Ideas to Inspire

I’ve been able to go into two classrooms this week where the teachers are assigning multigenre types of research projects for the end of the year. Multigenre, loosely defined, means many types of different writing. Although all the projects start with writing, though, the projects should be a more complex, multilayered, multivoiced blend of genres.

In doing multigenre research, students don’t necessarily focus on the same content material, but multigenre research allows students to

• learn how to conduct research in search of answers to questions that they pose
• learn to self-evaluate by monitoring their own progress and set goals for themselves throughout the unit
• practice using technology skills in a variety of ways
• develop thinking and problem-solving skills by delving further into a topic that they are already familiar with or are interested in learning more about
• learn organizational skills
• learn the skills needed to collaborate

The outcomes of multigenre projects are ideals, and not all students will get the same satisfaction, or rigor out of their project, but teachers can keep several things in mind in order to keep their sanity. First, choose topics that students are interested in, or topics that have validity and usefulness for them. Second, have a clear rubric, but also allow flexibility. Don’t get upset if someone wants to do something that is not on your extensive list of options. Their passion for making iMovies could expand your list of options. Make sure students are balancing exploration with mastery. If the MLA format is important for all research, then have them practice until they show they can master it.  If you are not as picky about the elements of a poem, then let them go wild.

If you’re interested in learning more about multigenre projects, let me know. I have some resources for you.

It’s almost the end of the year and I’m sure you’re making summer plans, but if you’re looking for a simple graphic organizer to keep students focused on the higher level thought processes, try the “say, mean, matter” form attached.

How it works:

Students fill out the type of document and title/description on top, then move one to the first of three columns.

Column 1: “What does it say?” One social studies teacher used artifacts instead of documents, so the first column read “What is it?” (Draw and identify)

Column 2: “What does it mean?” The revised artifact form said “Where were the materials gathered from?” and “What was it used for?”

Column 3: “Why does it matter?” (”How was this artifact essential to daily life?”)

Try it, change it, adapt it, play with it.

say.pdf

This spring break is unique in that because I have no students, I have no typical preparation or grading to do, so I’ve been spending my evenings reading and thinking about the craft of teaching, and especially the skill of questioning.Einstein has much to teach us about questioning.

If I were given a problem and one hour to solve it, I should spend the first fifty-five minutes asking questions and the last five minutes using those questions to solve it.
–Albert Einstein

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
–Albert Einstein

Information is not knowledge.
–Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
–Albert Einstein

The only source of knowledge is experience.
–Albert Einstein

So what do Einstein’s quotes have to do with us as teachers?  We must continue to be curious, continue to be learners and pass that curiosity onto our students. We can’t just give lip service to the idea of “lifelong learning.” What did you learn about yourself, your craft, your students? Once we learn it, we must share it with our colleagues so that the curiosity gets passed on. If  we have a fabulous experience in our classroom, but nobody else knows about it, did it really happen? It is not our duty to share our “aha” moments, but it should be done out of love – love for our students as well as our colleagues.

Love is a better teacher than duty.
–Albert Einstein

Today, February 12, 2009 is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two of our greatest wordsmiths.

President Barack Obama is linked with Lincoln not only because under Lincoln’s presidency the slaves were emancipated, but because Obama, like Lincoln is a great rhetorical orator (persuader). Lincoln is remembered for his  phrases like “four score and seven years ago,” “the mystic chords of memory,” “the better angels of our nature,” and “with malice toward none.”

Darwin is not known for his oratory skill, but his contribution to our lexicon is astounding. His discoveries were so novel that he needed to create words to explain his findings. No doubt his most famous contribution to the lexicon is natural selection, a term that he first used in an 1857 letter before elaborating on the concept two years later in The Origin of Species. A related term often attributed to Darwin, survival of the fittest, was not actually his coinage: Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 Principles of Biology, a work that connected Darwin’s natural selection to Spencer’s economic theories. (Darwin himself borrowed the phrase back in the fifth edition of The Origin of Species, published in 1869.) Phylogeny, referring to the evolutionary development of a species or higher taxonomic group, was also a Darwinian neologism.

Other terms first recorded in Darwin’s work had to do with the mechanics of biological descent, such as the verbs interbreed and cross-fertilize. (Darwin wrote a whole treatise in 1876 on “the effects of cross and self-fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom.”) He was also the first to write in English about the archaeopteryx, a fossil find that helped bolster his evolutionary theories. (The paleontologist Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer is credited with introducing the Greek-derived term archaeopteryx first in German.)

Darwin imported many foreign words into English in his work as a naturalist. For instance, in his journal recording the famed voyage of the HMS Beagle, he wrote of alfalfa, a Spanish word that ultimately derives from Arabic and Persian. Even more surprisingly, Darwin was the first known English writer to use the Spanish word rodeo, which appeared in a Beagle journal entry after he observed a cattle round-up in central Chile.

While “talking shop” with Ipo, she talked about her frustration with the writing quality in her classroom and she felt like she was spending so much time commenting on student essays only to get the next draft back with the same problems. Have you too been working on thesis statements and supporting details all year and the students just don’t seem to get it once you move on to the next topic? Do you feel like you’re working harder on grading the essays than they are at writing the essays?

For the students that are on the receiving end of your comments, what is their reason for “not getting it?” Students may be just as confused by teacher comments as we are on their performance. I know. I’ve been known to use my red pen (or purple, once I stopped using red) to vent my frustration at their “not getting it.” I would scribble profound comments like “awk,” “frag,” “unclear thesis” and “support”. My most famous comments: “vd” (verbal diarrhea) and “??!” So where’s the middle ground that will move students forward not to write a better essay, but to BE a better writer?

The English Journal (Vol. 90, no.1, 9/00, pp. 94-101) published an article, “Beyond the Red Pen: Clarifying Our Role in the Response Process” by Bardine, Bardine and Deegan that talks about their research on response. The first implication in the classroom is that while written commentary is an important type of response, extensive research shows that conferencing is an excellent way for teachers and students to dialogue about writing and begin the revision process. Conferences should be short and focused on the students’ needs, not on the teachers’ needs for the student. Donald Murray lists two good starter questions to begin a conference: “What did you learn from this piece of writing?” or “What do you intend to do in the next draft?” Jerelyn and I team conferenced and that took half the time, but it let us quickly gauge which students were on the right path and which students needed a major overhaul.

Besides using conferencing to cut down on the “write everything that is wrong on this paper” style of response, some other implications for our teaching from the article:

• We need to understand our own motivations and commenting style as we respond to our writers. Do we emphasize content or form in our responses? Are we emphasizing in class what we are responding to on students’ papers?
• Students will rarely look at comments if they don’t have the chance to revise, so give them the opportunity whenever possible. (I used to comment on their final as if they would take that and apply it to the next paper — NO).
• If at all possible, allow student plenty of time to write in class. This allows you to be available for conferences within the class period and it gives you an opportunity to do corrective mini lessons if you see students coming in with similar problems (like no transitions).
• Students want specifics and clarity in the comments teachers write on their paper. I used to sometimes use stars or wavy lines just as a note for myself so I knew what passage I wanted to focus on during conferencing, otherwise, “awk”, “weak thesis” or “support” doesn’t work without face-to-face.
• Continually emphasize, both in word and action, how our comments can be helpful for our students in successive drafts as well as future papers.
• Praise students when it is warranted. And even with praise, be specific, don’t just write “good.” What’s good about it? It’s why English teachers gave up the red pen, the whole bleeding paper thing.
• Mini-lessons and conferences used in conjunction with written comments actually are a powerful tool AND they cut down on your time with individual papers. If you see a common error like passive sentences, do a mini lesson and then have students find examples in their papers or their partners’ papers right then and there. Have them practice what they learned in the mini lesson right away by fixing it.

One last suggestion from Ipo: send the paper home and let the parents be a mentor reader for the student so that they can also conference about the writing. I would add that if you’re going to do this, it’s best to send them home with an ALMOST final draft rather than a rough, include a copy of the rubric and the assignment, and maybe some guidelines. For example in my teacher and peer conference, the writer asks for specific help (not “everything”) and the focus is only on that specific thing. It protects the kids from overly critical parent editors (like me).

As always, if you want to try something, let me know. And if you want a copy of the article, I can do that too.