communicate with one another.

Writing Steps: A Recursive and Individual Experience

As a student, I was taught that the writing process was supposed to proceed in order, step by step. This always made it difficult for me to get started, because I felt like my first completed draft represented the final shape of the writing. Now I understand the slinky idea, and I really appreciate Warne's idea of talking with students "about the differences between the general writing process steps and what might happen as they wrote." This helps kids understand that it's okay for the processes of writing to not always "proceed in a linear sequence." These ideas are freeing for writers of any age.

Harper Response

Laura Harper's The Writer's Toolbox: Five Tools for Active Revision Instruction

The bulk of Harper's article is spent explaining five tools from Barry Lane's book: questions, snapshots, thoughtshots, exploding a moment, and making a scene. Since I have already responded to Lane's descriptions of these tools, I will focus on what Harper brought us that was new.

First, she provided new examples for each tool, bringing them to life and helping us to see their usefulness. Second, she introduced the idea of a writer's toolbox. In her case it is a manila envelope that is given to each student and gradually filled with cards (tools) that provide revision strategies. This is a great idea because it allows students to independently remember strategies they can use to improve their writing. I think having the cards with their own envelope would also help students to stay organized so they can easily refer to the tools.

I really like the writer's toolbox concept, and I think it would even be worth using in my music classes. This also got me thinking about creating a musician's toolbox to help kids practice their instruments more effectively.

Finally, associated with each tool in the writer's toolbox is a symbol that can be quickly drawn on a student's paper, eliminating the need to write "describe with more details" or other lengthy instructions.

Calkins 13-14 Response

Lucy Calkins' Conferring and Learning to Confer (chapters 13 & 14)

Chapter 13, "Conferring," reminds us that our ultimate goal is to help our students become independent writers. It doesn't take long for them to progress toward this goal by conferring with themselves. With just a little practice, most kids can think of questions other students would ask them and use these ideas to keep improving their writing.

I love the image Calkins gives us: "Writing allows us to put our thoughts on the page and in our pockets; writing allows us to pull back and ask questions of our thoughts." It is hard to grasp the idea of my thoughts being made tangible and placed in a pocket, but it reminds us just how amazing written language (even spoken language, really) is.

Calkins also has great things to say about getting to know our student writers, listening to them, and learning to tell them what they need to hear rather than what we want fixed in their work. Then she ends with the reminder that we are not trying to build classrooms of cloned teachers, but classrooms of independent thinkers who can write with their own voices.

Chapter 14 takes us through different types of conferences and how to use them. It begins, though, with the caution that "we try so hard to be helpful we forget to be real" and "Sometimes the purpose of a conference is simply to respond." No matter how much we want to improve a student's work or increase a student's learning, we must remember that building a relationship with them and recognizing them as valuable individuals is crucial to their success and ours.

The various types of conferences and their descriptions were also valuable, and I can see that it will take practice to become skilled at productively conferring with students.

Lane 6-7 Response

Barry Lane's After the End, chapters 6-7

I see Chapter 6 as being divided into two main sections: shape and point of view. I didn't get much from the graphing examples (maybe they'll hit me differently next time I read this), but moment mapping worked very well for me and I would definitely try it with students. It promotes deeper thinking and helps writers make their work more cohesive. I think this is part of what Lane called "visualizing the shape of the pieces they work on."

The second part of Chapter 6, in which point of view is addressed, also challenges writers to think more deeply. Changing a story to a new point of view makes a huge difference in the impact of the story, and it seems like a fairly advanced skill to me. I wonder how old kids need to be to do this well.

In Chapter 7, Lane provides some great thoughts on conferencing. I like the idea of the absentee conference, because often students know what they should be doing or how to help themselves, but they don't realize it.

"Respond to a student's writing as a reader--not as a teacher" is another important piece of advice that applies to almost any subject. I need to respond to my students' playing (at least some of the time) as a listener rather than as a teacher. Stepping into the consumer role helps us make our feedback more relevant to the student.

Finally, "Create the Atmosphere" has me thinking about what I could do to make my room more conducive to writing. I think adding some touches of comfort could also help students be less resistant to writing in band.

Lain response

Sheryl Lain's Reaffirming the Writing Workshop for Young Adolescents

At the beginning of this article, Lain says that many teachers are nervous about "having middle level students behind the wheel." I am fairly comfortable with this, but I've been concerned that administrators or other teachers will think it shows that I'm not doing my job. It makes me feel a lot better to read all of these articles that show it to be a sound practice.

It seems like many teachers struggle with finding strategies that work for our unmotivated students, especially since most people who end up teaching were easily successful in school. Lain acknowledges this challenge and encourages us that using writing workshop can help us to reach even the students that challenge us the most.

I really like what she says about minilessons: "The recurring pattern. . . is to introduce the skill and then apply it to something the students have an interest in." This goes for music, too. Students learn much better when I teach them something and then let them use the concept in music they actually like. Combining music and writing, I am sure the students will learn most successfully when I let them write what they choose about the music they like.

I have hated writing poetry most of my life and wondered what it was really good for. Lain compares moving words with rearranging furniture. This week I finally experienced this for myself, and I discovered that this really involves some higher-level thinking as we decide what sounds the best and what provides the best meaning. It is also kind of fun!

Rief response

Linda Rief's What's Right with Writing

Rief packed a lot of information into her article. I related strongly with her on the topic of receiving A's on papers that are bland and meaningless, void of my voice. I also was deprived of constructive comments from teachers who could have helped me to improve. I am determined not to do this to my own students!

"Writing is thinking" came up several times in the article. This is one reason I really want to get the kids writing more in my music classes. I know that writing will help them think deeply about the music and what they are learning.

Students need choice in what they write, and I need to do some more thinking about how this will look in band. One thing I plan to do is have them write about the music they are playing. An easy way to incorporate choice would be to let them choice which song to write about, but that feels superficial to me if I am still "forcing" them to write about a song.

My favorite line in this article was the following: "Do it [writing] at every opportunity. And then do it some more." This is helping me, so I have no doubt it will help the students as well.

Calkins "Workshop Environment" response

Lucy Calkins' Establish a Predictable Workshop Environment

(chapter 11 of "The Art of Teaching Writing")

Calkins immediately had my attention with the description of all the creativity she put into teaching creative writing, only to realize that what the students really needed was a predictable and consistent environment. The context is different, but sometimes I think my "creativity" undermines student learning.

I appreciated the Nancie Atwell story where Graves tells her that the reason she succeeds as a writing teacher is her organization. I used to think I was organized, but it would be hard to tell that at school. I really need to work on organization and predictability.

I am really trying to figure out how to find time for students to spend in quality writing during my classes. I need to do some more thinking to determine what the "trash" is in each class period that could be replaced with relevant writing. It's hard for me to picture using writing workshop on a regular basis the way Calkins describes it. I am rethinking everything about writing in the content areas and trying to process how it fits with the classes I teach. Figuring this out feels like a slow process, but, as was quoted from Eve Merriam's poem, "It takes a lot of slow to grow."

Lane 1-5 Response

Barry Lane's After the End, chapters 1-5

Even after reading only five chapters of Barry Lane, I am learning a lot about how to write better and help my students write better. First, I really appreciated the section on leads in the first chapter. The bare-bones story he tells his students about the dog is a great example of how to find questions that will make the story more interesting and then choose one of these questions to answer as a lead. On page 17 he writes, "If they can find the right first sentence, the right lead, the piece will write itself." This is exactly the reason I have always struggled with getting started writing - I know I need a "perfect" first sentence, but I had never realized that asking questions about my subject will take me there.

I also felt that the chapter on snapshots and thoughtshots was very useful. Going back and forth between the "mountain" and the "sea" is something I have never done well in my writing. The quote from Carolyn Chute on page 31 really hit me: "What they do to show the big picture is to use details they see with the small lens." This has challenged me to look at every detail I do or don't include in my writing and decide what to do with it based on the meaning it brings to the piece.

There are so many practical ideas Lane gives for bringing his ideas to the classroom that this is a book I will definitely refer back to over and over.

Emig Reflection

Janet Emig's Non-Magical Thinking

I find it interesting that all three of our theoretical authors so far (Emig, Britton, and Moffett) have tried to explain writing developmentally or progressively and all three approach it so differently even though they seem to be basically in agreement.

Emig's statement that "to believe that children learn because teachers teach. . . is to engage in magical thinking" is a little scary but also relieving in a way. It is scary because we would all like to believe that our teaching causes students to learn, and it feels like I am a failure as a teacher if I don't cause my students to learn. It is also relieving because it reminds us that even if we do a terrible job of teaching, it will not automatically cause students to fail at writing for the rest of their lives.

Although I don't see myself teaching students this young, I was fascinated by the way Emig described the development of written language in young children, from gestures to objects representing other things in play to actual written language. The section on the importance of fantasy play has made me feel more strongly about encouraging my own children (when the time comes) to play and use their imaginations freely.

I also am increasingly understanding the importance of my students seeing me as a writer. I especially realize that I need to write about music if I am going to ask my students to do so. I plan to start that this summer.

Assessing growth in writing completely makes sense to me, but the idea is very intimidating. I would like to look into the references Emig provides on this subject.

Britton Reflection

James Britton's Now That You Go to School

Note to April: This paragraph is the summary you don't want to read but I feel compelled to write. Skip forward for reflection. Every time I read this essay or discuss it, I become more confused. In my opinion (which is newly formed and still changing), the difference between transactional, expressive, and poetic writing is the audience's reaction. With expressive writing, the audience or lack of audience makes no difference whatsoever. Transactional writing requires the audience to become participants in order for something to be accomplished. Poetic writing leaves the audience focused on the shape of the writing itself; the audience is a group of spectators rather than participants.

I guess my confusion is this: Britton seems to say that the distinction between the types is based on audience as I just explained, but he also seems to place writing along a continuum based on how much the author is revealed (see pages 7-8). Perhaps this is really a two-dimensional graph?

I am beginning to understand how to use this in my classroom, asking students to write for different audiences and require different responses of their audiences. I need to include writing for the sake of its art (poetic) as well as writing for the author's pleasure (reflective) and persuasive pieces (transactional). As I continue reading and discussing this topic, my understanding will surely become clearer and my classroom applications more useful.

Moffett Reflection

James Moffett's I, You, and It

Moffett makes a lot of sense to me. In the same way that we start out self-centered and gradually become aware of the world outside us, writing should start close to us, with personal subjects and a close audience. I don't remember learning to write in this way, but the progression is very logical.

When I first read the essay, I found myself picturing going through the progression of close to distant for every assignment. After discussion and rereading, I now understand that this progression would be used gradually with each group of students, over the course of the year or term. This definitely makes more sense than my initial visualization.

The challenge is in taking the time to build from the ground up with each new class. It seems like this would be easy with young students, but it is hard to remember to have a group of ninth-graders begin the year with personal responses and then move out to essays only gradually, especially when it feels like they should already be to that point developmentally. However, I think the progression is a sound idea and builds confidence as well as competence.

Personal Writing Book, part 1

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Three points from the first third

1. Bad first drafts - just get it down on paper; it's okay if it's awful
I think I'm actually getting better about this. I know that once I've got something on my paper/computer, I can move on to making it pretty. It's like sight-reading hard music - it's not pretty, but it has to happen sometime. I remember my high school speech teacher had a poster up that said "Never fall in love with your first draft."

2. Writing a lot will get you to some usable material
"There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go - but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages." (p.23)

3. Perfectionism: get over it
"Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up… Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground… messes are the artist's true friend… We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here… and what we're supposed to be writing."