The chapter on technology in Best Practices is an adequate introduction to technology in the classroom. Every teacher must start somewhere, and we all must start, because technology is not going away. WebQuests and Collaborative Internet Projects both seem like good ways for all teachers—however technophobic (and I am a partial technophobe, so I get it)— to embrace technology. There are plenty of options out there for teachers to dip their toe into the technology pool. And dip they better, because students will come into the classroom increasingly ready for…forget ready for…demanding..a technologically-savvy classroom. My three-year-old cannot comprehend why my laptop is not a touchscreen. She can navigate the touchscreen on an iPad as though she came out of me with one attached to her. It is absolutely innate for her to interact with a touchscreen interface. Granted, she also relishes turning the pages in the books we read. “No, it’s my turn to turn the page.” is her mantra. One does not necessarily outweigh the other. But education must keep up with the ways that kids think. Kids think on Facebook, on text, certainly online.

As teachers, we have to understand and embrace the ways in which kids use technology or our lessons will be meaningless to them. On the other hand, our experience with the tangibles…books, paper, pens and pencils…are also valuable elements of the learning process and kids will respond to them. Just as my daughter would be lost without real paper pages to turn, all students need a mix of technology and classic, proven learning practices.

But, that said, students and parents benefit from something like classroom websites. In fact, it may often help build an essential part of the educational puzzle—community/parent involvement.

There are two questions/concerns that I have. The first is security. How do teachers ensure that those who comment on classroom websites through guestbooks, as in the example of the 400 year-old owl, are legitimate and not abusive or problematic in some way? What kind of protections can or should teachers put on classroom websites and how can they manage them?

Second is the fact that students think they are technology savvy, but they don’t necessarily know how to discern legitimate information from questionable information online. This is a skill that teachers have an obligation to impart on students. But teachers must know how to articulate these distinctions to students. If we are to truly embrace technology, we must teach the students who already embrace it to use it wisely.

Chapter 15 lays out many of the distinct difficulties that special needs students can have with writing. First, students with LD know less about the recursive nature of the writing process, less about the features of good writing, different genres, the role of audience and the purpose of writing. They may fail to plan and organize their writing and they make more spelling, capitalization and punctuation errors. Students with LD also struggle with revising more than students without special needs.

So, how do we focus instruction for special needs students in the mainstream classroom? The first step is proper assessment. Curriculum Based Assessment, short probes administered to the entire class weekly or biweekly, will help the teacher to identify students who are at risk or who are not progressing at the same rate and level as the class average, monitor each student’s progress, identify a student’s specific strengths and weaknesses and plan instructional changes accordingly.

Dynamic Assessment will measure how students respond to instruction. In this kind of assessment, the student is given an opportunity to rehearse what he or she plans to write and is prompted to make notes before writing; after composing a draft, the student is asked to identify problems and suggest changes. Measuring growth only in terms of what the child can do independently does not provide a full picture. Measuring what a child can do with mediation provides  an estimate of the child’s developing abilities and gives a better look at the child’s potential.

The elements of successful writing programs for special needs students don’t necessarily differ from those that succeed in improving the writing of any other student. The difference is that special needs students often require more practice to gain mastery. Successful elements include:

Direct Instruction. In comparison to peers without disabilities, students with special needs require more intense and more explicit instruction. Perhaps mini-lessons presented to selected groups within the classroom, while other groups work on other aspects of writing, would be a way to offer additional review to students with special needs.

Self-regulated strategy instruction. Self-regulation techniques are successful for all students, but students with disabilities often need more scaffolding. The PLAN and WRITE mnemonics help students remember strategy steps.

Pay attention to the prompt

List main ideas

Add supporting ideas

Number your ideas

Work from your plan to develop your thesis statement

Remember your goals

Include transition words for each paragraph

Try to use different kinds of sentences

Exciting, interesting, million-dollar words.

The author contends that these mnemonics garnered positive results for students with LD and for students at all levels.

Other techniques for improving writing in special needs students are connecting reading and writing instructions, leveraging technology and utilizing speech recognition software. For many special needs students, word processing can improve writing by removing the need to write by hand and copy revisions. Spell check can also improve spelling. But some additional challenges, such as the need to learn how to type effectively, can become additional burdens.

Speech recognition software can be a great help to special needs students as can dictation. This chapter provides the details of a study of high school students in which students with and without LD wrote a series of essays using handwriting, dictation to a person and dictation to a computer using speech recognition software. Although students without LD scored similarly using all three methods, students with LD scored higher using both forms of dictation. The highest scores were seen when dictating to another person. This method can be used to help measure content knowledge in certain special needs students.

Well, I read both chapters of Best Practices and the Nancy Rankie Shelton and Danling Fu article on Creating Space for Teaching Writing and for Test Preparation and all I can say is, assessment gives me nightmares. Since I started this reading I have dreamt every night that I’m taking a horrifying writing test of some kind or another. The two more vivid were one where I was just starting the test when the lights went out and no one seemed to notice but me. I couldn’t read the test, and I couldn’t see how anyone else could, but no one else was complaining. They just kept going. I rose my hand and tried to get the proctor to listen to what I was saying about the light situation, but he refused to see me. The next night I dreamt I was a prisoner in a school building and wouldn’t be released until I could pass this particular writing test. I kept taking it and failing even though I was positive that I had produced good writing. I couldn’t figure out what it was they wanted from me and I kept being forced into a new classroom every time I failed. Finally, I felt like I had it down, I was on a role and only had one more section of the prompt to cover before completing a perfect essay that covered every single thing they (whoever they were) could possibly want, when the test was over. I was freaking out. I was so close to finishing but they ripped the paper out of my hand and I failed again.

I don’t know exactly what this means, but I know I am feeling stressed by the fact that I seemed to retain nothing from the Best Practices chapters. I read portions of them three and four times and still it was like I was reading Greek. It just didn’t gel for me at all, which is scary because I know this is going to be a big part of my job, but I just had a complete mental block about it.

The article left me conflicted. I was glad to see that Nancy made writing workshop work for her. She seemed ready to experiment with other ways to incorporate test prep, and even seemed likely to abandon it all together if she felt confident that her writing workshop alone could prepare students for tests. It was nice to see that there is some hope for breaking out of teaching to the test. Still, my experience with field work this year showed me that students in struggling schools have been completely brainwashed into believing that tests are all that matter. In one class I observed this semester, a teacher asked her class why it’s important to learn grammar. A student answered, “So we can do better on tests.” The teacher said, “Right.” There is something so fundamentally wrong with that. In other classes, I noticed all the students care about is finding out what their grades are. One teacher purposely puts no preliminary grades into the school’s system because the students obsessively check it. There is a total disconnect between grades and the purpose of education.

In looking over Chapter 7 again, I find I do get a lot out of the strategies on revision. Certainly, I see how reading and writing work together, because without the ability to read critically, you can’t critique anyone’s writing, including your own. As a former editor, I know that revision is essential to good writing. Very few people (maybe none at all) can produce high quality writing without revision. That’s why I find it so insane that we make kids take these writing tests where time is so short that they have all of five minutes to plan and maybe five minutes to proofread, but no time at all to revise. That’s not really writing. That’s the Jeopardy of writing. Just because you can’t hit the buzzer as fast as the guy next to you doesn’t mean you don’t know the answer. Some people need more time to write and more revising time than others. That might actually mean you’re a better writer overall. But we don’t seem to care about that. Certainly, if all you’re doing is teaching to the test, there is little place for revision. Yet it is maybe the most important part of the whole process.

I’ll have to give Chapter 13 another try at another time. I just don’t know what happened there.

But there is one other thing that has been confounding me. All of the examples of actual classroom experiences in Best Practices are K-8. I’m feeling unsure about what this means for high school teachers. How is high school different from what we are learning about here? What are kids supposed to be doing in high school? In my field work, it seems they are reading short stories and catching up on what they should have already learned, but none of it is being done in a coordinated way. I’m feeling very nervous about the prospect of teaching in high school because I feel so unclear about what I would be teaching or what I could or should expect my students to know.

What’s great about the Overmeyer book for me is the real concrete advice on how to keep track of your thoughts and notes on student progress.The analogies to dancing and athletics are also right on. Writing is one of those things that you have to do badly before you do it well. There’s no way around that. So how can you give students a poor grade when the act of creating flawed writing is the only way to get the student to produce better writing?

Overmeyer’s tips for talking to students about writing, his advice on allowing students to participate in the creating of rubrics and his charts for keeping track of student progress all seem like things that can really be used in the classroom. It’s not theory.

One of my favorite things in this book is the Writing Checklist on page 33. It’s straightforward and boils writing down into something so simple, yet not simplified.

Another thing that really helped me about this book is seeing the actual student writing along with Overmeyer’s assessment of it. There were a few pieces where my first thought was, “I wouldn’t know where to start assessing this.” But Overmeyer was able to find the places where the student was doing well even if the student’s mechanics were extremely problematic. He was able to see that a student like Owen, who wrote about Brussels sprouts, was strong on detail and main idea even if his organization and mechanics needed help. So now I feel I’ll be better able to see past problems, especially on the mechanics side, and look for what is working in student writing. This was a hugely helpful book.

Another issue this book made me think about is this notion that students should write without any help whatsoever. Where on earth did this idea come from? I was a professional writer and editor for 14 years and I never wrote or edited a piece that went straight from the writer to publication without someone else stepping in and advising and changing/improving the piece first. Professional writers refer to a dictionary, a thesaurus, a style and usage manual ALL THE TIME! We consult with coworkers when we’re stuck. Reading about teachers discounting students’ accomplishments because they used a word they saw on the word wall instead of having it pop like magic out of their own brain is so incredibly ridiculous. I think this attitude toward education comes from a time when the goal of education was not to educate all kids but to weed out only those who are considered “exceptional” and throw the rest to the curb. Except “exceptional” generally meant, “just like us—the ruling class.” If that is no longer the purpose of education, then why do we still use these outdated notions toward writing. I have to admit, the writing prompts that Overmeyer mentions really freaked me out, because I don’t know if I could read that prompt and just start writing on that topic. I don’t know if I would do very well on these writing tests, although I’m pretty sure I’m a decent writer.

And another thing on punctuation. It is extraordinarily difficult to find errors in your own work, because you are so close to the content. You’ve read it so many times that you become blind to basic things that a fresh set of eyes will see right away. This is why we used to pay proofreaders in professional publishing. Now, we just accept lower quality and lots of errors. Because even an editor (as opposed to a proofreader who is only looking for mechanics and punctuation, not content) can overlook things once they get into the act of reworking sentences and what not. It’s just crazy to me to think that a student shouldn’t use tools, like reference books and peers, to improve their writing. Professional writers couldn’t work without them. Why should students?

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg, is a fantastic read for anyone looking to free themselves or their students from all the preconceived notions about what writing should be and all the doubts and criticisms that we inflict on ourselves.

It’s far from a manual on how to write. Rather, it’s a long talk with a good friend—the kind that helps free you from some hang up you hadn’t even been willing to admit had been holding you back until the two of you got together for dinner one night and just started talking.

This is not to say that there isn’t advice on writing that you can grab hold of. There is. The entire book is really about the concept of writing practice and how all writers can benefit from open, honest and regular exercise in timed writing practice. Goldberg says very early on, on page 8, “You may time yourself for ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour. It’s up to you.” And she gives concrete “directions” on how to go about starting writing practice. She says,

“1. Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)

2. Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)

3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.)

4. Lose control.

5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.

6. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

Goldberg says the aim of this process is, “to burn through to first thoughts,” (pg. 8). First thoughts are, “the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash,” (pg. 9).

Goldberg compares writing practice to physical conditioning. “Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen” (pg. 11).

From these early discussions on the reasons for and benefits of writing practice, the book takes off on a meandering path, alternating between chapters that focus on strategies for getting the creative juices flowing—like why to get out and write in restaurants and how to do it to best effect—and others that tap into the spiritual side of writing.

My personal favorite of these Zen-inspired spiritual chapters is A New Moment (pg. 120). “Tulips come up in the spring for no reason. Of course, you planted bulbs and now in April the earth warms up. But why? Becasue the earth spins around the sun. But why? For no reason except gravity. Why gravity? For no reason. And why did you plant red tulip bulbs to begin with? For beauty, which is itself and has no reason. So the world is empty. Things rise and fall for no reason. And what a great opportunity that is! You can start writing again at any minute. Let go of all your failures and sit down and write something great. Or write something terrible and feel great about it.”

This book touches on every aspect of writing—the where, as in creating a writer’s studio, writing in restaurants, writing in laundromats; the how, as in tips for adding detail to your writing, as simple as, “Don’t say ‘fruit.” Tell what kind of fruit,” (pg. 77); the why, as in, “Baker Roshi from San Francisco Zen Center said, ‘why? isn’t a good question.’ Things just are. Hemingway has said, “Not the why, but the what.” Give the real detailed information. Leave the why for psychologists. It’s enough to know you want to write. Write.”

What is best about this book is that it mixes a discussion of the spiritual aspects of writing with more practical considerations, like how to add detail and the need for frequent writing practice. If this book is on your shelf, you will be able to pull it down whenever you’re feeling stuck, in need of inspiration or just want to get your mind going. Each chapter is self contained. If you flip through it and open to the beginning of any chapter, you will find a few pages of succinct, heartfelt and caring advice from one writer to another. Somehow, I believe, whatever chapter you stop on, it will be exactly what you need at that moment in time. It’s just that kind of book.

I read Chapter 3 in Best Practices this week, and I found the concrete, step-by-step approach to teaching narrative writing to be very helpful. There were a few areas of confusion for me though. First was the rubric on page 60. I didn’t quite grasp how this was supposed to be used.

I also fell off a bit of a cliff on page 66 when the authors discussed the phenomena of students falling back in competency as they began to incorporate more complexity into their writing. It’s not that I didn’t understand the concept. It’s just that I didn’t quite get what a teacher’s strategy should be for this. Should we circle back and review concepts already covered or press on? Still, it’s very enlightening to know that this is a normal part of the process.

I found the storyboards a wonderful way to help students visualize the progression of a narrative. Also, the story plot planning sheet and the cartoon exercise are other great ideas for helping kids visualize., which I’m sure is a necessary element for many kids to be able to wrap their heads around the concepts.

One other part I didn’t quite understand was at the very end. The authors discuss the fact that their students performed better than other classes using different techniques. “The two instructional approaches differed as follows: focus on plot tension versus temporal event sequence, story character versus story problem, characters’ inner mental worlds versus outer physical worlds.” I’m not sure I even know exactly which is which. It would be nice to know how less successful techniques differ from these techniques.

I guess my other big question about all these readings is that the majority of them seem to be geared toward elementary school students. I wonder how these techniques would work in a high school classroom. At this point, and given my recent experience with field work in high school, I have no idea what high school students are meant to be learning. Should they already be proficient writers? What percentage of high school students are actually where they should be in writing skills? Certainly the students I’m seeing in Bridgeport aren’t there, but who is? And how do we handle older students who are significantly behind in writing skills? Seems like in Bridgeport they are closing their eyes and pushing the kids out into community college to hopefully learn the skills they need there. That’s just my first impression so it may be an unfair characterization, but my question remains. How does most of this relate to the high school level?

I also read “Multiple Literacies in the Content Classroom: High School Students’ Connections to U.S. History” by Jane Hansen. I guess my biggest impression about this is why is this so unique in our classrooms? It seems so obvious that kids will not be motivated by dry, boring textbooks that they know are only telling them half the story. Tell them the truth and they’ll be compelled by it. My daughter is three and she already knows when I’m lying to her. You don’t get anywhere with young people by underestimating their ability to handle complexity. In fact, all they do is shut down because they know you’re patronizing them. I remember that vividly when I was young. There was nothing more frustrating than knowing your parents were keeping you in the dark about something.

Erika Pierce’s (or Price?) methods clearly work since all but one of her students passed the state test. Since what we care about today is passing tests, why don’t we just get over our own discomfort and let kids read the truth. It seems to work.

How does one motivate a student to write? What I took away from Chapter 10 in Best Practices is that students will be motivated to write if the writing is meaningful and interesting to them, but that’s not quite all. There must also be a real reason to write whether it’s to solve a problem, to think through a theory or idea or to communicate with the public through a published piece of writing (even if that publication is only read within the class or school.)

In addition, students must feel competent or they will not want to write. This reminds me of how many people feel about math. Maybe it’s because I tend to be in classes with English majors, but I’m very used to hearing people say, “I hate Math. I’m terrible at it.” It’s a way to shut down and protect yourself from struggling and failing at something. But many people do the same thing with writing. It’s important to make sure students understand that everyone struggles with writing—even the greatest writers.

But this also means making them aware that writing is hard work but that nothing worthwhile in life comes easily. (That right there may be the single most important thing any of us can teach our students, I think.) On page 219 the writers remind us that, “When learning to view writing as a meaningful activity, students should also be helped to recognize and face its complexity.”

There was a wonderful example of this in Grammar to Enhance and Enrich Writing by Constance Weaver, which I read for my grammar class last fall in which a beautiful piece of student writing was used to start the chapter. It was about the student’s grandmother passing away. (Damned if I can find it in the book right now.) Later in the chapter, the original draft was shown. It was riddled with grammatical mistakes and punctuation issues. It was the barest bones of what it was to become through revision. I think it would be helpful to show “before and after” writing from previous students who are willing to share their work so that students can see that no one produces a beautiful piece of writing without many revisions.

I was intrigued by the notion of collaborative writing, because I don’t have much experience with that. But it builds on another element, which is the social aspect of writing and the fact that writing isn’t only about expressing emotion, which I think is sometimes the only form that writing takes in school. You spill your guts about something you’re very passionate about. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there are so many other ways that writing can be done, such as “playing with writing,” which is discussed on page 212.

This leads to something that seems to be becoming a theme. Writing needs to happen in every subject area. It must be integrated into everything that students learn. In Chapter 12 Dolores Perin discusses writing to learn as an essential element in adolescent writing. This really made me think about how stunted a person’s entire academic life can be if they aren’t able to translate their thoughts and ideas into written form. If they can’t summarize or ask and answer their own questions, than how can students form theories and test them in science or grasp complicated mathematical ideas? I wrote in the margin of page 257 under Recommendation 11: Writing to Learn, “Again integration. Science teacher should be reporting to English teacher about kids’ progress.” It seems essential to me that teachers in the middle and high school level communicate with each other about kids’ progress, not just to monitor their reading and writing proficiency but many other factors as well, not the least of which is emotional well-being. But I’m getting a bit off topic there. Perin says it best, “Not only should content-area teachers teach writing skills, but language arts and literacy specialists should teach writing using tasks, vocabulary, and reading material drawn directly from discipline courses.” Again, this is a whole school challenge. The question is, what can teachers do when they don’t have the support of the whole school? Or better yet, how do they fight to change the culture of the school from the inside and get more teachers working together?

The final realization that Chapter 12 brought to bear for me is that every student is an individual and different approaches must be tried for different students. Hence the eleven recommendations—and probably many more—must be in your bag of tricks at all times.

What is most interesting about the  strategies and research laid out in Chapters 1 and 2 of Best Practices in Writing Instruction is how intuitive it all seems. It makes logical sense that students who write often about topics that engage them and receive regular support, instruction and guidance from their teachers would become better writers than those who don’t practice and don’t receive guidance from teachers.

It seems from this reading that we know how to improve kids’ writing. Write often, give feedback and instruction and use the plan, draft, revise method. The larger challenge appears to be incorporating these methods on a school-wide basis. The key to true writing improvement, according to Chapter One, is that writing instruction is consistently good in every grade. This seems counter to most of our experiences as students. More than anything else, the story of American education is about that one great teacher—the one that made a difference. But the model described in Chapter One of Best Practices is about expanding that great experience to a student’s entire educational career. And it makes sense. We all have great memories of that “one great teacher.” But was that really enough? Maybe it was for some of us, depending on our family situation or what additional things we had going for us in addition to that inspirational teacher. But a lot of kids don’t have much else. They need consistency. Not one great year and that’s it.

That said, I loved these chapters because they included clear, research-driven methods that really work. If kids write often, if they receive instruction and feedback from teachers as well as peers, if their work is celebrated by being displayed throughout the classroom and the school, if they plan, draft and revise, if they are allowed to make mistakes when those mistakes are leading them to higher-level writing, if they are allowed to write about what interests them, they are much more likely to improve as writers.

The challenge for teachers, I would imagine, is to find the time to write more and to get the support of the entire school. How else can you integrate writing into all subjects—at least in the middle and high-school levels—without the support of all teachers in all subject areas?

My favorite quote from Chapter 2 is in the conclusion. “Writing is such a complex task that it cannot be taught once and for all—that is, we are all apprentices in learning to write and in writing to learn.” The key to successfully implementing all of the strategies in Chapter 2 is letting the student drive the process. Let them make mistakes if those mistakes are leading them to experiment with more complicated grammatical structures. Let them reject revision suggestions if they feel strongly about it. Make it personal and make it engaging.

Which, of course, brings us to the Yancey piece. The most engaging writing that many students do is texting, Facebook messages and the like. This is the toughest idea for me, because I don’t think I’ve wrapped my head around how to incorporate all of the new media options out there into the classroom. It doesn’t seem like anyone really has yet, but it’s a fascinating discussion. It’s beneficial to be reminded that the role of writing has been evolving for as long as there has been a written alphabet. So it’s only natural that we struggle with how to define, embrace and teach the new media writing that kids participate in nowadays. But it is essential that we strive to find ways to embrace it. I’m less optimistic than the author that young people will find ways to turn this new community-driven communication into something positive. That’s not because I don’t have faith in young people. It’s because I don’t put too much faith in anyone right about now. But I would be thrilled to be proven wrong, kids.

Just finished reading Ralph Fletcher’s book, A Writer’s Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You and I’ve already poured quite a bit out into my own writer’s notebook. It feels good. For a long time I’ve been purposely not writing because I don’t want to face so many of my thoughts. But it’s not just that. Somehow I started feeling like anything that came out of me and onto the page had to be perfection on arrival. I know better than that intellectually, but emotionally I clung to that hang up. Fletcher’s book really helped me accept how closed off I’ve become. I wasn’t always like this, but I’d say it’s been a good ten years.

What I liked best about Fletcher’s book is that there is no judgement. If doesn’t matter how good, bad or silly your ideas are. Writing is a process and most of what comes out might not be “good.” But what does good mean anyway? If it came from you, it’s good, whether it becomes part of a finished piece of writing is sort of secondary. You can’t ever make a finished piece of writing without being open to whatever thoughts and ideas are flying around in your head. I love that Fletcher shares some ideas for stories he’s written in his own writer’s notebook in their most primitive form. I’m thinking specifically of his idea for a story about a place where words grow like plants. He admits that the idea might be silly, but I think that’s the point. A lot of ideas sound silly in their infancy. We’re all silly in our infancy. But if you aren’t brave enough to be silly, corny, stupid, embarrassed, even ashamed, then how will you ever be creative? I have to learn to be open to this. And I think that will be the theme of this blog: Learning to overcome fear. I am terrified of failure, and I have to get over it—here and now. Writers fail. And teachers fail. Every lesson can’t be successful. I can’t go into teaching thinking every day will be magical. And if I’m not willing to fail, I’m never going to be any good at this. By this I mean teaching, writing and life in general.

So thanks Ralph Fletcher. I will continue keeping my writer’s notebook. And I will keep your book close by to remind me that being fearless means dropping the pretense and letting yourself be silly sometimes.