Eleven O'Clock Blog

How can I help students write varied texts effectively for a wide variety of audiences and purposes?

For the unit I just completed with my tenth grade honors class, I created lesson plans centered around this question.

First: I acknowledge what I’m trying to do.

My teaching style is more democratic, and I think high school students want respect more than just about anything. So I’ll talk to them about what I want to do– I want to get them writing for a wide variety of audiences and purposes, because it will benefit them if they can do this. It will benefit them GREATLY, as a student, citizen, employee, parent, etc.

So– first, I talk to my class about what the goal is.

Then, I come up with creative, interactive ways to do that. For my unit, I took each day to do a different writing task. On Monday it was cover letters. On Tuesday, we wrote out speeches for a debate based on the book Night. On Wednesday we were writing emails to our boss and co-workers, and Thursday we were writing tips to our fellow students on public speaking.

I think this worked well, really well, because the students knew it was for their benefit.

That’s how I get the students on board. Tell them the purpose– in my experience, everyone wants a sense of purpose. Show them you respect their time with you– that you want to use that time to teach them, to help them. Even the more resistant students can’t argue with that.

One way I think we can get students to start developing their ability to use and appreciate language is to have them write about something they care about. Why not?

And who says that professional writing, or writing for an SAT essay or an SOL, can’t be fun? Why can’t that loathed five-paragraph-essay be about something they are interested in?

At least at first, I think students should be writing about what matters to them. Just allow them some time to get used to a different kind of language– a written, Standard American English language– and walk around in it for a while, but in whatever shoes they like, if you will.

Eventually, they will need to write an essay on a novel or short story or poem they read. But even then, why not have choices? If open prompt is too vast for the class, bullet out a list of paper topics and let them choose what to write about.

Finally, students will be given specific topics that they will have to write essays on. If not in your class, we all know they will on their SAT and SOL essay prompts. So we do need to keep this goal always in the back of our minds.

But we can take our times with this (to a degree). We can give our students time to get into the water– it can be quite an uncomfortable adjustment if they don’t feel like they have a grasp on the language.

(image from: www.choosetop.com)

Centreville High School. “We Are Cville“– the chant I remember yelling in black and blue body paint so clearly in the Fall of 2006– my senior year. So vividly I remember those words, “we are Cville,” echoing from our huge silvery stadium as it rang across the football field on Friday nights beneath bright lights and scoreboards close to professional status, and the advertisements surrounding the stadium from the sponsors who can’t go unnoticed.

Fairfax County, Northern Virginia. Materialism. Everyone always busy. SUVs bigger than garages, and Starbucks beverages in every single hand. But also– so much involvement. Almost every parent at every game, every concert, every parent-teacher conference. Technology options. Reading options. Incredible, well-schooled teachers. Class options. Extracurricular options.

That’s one thing I loved about the high school I graduated from. Options. And the freedom to discover who I am, what I’m interested in, what I’m good at, that comes from options. I got to take an AP Environmental class my senior year. I was in two different choirs and ran for a cross country team that had enough members to make two freshmen teams, two JV teams, and two Varsity teams. Six teams of at least seven members each just for cross country? All transportation and uniforms funded for?! After living in a dramatically smaller, lower socio-economic area, I realize just how lucky I was. I had options.

I remember my favorite teacher, and my most effective one. It was my first day of high school, and I was a scared 9th grader (isn’t that how it always starts?) I walked into class and there she was, with a beautifully colored head scarf that draped over her hair and down her shoulders. She was understated and hilarious, and I could tell in an instant that I loved her, that was was smart and that I respected her. Not only that, but she was humble and funny and she didn’t like Romeo– finally, an English teacher to really relate to literature. She made me feel like I could really love a character, or hate one, and she taught me how to explain why. The last week of that year we had “coffee shop” where she brought in baked goods and coffee and we read our poetry as a final project.

While I was there, I thought of Centreville as a great school. Now that I’m about to graduate from a university filled with students mostly from high schools nowhere near mine, I still think of it as a great school. I felt so prepared for the academics of this university. I have a sense of confidence and competence that I credit to a high school that was very purposefully focused on teaching students how to “get somewhere”– we learned how to test well, how to interview well, how to apply well.

And then, I look back at my high school and see what I missed out on. While there was a strong sense of purpose, I do feel that the “Northern Virginia” purpose isn’t a full one. We were pushed and stretched and challenged– but the purpose was always “to get good grades, to go to a good school, to get a good, NOVA-salary.” Now that I have experienced first-hand Southern Virginia classrooms that are much smaller and less technological, and lived with friends from Richmond area schools that were less city/suburban, I have been exposed to different kinds of purposes. Life isn’t ultimately about getting a big paycheck, according to some of the high schools I have spent time teaching at. I think four years in a Fairfax County high school made me forget that. Or perhaps it was just never suggested to me, or I never thought about it.

But after a semester at Buckingham High School, I’ve seen what it was like to be in a school that isn’t pushing its students to simply “get good jobs to… have a huge salary one day.” I’ve seen a high school that’s pushing it’s students to be an important member of a community– a good neighbor, a kind friend, and a smart student. And maybe that will take them to college to make a big, Northern Virginia kind of salary. But maybe it will help them to be a good parent or teacher. And these roles are important, too. These high schools are instilling purpose just like mine was, but the purpose they are instilling is something I wish mine would have encouraged more of.

I appreciate the school, but also realize after leaving the school that perhaps there is more to life than doing the best you can so that you can have a high-paying job at which you are always busy, always stressed, always Starbucks dependent. Why not do the best you can at something you enjoy, because it makes you happy? Why not do something that makes this world, your family or community, better off because you were a part of it?

This instilled sense of purpose is a latent goal incorporated in high schools around Virginia, and mine missed out on this. As I go into secondary education, I want to help these two approaches to teaching blend into one– my high school’s success-oriented purpose meets other high schools’ relational, personal sense of purpose.

Poet Ntozake Shange writes that poetry should “make you swoon, stop in yr tracks, change yr mind, or make it up, a poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss.”

It seems that poetry should be the recess, or the dessert, for high school English students. It seems like students who hate reading should find poetry more appealing, and for students that love literature– they must certainly love poetry too.

As Milner discusses in Chapter 6 of Bridging English, “Many high school students barely notice poetry… in fact, our students often bring strong biases to poems, and those biases are often more negative. So we begin most classroom poetry encounters with many student resistances.”

This has been my experience in the classroom. And of course, I was teaching Romantic poetry, which most of my English majoring colleagues even tire of (I stand in the Wordsworth-appreciating minority).

But I think there must be a way that high school English teachers can lead their students to enjoy poetry. It seems to me that the characteristics of poetry– typically shorter than novels, and less boring than non-fiction texts, emotional, imagery-filled, identity-concerned– would appeal to high school students more than nearly anyone else.

Poetry is accessible, teachers just have to alter students’ attitudes towards poetry.

A key to teaching poetry, in my opinion, is offering choices. I love E.E. Cummings, but not everyone does. Especially students that have trouble with poetry and come in with those negative biases, Cummings might feel like nonsense to them. Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost. But if not those, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Heck, even T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams.

If you approach anything with the attitude that “this is really hard, this is a mountain you will have to climb and most of you won’t reach the top,” what kind of student will succeed? What kind of student would even want to try?

The attitude with which teachers teach poetry must be enthusiastic, and original, and most of all faithful. Don’t tell the students that The Wasteland is impossible. Work through it with them, see what they’ve got. I think often teachers accidentally limit their students by helping them too much, or not even giving them the chance to really work at something. Students have all the potential to make meaning out of a poem until we tell them they don’t, or take the words out of their mouths before we’ve let them get it out.

Poetry is “like cold water or a kiss”– it doesn’t have to be the enemy (for high school students, or their English teachers).

When there’s social “drama” in a classroom, what do all the students want to do? They want to know all about it, and talk about it, and talk about it some more. If there’s a fight, they want every single detail of the fight (the how, the why, the when, the where, etc). They are drawn in by the drama, because it is exciting and intriguing and relatable, but still from a safe enough distance to talk about it from an outsider perspective.

Isn’t this the kind of reaction students should be having to drama in literature? Shouldn’t they feel connected to the characters in King Lear? Shouldn’t they want to know all about the how, why, when, and where of Juliet’s death in Romeo and Juliet? Couldn’t they be responding to this drama with the same intrigue and passion that they do to the drama existing within their high school walls? After all, we English teachers know that one of the great points of drama (and specifically, to be consistent, with Shakespeare’s plays) is that they are so relatable, so universal– it’s why they are still around today, right? (Of course it isn’t because they are standards of learning that we just accept this as “the way things have always been.” That wouldn’t be a good enough reason for students to read it, even from a teacher’s standpoint.)

Of course, experience tells us it is not the case that students respond to literature and drama with the same intrigue that they do their own life and drama. Start a class discussion about a fight in the cafeteria and everyone has their opinion. Start a class discussion about the fight in Romeo and Juliet and most will say they haven’t read it, or didn’t understand it if they did.

In Milner’s book Bridging English, how students respond to literature and drama is discussed in detail, with examples of how to engage students in the literature they read. The chapter (5) offers stages of reading in literature and tools to get students responding to drama with more life than we’ve all seen in the bored eyes of past students.

The chapter also emphasizes reader response theory– a theory I personally find most useful in the classroom, as opposed to any other literary criticism theory. So, of course I tend to agree with this approach to teaching literature.

But, mostly I would recommend English teachers read the chapter for themselves. It’s thick with tools to get students responding to literary drama with nearly half the enthusiasm as they do cafeteria drama (and when you think about it, that’s a lot!)

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean– neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be your master– that’s all.”

–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I love that Janet Allen begins her article, Mastering the Art of Effective Vocabulary, with this quote. I can relate so perfectly to Humpty Dumpty, and Janet Allen– the daunting task of helping students to master vocabulary masters me. I can’t think of ways to help students with this effective and complicated art besides the typical memorization habit that we English teachers can’t seem to shake (is having students memorize weekly vocabulary words something we even should be shaking?)

I’ve seen it done so that students really do memorize the word– definition and spelling, and how to use in a sentence. But how often does that word get used in a student’s life after that quiz? Two weeks later, will they remember? Or even if they do remember it, will they make that word a part of their vocabulary? After all, that was the goal, but it seems to me like somewhere along the way the goal simply becomes how well they can do on that week’s vocabulary quiz.

Allen discusses several different programs and practices to use as instructional ways to build a student’s vocabulary, and not just for the short term (I particularly like the concept circles).

But I love this ending quote from Stahl the most:

Learning to use a word such as beret instead of hat… should make a child think that he has learned a secret code– a better, more mature way to talk and write. After all, teaching word meanings should be a way for students to define their world, to move from light or dark to a more fine-grained description of the colors that surround them.

After reading Burke’s handout on reading, it affirms my conviction that reading out loud in classroom, with the class, not only makes the text more interesting, but is also beneficial for the students.

The accountability that occurs between two students when texts are read out loud to one another is strong. When I’m reading alone and I’ve just started a book that I don’t particularly want to read, I drift, I nod off, I don’t pay attention. But if I have to read the paragraph to a partner, who then summarizes what I read, and we go on to the next one vice versa, there is accountability there and reason for me to pay attention. Although eventually I think this would interrupt the flow of  a text, as the book is being introduced (especially a poem like Rime of the Ancient Mariner), I think this is a great way to help students really engage in what they are reading.

Problem to Solve:
Bats– are they misunderstood? Not really evil? Or:
Bats– notorious for a reason. They really are evil.

After researching bat poems, and pro-bat and anti-bat websites, write a poem from the perspective of a bat.

The perspective should either convince the readers that bats are merely misunderstood, or that bats are really evil.

Happy Halloween!

I never thought I’d be writing what I’m writing in this blog post, because for a while I had lost sight of the bigger picture. I’m still so excited by the glance I got this morning of it that this is all frantically spilling out, but here it is…

Ken Robinson is a visionary for the educational system. YouTube Ken Robinson and listen to him if you ever want to teach, or have children, or be in on an insightful, inspiring conversation.

Everything I’m about to write is a direct reaction to my first encounter with Ken Robinson.

Arts are at the lowest rank in the education hierarchy– globally. We progressively educate children away from their bodies, away from dance, from arts, and eventually only focus on the left side of their brain, leaving the right side of their brains, their voices, their hearts, their stomachs and hands and feet, all left to merely be vehicles for that left side of their brain.

Robinson explains that the current educational hierarchy is based on:
1. Usefulness for work
2.  Academic ability

But as the system is shifting (we know it’s shifting because what used to only require a B.A. now requires a M.A., what used to require a M.A. and etc), so must our educational system. “Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they are not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or actually stygmatized, and I think we can’t afford to go on like that.”

Re-think our view of intelligence. Radically. Movement, abstract– intelligence is dynamic, interactive. It’s distinct.

We must adopt a conception of the richness of human capacity. We’ve mined students for a particular commodity– and we have to rethink this.

Teachers must see creativity for the richness it is, and students for the hope they are. –Ken Robinson

I’m starting to see where I come into all of this.

I want to bring arts into my classroom– movement, abstract thought. I don’t want to cut off the capacities of my students because of “how things have always been,” or standardized tests, or my own insecurities of losing control.

I was hoping this would happen. I’ve spent three years at this university struggling to remember why I’ve always wanted to teach English. I thought of the second part of my degree, the teaching part, as a back-up plan. As a “just in case.”

I’m realizing now that it’s the most crucial part. For me. I cannot enjoy writing and literature and all that it means to me if I am not sharing it. It’s just who I am; To Kill a Mockingbird loses so much of it’s value for me when it is not talked about. I am not the person to silently enjoy what literature has done for me, for my eyes and my soul. I am not the person to write for myself. I am not the person who doesn’t delight in the writing of others.

I am and always have been the girl who desperately wanted to help others to write, to read. I am the girl who has always wanted to talk to whoever would jump into a conversation about the book I’m reading or they are reading (in a coffee shop or in a classroom or in my home).  I am the girl who has always wanted to see the light in someone’s eyes brighten as I explain to them something they couldn’t see before.

And I am so struck with the conviction that teachers have (accidentally) cut off their students creativity by focusing solely on limiting their intelligence to that left side of their brain.

And I am so inspired to create a classroom in which students express literature and literacy in more ways than scoring well on their SOLs.

I cannot wait to be a teacher. I cannot wait for the days I will cry because I feel unprepared or insecure, for the parent-teacher conferences, for the lesson plans and SOL goals. I cannot wait for all of the hardships because I know that what a teacher gains is worth more than the pitiful salary they receive, and justifies the struggles it takes to get there.

This is a note to myself, for forty years down the road, in case I ever forget it again (and how painfully cloudy things get when you lose your sense of purpose):

Emily, you were meant to be a teacher. Every part of you shines teacher. You love what you do, if it is teaching literature. You love what you do if it is opening someone else’s eyes to something beyond themselves. You love what you do if you open up the child-like creativity that somehow diminishes in most people by the time they are adults. Don’t educate a student out of their creativity capacity– nourish that, expand that. You might be the only person to do it.

So love that you are a teacher. Love that you get to spend your days with the books you love. Love that you get to spend your days with some of the most insightful thinkers in the world, and with some of the most reluctant. Love that you get to be with people and with literature. Love that you didn’t have to choose. Love that you get to blur all professional and politically correct boundaries because when you’re client is hurting, you can still hug them, and when your client doesn’t know, you can still teach them. Love the days that are bad– just like the body, when your muscles are hurting, it means they are growing stronger– you, and your students, are the same. Love that work never ends– your job means more than 9-5, your job seeps into your being, your relationships and life; it means your job is actually meaningful. So love that you are a teacher.

Without even knowing the terminology, we can all explain what it is like, how it feels, to be in a student-centered classroom, or what it is like to be in a non-student-centered classroom.

And although being in a student-centered classroom does not automatically make the class great, the teacher effective, or the learning especially easy or interesting– I would bet that it is still a “better” class than one that is not student-centered.

These classrooms, these non-student-centered classrooms, are not only ineffective for student learning, but are actually detrimental to students. Let me explain:

When a student is in a classroom that isn’t centered around them, but instead around the instructor, the material, the test, the SOLs, the adminstration… the student feels irrelevant to what is going on in that class. The student does not feel plugged in, included; the education is outside of them, not for them, and if the student doesn’t become apathetic they will probably become insecure.

Apathy or insecurity (or both) in an academic setting sets a student up to fail– why try? is the question they are left asking. And if a teacher doesn’t attempt to satisfy that question with purpose or inclusion (and they wouldn’t in a classroom that isn’t student-centered), a student answers the question for themselves: I shouldn’t.

And then they don’t.

Having a student-centered classroom isn’t always going to make a bad teacher good, but I doubt you will find a good teacher that doesn’t have a student-centered classroom.