Synchonized Literacy

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Some days there is fascinating synchronicity among events.  Today was one of those days.

Yesterday was, of course, Veterans Day.  My kids had the day off but I did not, and to make matters more complicated, Amy is at a conference in Florence, so I had to drag both kids to my classes on Tuesday afternoon. 

I instructed both kids to bring things to do.  They both brought art and books, so many I had to give them each a canvas bag to carry them in.  (I ended up lugging around Elsa’s bag).  Elsa brought along the second book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Cormac had a couple of books on Minecraft and a copy of Wings of Fire:  The Lost Heir, book two of a dragon series published by Scholastic that he’s really into now.  But he also had a copy of Donna Jo Napoli’s The King of Mulberry Street, a work of historical fiction that he’s reading in a book group in his sixth grade Reading class at school.

Cormac’s homework for the long weekend had been to read twenty pages a day of The King of Mulberry Street and to annotate each chapter with questions and observations on post-it notes.  This is the kind of assignment that should be easy for him but he’ll blow off because he just wants to read, so I sat down with him and modeled the kinds of observations I might make and put on notes, and then I had him do this independently for the next chapter.  That worked pretty well and he was able to complete the assignment without any more fuss.

And this is where the synchronicity kicks in.  It just so happened that today I spent the day doing writing workshop PD at Bennet Academy in Manchester, which is a stand-alone sixth grade school.  I worked with all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade English/Language Arts teachers, and one of the pieces I used as a mentor text was Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” which is the poem that is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Now I didn’t select this poem for any reason having to do with Veterans Day but simply because I wanted to use a well known contemporary (relatively speaking) example of a Petrarchan sonnet.  But of course once I introduced this poem, discussion among the teachers turned not to the form but to the content.  Turns out that NPR had aired a story on Veterans Day about the Common Core and fifth grade students reading “The New Colossus.”  You can read or listen to it here:  NPR CCSS New Colossus.  Part of the NPR story was about whether or not this poem was too hard for fifth graders—which it turned out not to be.

Anyway, tonight I read more with Cormac, same as this weekend—me modeling my reading of a chapter and then him reading the next one on his own.  And wouldn’t you know that the chapter I read aloud tonight from The King of Mulberry Street had the Statue of Liberty in it.  The main character, a seven-year-old Jewish stowaway on board a ship from Italy, gets thrown overboard in New York’s harbor, and when he surfaces he sees the statue.

All excited, I dragged Cormac to the computer and pulled up a version of Lazarus’ poem for him to read.  I asked if he understood the reference to  “the brazen giant of Greek fame,” and he immediately knew that referred to the Colossus of Rhodes, and he even figured out that the ‘old’ Colossus was a symbol of war and that the new Colossus whose “mild eyes” welcomed immigrants was meant to be in complete contrast.  He even got the reference to Prometheus in the line about “imprisoned lightning.”  He said, “Oh, because Prometheus brought men warmth and light, just like Liberty is supposed to do for the “huddled masses!”

That got him all excited, and Elsa too.  Soon we three were at the computer looking at Google maps images of the Statue and they were asking questions about my Italian great-grandmother who came over at the age of thirteen and my Irish great-grandmother who came over at the age of nine—both alone on board ships.  We all marveled that children so young (Cormac is eleven and Elsa is almost eight) could make such journeys alone.

And after the kids were asleep, I marveled at the way a book and a poem and workshop and a holiday and a little family history all crashed together in one wonderfully bizarrely synchronous moment.

Blogging From The Nwp And Ncte Conventions

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Last week, my students and I were discussing professional development and teacher leadership in my Pre-Teaching Secondary English class.  I know.  Sounds exciting, right?

Seriously, we had a great discussion that began with a study conducted by Helen Ladd almost a decade ago now which looked at teacher quality and effectiveness.  (For the record, these two factors were measured by peer and direktur review, not by student performance).  The study concluded that teachers are least effective during the first four years of their careers but that, for those who remain beyond the four year mark, teachers attain a level of competence around year five that they sustain for a fifteen year period.

There are several interesting things to observe about this study.  One is that the four year mark is consistent with research on performance mastery.  You’ve probably all heard about the studies that show that 10,000 hours are necessary to master a skill.  At forty hours a week (and most teachers put in more), after four years you’d have a bit over 8,000 hours of practice.  Factor in one to three years of some form of student teaching preceding this (depending on your program) and you see that most teachers attain that 10,000 hour mark some time during that fourth year.  This study might also help explain or at least contextualize the fact that large numbers of teachers leave the profession in the first five years but this rate flattens out after that.  Those who stay are the ones who have figured it out.

Some of the corporate reformers out there—Michelle Rhee is a notable one—have deliberately misrepresented this study to suggest that teachers attain minimum competence in year five and then stagnate for the next decade and a half, which is clearly not the conclusion drawn by Ladd.

Additional studies cited in Dana Goldsein’s new book The Teacher Wars also demonstrate that only about 2% to 3% of teachers who have attained tenure are measured as ineffective.  This does not mean everyone’s a rock star; it just means that the vast majority of those who make it to tenure demonstrate at least basic competence.

Nonetheless, one compelling question raised by Ladd's study regards what happens after year twenty.  For one thing, significant numbers of teachers leave the classroom after that point.  They don’t necessarily leave teaching, but they may enter administration or guidance or higher ed, or they may take on a new role, such as literacy coach or reading consultant, something that grows naturally out of a sixth year degree or second masters.

For those who remain in the classroom beyond year twenty, however, this study revealed a significant divergence in the quality of their instruction.  Some excel while some struggle.  It’s not entirely clear why this is.  It may be that the mass exodus of teachers from the classroom may expose existing disparities among otherwise competent teachers and also exaggerate the degree of difference.  It may be that the profession passes some by, as in the realm of digital literacies.  It may be that some teachers simply burn out.  Regardless of these factors, the researchers concluded that the major difference between the quality of effective and ineffective teachers beyond year twenty was the teachers’ participation in quality professional development.

Personally, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of ongoing quality professional development.  In the last few weeks, Amy Nocton, Danielle Pierrati, and Colette Bennet presented their summer institute research at conferences in both Connecticut and Florence, Italy.  Kim Kraner has been taking a grad class in creative writing.  Earlier this week, Liza Escott, Kim Shaker, and Elizabeth Simison led workshops for their colleagues at the UConn Early College Experience English conference.  And I participated in roundtable discussions here in Maryland at the NCTE Annual Convention with Elizabeth Simison and Amanda Lister. 

And part of the focus of my lesson for the pre-service teachers is that it’s not going to work to reach year twenty and then get involved in some quality PD.  One must develop habits of mind and practice as a new teacher, even as a pre-service teacher, that are maintained throughout your career.  In the case of the women I mention above, Amy, Liza and Colette are all around or beyond that twenty year mark while the others are still on the short side of that line, but they all have clearly integrated these habits into their professional lives and identities, and the research suggests this will be to their great benefit long-term.

The Narrative Arc Of Teaching

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This past Sunday the New York Times offered its list of 100 notable books of the year, and on it there were a couple of great nonfiction works on teaching, including Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars, which I loved and highly recommend.

That list got me thinking of the many books I’ve read this year and which ones I might strongly recommend.  One of the best books on teaching I’ve read this year just came out.  It’s Tom Newkirk’s new book, called Minds Made for Stories. 

It’s excellent, of course, as is most of the stuff Tom Newkirk writes.  I often found myself stopping to write exclamation points in the margins, thinking to myself, ‘Yes! I feel exactly the same way!’ or, ‘Yes!  I have been saying that for years!’  Too bad I didn’t get to this first, but nonetheless I’m glad these ideas are in print.

The book has many good features to offer, including great chapters on the role of narrative in science and math.  But I want to focus on what Newkirk has to say about narrative and cognition and narrative and teaching.  I don’t mean the teaching of narrative, but the relationship between narrative as a means of thinking and learning and its relationship to the art (or science) of teaching.

Newkirk makes the essential argument that narrative is not simply a genre but is both “the deep structure of all … writing” and—even more importantly—that it is the foundation of cognition, that narrative is the way we organize and make sense of the information our brains take in from our perception and our experience.  He cites authors, artists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to support his argument. 

In the fifth chapter, where he makes the turn toward writing in the sciences and mathematics, Newkirk writes that effective teaching needs to be plotted, that is needs to have a “‘narrative arc’” for students to be successfully engaged and learning.  When I read this, I got excited and pulled out my just-finished copy of Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, in which Willingham makes an identical argument.

Dan Willingham is a cognitive scientist who does research in applications of cognitive science to K-12 education.  (He’s got a great blog, too, if you are interested).  In a section called The Power of Stories, Willingham discusses how his research demonstrates that “organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.”  Later in the book, he reinforces this claim by providing evidence that a lesson must be designed around a conflict to be resolved, and that teachers should think of their teaching like writing.  Among other things, both writing and teaching should consider audience and how best to spark audience interest.

Newkirk discusses this idea, too.  At one point, he quotes Kenneth Burke saying that writing at its best is “‘an arousing and fulfillment of desires,’” what Newkirk sometimes calls seduction.  In his application to teaching, Newkirk pedestrianizes this phenomenon by quoting Peter Elbow, who describes writing as creating an itch that needs to be scratched, which is perhaps more appropriate for the context of K-12 education.

Although neither Newkirk nor Willingham get deep into a discussion of assignments, I think the centrality of narrative is highly relevant to the reading and writing assignments we give students, too, and not just to our lesson planning.  How often are our students bored by the reading we assign them and uninvested in the writing we require them to complete?  To be successful, to get the students truly interested in their reading and writing, we have to help them to fit both activities into their own personal narratives. 

I don’t merely mean we have to give them culturally relevant books (though that’s important) or that all writing has to be personal writing (though some should be), but that connections have to be made between the classroom and the world the students live in outside our walls. 

I think of Phillip Lopate’s dictum that the essay is “an enactment of the creation of the self” or Don Murray’s statement that “all reading is autobiography,” which concludes his essay “All Writing is Autobiography.”  We can’t settle for a situation where there is school and there is everything else, and never the twain shall meet.  In the reading and writing we assign, as well as in our teaching, we have to bridge that gap.

To quote Mark Turner, “narrative … is basic to human thinking.”  Students are inherently immersed in narrative.  The trick, for us, is to get them to integrate the narratives of school into the narratives of their lives.

Reading With The Kids On Winter Days And Nights

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Earlier this week I re-posted a fun article from BuzzFeed about The 51 Best Lines from Literature.  It was hardly a comprehensive list, but there were a number of good lines, and several from books I’ve never read before, so it gave me ideas for new books to read.  Not that I don’t already have a towering pile on my nightstand and another one in my office, as well as a box of books I just picked up to read over break that’s basically the entirety of Illing Middle School’s LA curriculum, which is sitting beside me as I type.

Last week Cormac finished up the fourth book in the Wings of Fire series, and since the fifth book hadn’t come out yet (it actually just did, and I got it for him for Christmas, but he doesn’t know either of these things) I suggested he pick up something classic.  One day in his Reading class, because he’d finished his book that morning and hadn’t thought to bring his next one with him to school, Cormac had begun reading The Hobbit, and so I suggested he resume that.  And he did.

Unusual for Cormac, however, was that he was having difficulty getting started.  All that stuff in the first chapter about Bilbo’s maternal and paternal ancestors didn’t exactly get him going.  But he had a doctor’s appointment out in Farmington on Monday morning, and on the way home we stopped in the little Boston Market on Farmington Ave, just over the line into West Hartford.  We had some comfort food on that soggy, raw day, and after we’d eaten our fill, I took his book and read about half of the first chapter aloud to him, up to where the dwarves tease Bilbo by singing a song about breaking all his dinnerware.  That was sufficient; Cormac was hooked by then, and is almost a third through the book now.

I haven’t read The Hobbit since the seventh grade!  And though I remember how much I liked it, reading it again (even just snatches before bedtime) reminds me why.  Tonight, I was reading aloud from where Gandalf, Bilbo, Thorin and the other dwarves get captured by goblins during a thunderstorm, and I had to read this one line over again.  It went, “The nights were comfortless and chill, and they did not dare to sing or talk too loud, for the echoes were uncanny, and the silence seemed to dislike being broken—except by the noise of water and the wail of wind and the crack of stone.”  It was that last part I re-read, from ‘and the silence.’ I paused, and then, into our silence, Cormac said, “That’s awesome.  This guy really knows how to write!” When I asked Cormac what he thought was going to happen in the cave, he said, “Something bad.  It’s just like Odysseus and Polyphemus.”  Gotta be proud an 11 year-old can give that answer!

Tonight, I also began reading A Christmas Carol aloud to both Cormac and Elsa.  As a boy, I read and re-read that novel every year at Christmas.  I must have read it every year from second grade till I left for college, and occasionally afterwards.  Both kids know the story, and we’re going to see it at The Hartford Stage this weekend, but this will be the first year I read it to both of them.  Elsa kind of likes getting scared, especially if she can snuggle up next to me while I read.  She just finished the ninth book in The Babysitters Club series, which is about the girls thinking Dawn’s house is haunted, and Elsa loved scaring herself reading that.  So tonight she enjoyed the opening stuff about Marley being dead.  Even though his ghost had not arrived yet, she’s knows it’s coming, and got chills in anticipation. 

Elsa especially likes for me to do voices for different characters.  So I was gruff and loud as Scrooge and meek and quiet as Bob Cratchit; jovial and ingenuous as Scrooge’s nephew and pompous and self important as the philanthropists.  She also really liked the description of the foggy London streets, dark already by three in the afternoon.  Dickens writes, “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were phantoms.”

Soon we’ll all be on break, and we can spend some quality idle time discovering favorite lines in new (or re-discovered) books.

In The Middle, Mostly

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I spent my ‘vacation’ mostly in middle school classrooms in Manchester and Mansfield, with one quick trip to Canterbury.

I’ve been doing a lot of classroom observations, as well as some co-teaching and work with students.  The observations have been insightful, and working in several schools with different teachers, grade levels, and populations of students has given me myriad perspectives.  I’ve also collected great ideas and shared them with all the different teachers I have worked with—a sort of cross pollination.

In Mansfield I have been working with an eighth grade teacher on personal essay.  I got to observe a terrific unit using This I Believe, which, if you are unfamiliar, was begun in 1951 by Edward R. Murrow.  The website houses thousands of essays and audio podcasts (about 500 words and three minutes long, respectively) from individuals as famous as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, and Eleanor Roosevelt to regular folks.  There are over 43,000 essays written by students under 18, alone.  And we and our students can submit our essays, too, which is a wonderful opportunity.

As a resource, the This I Believe website is cool enough, but the lesson I observed was even more impressive.  At the beginning of the class, an essay that had been assigned the day before was projected onto the white board, and the teacher began by asking the students, “Who wants to teach class today?”  Then, one by one, students went to the computer and highlighted passages, discussing them according to concepts they had studied in mini-lessons.

I adapted that idea when I co-taught classes a couple weeks later at Illing Middle School, only this time the teachers and I used either student drafts or mentor texts the teachers had written.  One brave eighth grade girl named Mary was the first in her class to volunteer.  Not only did she do a great job of working with me to lead her classmates in a discussion of her own draft, but her classmates were insightful, helpful, and kind in their observations and discussion of her vignette.

I’ve also enjoyed the exchange of literature that has grown out of this work.  I have been reading many new titles (new to me, anyway) like Bronx Masquerade, Long Walk to Water, and Wonder, and based on my observations of and conversations with the teachers, I have been distributing texts I think are well suited to their interests, like Tom Newkirk’s new book Minds Made for Stories to a couple of teachers at Mansfield Middle School who are interested in writing across the disciplines, or Jeff Wilhelm’s now-classic You Gotta BE the Book to a sixth grade teacher at Bennet Academy who I observed doing some great stuff with creative dramatics, or the NWP’s Writing for a Change to a seventh grade teacher at Illing who is deeply invested in the social justice aspects of his work with special education and ELL students with tough personal histories.

I took a break from PD in middle schools to travel to Vancouver for the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, which normally would be a situation where I work mostly in the field of nineteenth-century American literature, but in this case I got to do some K-12 work, too.  Or, I should say, K-16 work.  The MLA’s outgoing president, Margaret Ferguson, began and will be continuing a collaboration between and among the MLA, the National Council of Teachers of English, and other professional organizations such as the NWP and the International Reading Association.  In large part this effort has emerged from a desire to respond to the Common Core State Standards, and from what I understand, the MLA has gotten interested because the CCSS architects and the people at PARCC and Smarter Balanced, as well as within President Obama’s Department of Education, continue to speak for higher education without actually spending much time communicating or consulting with people within higher education.  I may get an opportunity to serve on one or more committees within this collaboration, which is exciting, to say the least.

At this time, all the college educators are just beginning the spring semester, and the secondary educators are in the midst of midterms, and the elementary educators are likely conducting mid-year formative assessments.  I welcome everyone to the second half of the year!  And it’s just about that time you should consider applying to or recommending a colleague for the Summer Institute.  Send me an email!

Better Teachers: Teacher Education, Standardization, And Natural-Born Teachers

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Although I spent most of the last few days shoveling snow, I did manage to enjoy some reading. I almost finished Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, and I finished Elizabeth Green’s Building a Better Teacher:  How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone).  Green’s book, along with Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars, were on the NY Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014 list.

Whereas I loved Goldstein’s book, I can’t say the same for Green’s book.  Part of my lack of enthusiasm may be the fact that there is more focus on math than English, but I also think Green gives too much due to corporate reformers, she limits herself to too few examples (from her evidence, one would think the Mecca of pedagogical innovation is Michigan), and she comes to few conclusions. 

One thing I do like in Green’s book is her attempt to explore the notion that great teachers are born not made, the idea that there is some intangible “it factor” that some of us simply have and some of us simply don’t.  She begins with a case study of a so-called great teacher named Magdalene Lampert, and after demonstrating Magdalene’s greatness proceeds to document Magdalene’s self-doubt, her constant introspection, and her relentless pursuit of both greater content area knowledge and deeper pedagogical insight. 

Green’s point, ultimately, is that while some teachers may have certain personality traits—confidence, charm, charisma, extroversion—that make the transition from preservice teacher to full time teacher relatively easy, such traits are never sufficient long-term. 

Green then contrasts Lampert with another educator, Doug Lemov, who was a brilliant man who appeared to lack the “it factor” but who, through years of assiduous study and practice, became, if not a dynamic and exciting teacher, at least a more than competent and successful one.

Green also demonstrates how difficult it is to “scale up” any successful model of instruction.  Chapter after chapter chronicles attempts by schools, districts, cities, states, schools of education, charter networks, and the federal government, to capture lightning in a bottle, to take the successful dynamic of one teacher or one department or one building, and codify it so as to export it and implement it on a large scale, as if teaching expertise could be franchised.  In every case Green documents, such efforts fail, and often grandly.

Tom Newkirk likes to say, “Bad things happen to good ideas when they get standardized.”  I think we see myriad examples of this throughout our professional lives.  Calkins’ Units of Study is perhaps the example du jour, but I felt the same way when Grant Wiggins took Understanding By Design on the road, or watching Mike Feinberg and David Levin try to build the KIPP empire on the foundation of Harriet Ball’s idiosyncratic teaching methods.  Calkins and Wiggins—and Ball for that matter—are great educators who have made incredible contributions to the field, but attempting to package their work and use pre-set materials to train teachers to be just like them is destined to fail.  As my old Sociology Professor Hal Abramson used to say, “Religion is what happens when the charisma dies.”  Too often, what you’re left with is a few stone tablets and a bunch of bickering former acolytes.

Although Green confoundingly fails to summarize her findings, I think they come down to a few things.

*New teachers need to be apprenticed to highly successful teachers.

*All teachers benefit from observing one another’s teaching.

*All teachers benefit from talking with one another—across grade levels, disciplines, and districts—about their teaching.

*Quality professional development is hard to find but invaluable when found.

*Teachers need to build relationships with their students and their students’ families and communities.

*Teachers improve their practice when they expand and deepen their content knowledge.

*There needs to be more communication between K-12 teachers and content area professors at local colleges and universities.

*Professional development (call it Educational Reform if you’d like) works best when it evolves organically from within a department, building, or district.

Goldstein arrives at complementary conclusions in her book. She also points out several correlating factors for effective teaching: “deep content knowledge,” a working class background, an urban upbringing, attendance in non-elite colleges, residency in the community where they teach, “experience spending time with low-income children,” and being “coachable.”

Goldstein’s concluding mantra, and one that could serve for Green’s book as well, is that “teachers teaching teachers, outside formal evaluation systems” is the most effective method of improving teaching. 

Amen to that.

What's The Point Of Studying Poetry And Then Writing Essays?

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We spent a month reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance in our English class. Then Mr. Ward—that’s our teacher—asked us to write an essay about it. Make sense to you? Me neither. I mean, what’s the point of studying poetry and then writing essays?

When I was at the NCTE Convention this past November, I attended this one session where a woman talked about an after school literacy club she began for fourth and fifth grade girls.  All the books have female authors and protagonists.  I wrote down her entire reading list and bought every single book for Elsa for her eighth birthday in January.  The book I was most eager to read myself was Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which was a National Book Award Finalist in 2014.  I finished it yesterday.  It was awesome.

Brown Girl Dreaming, in short, is an autobiography told in a series of poetic vignettes, divided into five sections, covering Woodson’s birth in Ohio, her childhood in South Carolina, and her adolescence in New York.  I especially enjoyed the middle sections that take place in South Carolina where Woodson and her siblings were raised by their maternal grandparents as their mother strove to re-make her life in New York.

The book made me think of Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade (2002).  Although Grimes’ book is fiction, it tells the biography of a school in the Bronx, and is told in a series of vignettes that are both in prose and poetry.  Both works also use Langston Hughes poems as framing devices for their narratives.  Brown Girl Dreaming uses “Dreams” while Bronx Masquerade uses “Harlem,” which is often referred to as “A Dream Deferred.”

The epigraph I used for this column comes from Tyrone, the protagonist—or at least the focalizing character—of Bronx Masquerade.  I thought of this statement Tyrone makes early in the novel because I wondered the same thing.  When I read Bronx Masquerade, I wondered how often teachers allow students to attempt to write poetry, or more provocative yet, to write something in a mixed genre like the novel itself.

For two decades I have said that one of the oddest things we do in the field of English is ask students to read, venerate, and study fiction, poetry, and drama, but then we rarely allow them to write in these genres, but only to write essays about them.

And yet there is such a rich tradition, not just of the principal genres, of course, but of mixed genre books.  Staying just within the realm of African-American writers, I immediately think of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, after the publication of Annie Allen in 1949.  Annie Allen, like Grimes’ or Woodson’s books, tells a biography but in a series of poetic vignettes.  In 1953, Brooks published a similar work, titled Maud Martha, which again tells the biography of an African-American woman in a series of vignettes, but this time the vignettes are in lyrical prose rather than in verse.  I discovered them about a decade ago and couldn’t believe I had never heard of them before.

Then there’s Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which tells the story of a community in poems, prose, and drama, and sometimes a mix of two or all three in a single section.

Of course these sorts of literary experiments aren’t the sole provenance of African-American writers.  I’ve always loved Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), which tells the story of a community in a series of poems, each authored by a deceased member of the community.  Masters’ work influenced both Sherwood Anderson’s experimental novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which is a series of vignettes that tells the story of a town through the focalizing lens of a single protagonist, as well as Thornton Wilder’s experimental play Our Town (1938), which also tells the story of a town and uses the dead as narrating characters—as well as a somewhat supernatural narrator.

So, at the risk of belaboring my point, I wonder why we don’t allow our students to experiment likewise.  I know many will say that the students need to learn the rules before they can break the rules.  I kind of get that.  But I don’t think we need be quite so tight on the reins.  It’s a topic for a different day, but in Write Beside Them, Penny Kittle shares some great ideas about multigenre projects that her students compose as end of semester assessments.  I think it’s a worthy idea.