You are here: Home / Archives for Writing

Reading Reflections: Reshaping High School English

February 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve liberally sprinkled this blog and its sister website with references to Bruce Pirie’s Reshaping High School English, so it’s high time I gave it a review.

Rating: 5/5

Reshaping High School English is a decade old, but the ideas in it are fresh and for many of us English teachers, quite revolutionary.

Some of the key ideas that I took away were:

  • Reading skills need to be taught to adolescents, and the best way to do that is by modelling reading. Conducting “think-aloud” readings of texts regularly is key.
  • Writing is a mysterious process for most of us, including us teachers. To teach it, we need to model it authentically in all of its glorious, messy uncertainty. Let your students watch you write a poem on a topic of their choice.
  • The five-paragraph essay is not the pinnacle of writing as some of us English teachers tend to speak of it. This is because,
    (a) ideas can be shared in other forms of writing, like a poem, short story, or play; and
    (b) some essays, crazily enough, actually hold together with paragraphs numbering more than five. It’s true: there are six-paragraph essays out there that are worth reading.

Pirie has challenged me to consider how I structure class time and how I go about the business of teaching students reading and writing. It’s probably best read with a group willing to talk about it, making it perfect for an English department book club or discussion group.

Filed Under: Books, Writing Tagged With: , ,

Handwriting on the wall

February 17, 2008 By 3 Comments

Last year, in a meeting with teachers from feeder schools, someone asked whether or not elementary school teachers should continue to teach cursive writing to their students.

At the time, I told them that I am just happy with something legible, whether written, printed, block-letter, or a mix. All good copies are typed anyway, was my rationale. The Grade 8 teachers breathed a sigh of relief, wiping a lot of future battles from their schedule. A colleague from my own department, who continues to request cursive writing from her students, breathed a sigh of despair. “Where will we be when the lights go out?” was her question.

Since that day, however, I’ve come to question my earlier position. Is it really okay if students don’t use cursive writing anymore?

When we look into the future, it’s highly possible that handwriting will be replaced by some form of keying. It’s part of my job to prepare students for that future, where they will need to be able to publish written works electronically and online.

But the reality is that today, right now, students aren’t working entirely electronically. They don’t have access to computers in every class for note-taking (at least not at my school, and I suspect this is the norm rather than the exception). Tests and in-class assignments are completed using a pen and paper.

My wife alerted me to the article “Writing a Wrong” by Helaine Becker in the January 2008 issue of Today’s Parent. Although the article is a bit shy of references, there are some ideas in there that make sense, among them being:

  • Students who cannot write legibly and quickly perform poorly on tests.
  • Poor penmanship is unconsciously penalized by teachers, even when they are trying to mark only the content. This means that students who cannot write legibly receive lower grades.
  • Students who cannot write legibly may not be able to read their own notes or homework assignments.
  • Students who cannot write fluently – with automacity, according to Becker – have to focus on forming their letters rather than on sorting out and communicating their ideas. They can’t really process what they are writing.

These are some alarming consequences of poor penmanship in a world where receiving a high school diploma depends on hand writing a pen-and-paper literacy test. So until the format of that test changes, I think I’m going to include some handwriting practice in my Gr. 9 and literacy help classes.

Filed Under: 21st Century Skills, Literacy, Writing Tagged With: ,

Shifting our educational culture

February 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I share Will Richardson‘s questions about changing our culture:

So, it comes back to what is to me at least, the big question these days. Not how do we help teachers get their brains around these tools in terms of their own personal learning practice (which is still hugely important), but how do we help schools and districts to begin to reshape their culture around learning in more collaborative, connected environments? How do we get to the point where we’re not just seeing individual teachers and classrooms make the shift, but where we are seeing schools as a whole beginning to shift as well?

As facilitator of a program intended to help students prep for the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test(OSSLT), I am really feeling the tension between what I’ll call ”multiliteracy” and “conventional literacy.”   In my regular courses, my goal is to support student multiliteracy because (a) it is in line with curriculum expectations, and (b) I think that students who can only read and write text on paper are not going to be functionally literate in our society.  However, students’ literacy levels are formally determined by a standardized test that is based on conventional literacy.

(Before I go on, I’ll just say that I am not opposed to standardized testing, because I value the aggregate information that is available from it.  More on that another day.)

I am wondering, though, if there is another way to handle the testing — a way that is culture-shifting.  Some of the concerns that I have with the current testing approach are:

  • Students write using pen and paper.  For some, this is not their most familiar communication medium, so they are disadvantaged.  (Clarification:  I’m not advocating a text-messaging test.)
  • Students write in the same format every time:  a news article and a five-paragraph essay are the essential written components.  These are limiting forms.
  • The same format every year means that our regular courses are being tailored more and more to meet the expectations of the literacy test.  Hours of class time being spent learning the specifics of writing a news article.  I wonder how often students will have to write a news article in their futures?

I don’t have any solutions, just questions right now.  How can our education system shift its culture to embrace multiliteracy?  Can standardized testing be adapted to support a new culture of collaboration, or is it fundamentally incompatible?  As I prepare for another literacy support session, how do I make this most helpful for students:  do I teach them to write the test, or do I teach them to read and write texts?

Filed Under: Assessment, On My Mind, Writing Tagged With: ,

A Writing Challenge

February 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been enjoying Bruce Schauble‘s 100 Words a Day (a favourite is “Thirteen Ways of Thinking about 61“). I admire the commitment that it takes to write so regularly. I briefly wondered about taking the 30-day challenge myself, but alas, well…

Reading these 100-word gems along with a summary of the process behind their creation reminded me of something I first encountered in Bruce Pirie’s Teenage Boys and High School English: students are able to learn a lot about writing simply by watching someone else model the process. In the classroom, I guess that ‘someone else’ should be me. Modeling writing is not something I have done before, as I have usually organized in-class writing time so that I can conference with students, check notes, or answer questions. (And have thereby neatly avoided the certain embarrassment that would come from fumbling with words in front of a class of teenagers.)

Therefore, my personal challenge this semester is to model writing for my students. It’s not nearly as interesting as 100 words a day, but it is still daunting for me. Our semester-end culminating activity will be a multi-media project based on the “This I Believe” essay, so my plan is to create my own project along with students.

Wish me luck.

Filed Under: Writing
Newer Posts »