Think Like a Teacher

I love writing. I love helping others love writing, especially their OWN writing. I love watching people as they hear their own writing voice, perhaps for the first time. So I share a few writing favs in hopes that your might play and be lured into hearing yourself as a writer.

Play with words using this Google Docs demo (reviewed by TeachersFirst) that allows you to “collaborate” with master writers such as Shakespeare, Nietzsche, or Emily Dickinson. See what Poe would do to the words you type or watch your simplest phrase transformed by Dickens. This demo is limited, of course, but it draws attention to word choice and the many ways English can say similar things. Single words often become phrases extracted from a literary masterpiece. I do not commend the crazy concoctions that combine on the demo page, but I do relish the questions this demo raises. I wonder what it would look like if Hemingway were one of the collaborators? Instead of adding words, the demo might subtract them!

Who do you write like? Try I Write Like (reviewed by TeachersFirst) to find out. In a near-reversal of the Docs demo, this tool prompts you paste in your words and analyzes your writing to see which well-known author’s work is most similar to your writing. (The analysis of this post says I am like H. P. Lovecraft. I am intrigued  and want to learn more about Lovecraft, since I do not know his work.)

I love word clouds. I love creating them, and I love using them to see my own writing from another point of view. Here is last week’s post transformed into a word cloud by TagCrowd (reviewed by TeachersFirst):

There are loads of word cloud makers, each with its own variations: Tagxedo, Worditout, Wordle,  and more. Alas, they also disappear often, as did Wordsift and Tagul

Of course, writing is sometimes excruciating, especially for those who decide they cannot be poets without rhyme. Enter the many online rhyming dictionaries. This result offers rhymes for writing itself, though you must ignore annoying ads and distractions. (See TF’s review for ideas.) Writing may be more like biting or fighting, but it can also be igniting. A cleaner tool, Write Rhymes (reviewed here) gives a different look, but you have to know how to Option+click (not tough at all!). Here is what you get for the word write:

So play today with words to say and maybe you will find a way to hear your voice and make a choice of words to tell your thoughts so well you’ll want to write.

Write to be… or not to be, to find a voice that says, “That’s ME!”

TeachersFirst is blessed with a wonderful team of reviewers. The challenge we face is maintaining a consistent voice among so many teacher-writers. This same challenge rises in any collaborative student project where each student writes a portion of the content. How do we maintain a voice and writing style that does not scream, “Listen to how different I am”? Of course, in the “real world,” there are editors handle this challenge, shifting sentences and wrangling words to conduct a song in unison without erasing the beautiful tone of each writer.

As I work with our team, I realize that the lessons I learn from these lifelong learners, our teacher/reviewer/writers, are similar to those any teacher learns from students. My lesson this week was on feedback. The editorial team decided to share screencasts of the editorial process with each reviewer. The screencasts follow the mouse as the editor reads, mulls things over, makes changes, moves things, and –in effect–thinks “on screen.”  It is stream of consciousness editing in real time. (That element of time matters.)

You could do the same: have a student “editor” (or you) use a tool like Screencastomatic (reviewed here) to record the process of revising a piece of writing. Another possible tool is Primary Pad (reviewed here) which plays changes back like a tape recorder. Keep it simple. Focus in on changing one to three things that writer needs most. Let him/her watch as you combine sentences to eliminate redundancy or add active verbs. Don’t TELL him,  SHOW him.  Don’t talk about it, just share the link and see what happens. Perhaps have a slightly more talented writer make a recording for one who is having trouble with a specific aspect of writing. As a precaution, retain a copy of the original, in case the writer feels robbed of his work.

In the case of our reviewers, the response was as authentic as the situation. The process has taught me a lot about how we learn as writers. My fear going into this was that we would violate the very personal ownership that writers feel. Instead, we are hearing excited feedback on the screencasts. Specifically, if the release of ownership is motivated and justified by a purpose (such as making a group project sound consistent or making our site more consistent),  most writers will respond, analyzing what they observe about the changes at a level of metacognition any teacher would thrill to see:

As I looked at the screencast last night, I do see more what you mean in past feedback and what you are looking for…. I am making a list of the words, phrases to stay away from as well as use as examples to be a better writer. The screencast was actually much better feedback than just…comments. I really appreciated having that.

—–

I LOVE this, thank you for doing it! It is so helpful for me to get a better idea …. Based on what I see, more of my sentences should start with verbs – making them have more of an active voice and I’ll definitely try to combine sentences more effectively.

—–

The screencast is a lot more effective than the mark up on a word doc, I think!  It’s like, real time, or something.

This feedback on our feedback is enough to put screencasting high on my list as a powerful tool. Whether we respond to professional work, student lab reports, stories, or essays, we can offer an authentic, real-time window into revision and writing. And it takes a LOT less time than writing up all those comments … or reading this lengthy post!

The day after the State of the Union, in the midst of presidential primaries,  and at the height of school budget (cut) announcements for the coming school year, I find myself itching to mimic Judith Viorst’s classic poem. I even found a handy online form for students — and teachers(?) — to write their own versions modeled in the same format.  Here is my first crack at it. Try one yourself…and pass it on. Maybe even post yours on Facebook (!).

If I were in charge of the world
I’d make thinking something to brag about and write about.
Instead of “like” or “rate,”
The options would be to reason and respond.

If I were in charge of the world
There’d be art and poetry breaks in every office and warehouse,
live music playing in every Walmart,
and open ended questions during every newscast.

If I were in charge of the world
You wouldn’t call any class a “special” or an “elective.”
You wouldn’t make kids choose between chorus and sports.
You wouldn’t have budget cuts
so obviously done without thinking.

If I were in charge of the world.

Creating is very personal — close to the soul and perilously self-revealing. Those who are moderately successful at creating, people like published writers, performance musicians, and visual artists who are not starving, are generally articulate when asked how they go about their work. I have found some marvelous videos and interviews where people talk about how they go about painting or writing. Artist Kimberly Brooks spells out 8 stages to her painting process, concluding with:

(8) Resolution. Very elusive. The composer Aaron Copland said he didn’t finish compositions so much as abandon them. When it’s finally over, it feels like a whole relationship has ended. And then the anticipated rush of doing it all over begins again. [I love the concept of “abandoning” works at the end. Though cruel, it also implies that the work has a separate life of its own by this time.]

My bookshelves and Diigo account house an ever-growing collection of writers’ and artists’ discussions on how they create. I even have a few scientific analyses from adventurous experimenters explaining how innovations occurred in their lab.  What I notice is that those who are willing to bare their process are already successful and therefore can talk about creating from behind a safe curtain  labeled “success.”

If I were to ask, say — a teacher– how he/she creates things, I  wouldn’t expect to hear as much. Most adults will pooh-pooh the idea that they are ever creative, much less open up about how it happens (if it happens). Having lived for decades in a culture where someone else defines creative success, usually by some sort of juried process, we adults assume the jury knows what they are talking about. So we only talk about our own creativity after receiving the jury’s blessing.

Enter the world of YouTube, web 2.0 tools, and public commenting. Enter a generation (or two or three) willing to spill their guts and show their mental underwear on Facebook. Will this generation be more willing to talk about their own creative process after the “success” of publishing/performing/exhibiting wherever and whenever they want?  Do they even view their electronically facilitated play as creative process? Are they/we driven to carry creative work through the stages that Kimberly Brooks and others describe? Or is a dropping left on the surface of the web just that:  an abandoned, stillborn product? Are those who create with the toys of the web driven to return again and again, refining, remixing, even storehousing their discarded scraps for use another time? Can these tools be as powerful as any paint, word, or engineering lab? I think so.  But I believe we need the creators to be aware of and talk about their process to reach a higher level, a sort of creative self-actualization (ugh, another old theory, you say…)

I would love to work with some teachers and their students to find out more about creative process among today’s middle and high school kids. But first we need the teachers to recognize creative process in themselves. As I said in a recent post,

Teaching is a blessedly creative process, if we allow it to be. We sculpt a product — a plan for learning. We try it, revise it, tear it apart, remix its pieces, and try it again.

Talk about it. I dare you to ask your colleagues in the faculty room about their latest creative accomplishment.

Better late than never. I read the post in Education Week about #blog4nwp after the March 18 deadline, but perhaps that makes it even more meaningful. Time and deadlines will never erase the need for writers. A public policy decision looming in Congress could remove all funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), a quiet force that drives writing into classrooms across the U.S. with the strength of a benevolent tsunami. The NWP unleashes the force of writers from deep beneath the surface of a vast teacher-sea, sending forth huge waves to spread over large areas and leave an unforgettable swath. Unlike a real tsunami, however, the forces of writers are entirely of good, and they leave high water marks of inspiration and understanding wherever the wave travels.

Why writing? Why not STEM or math? Why do we need a “project” to make writers out of teachers? Writing scares people, just like water. Teachers will dip their toes in, but only through experiences like the NWP will they learn to swim, and even ride the waves as writers, willing to take risks with their words and talk about the process. Just as STEM programs provide experiences for teachers to act as real scientists so they can provide authentic science teaching, so does the NWP immerse teachers and respect the real experience of being a Writer as essential to building a classroom community of writers.

For the U.S. (or any country) to thrive, we need not only the scientists and innovative thinkers. We need them to be able to communicate their work clearly and with passion. Have you ever tried to read what an engineer writes? It’s a wonder that many new inventions get beyond the lab. If you can’t explain it, no one will ever know about it. Every scientist needs to be a writer. Without  teacher-writers to model the process of shaping ideas into words, we are destined to have great ideas that gather dust.

Almost 20 years ago, I was a writing fellow of a NWP-affiliate at a nearby university. I watched a kindergarten teacher get so excited about writing, she almost tackled community college prof with her ideas for writing together with five year olds. I learned the power of metaphor. I learned to visit and revisit every word I write. I learned to listen for voice. I learned to have a voice.

I know that only a small fraction of  teachers have experienced a NWP summer. But I also know that ending funding for NWP is as dangerous as stopping funding for cancer research. It may never be enough, but we should not underestimate how far each dollar goes. The one mistake we have made as NWP fellows may be that we did not tell enough people where our personal writing force began. This benevolent tsunami may soon be gone, and the high watermarks will fade. What is left without the force of the NWP will be a stagnant, waveless pond.

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever.

I just read a thoughtful– and occasionally heated– exchange on the role of time zones in fragmenting the world and as barriers to “flat,” global learning. The comment thread is fascinating and well worth a read, even if it is “old” in your time zone!

It makes me wonder: what is the value of  real time interaction and, consequently, of  Twitter, feeds, and blog posts for writers/artists and those who model creative process for our students? Are tweets the carefully crafted mini-poems or snippets we collect in scrapbooks for someday inspiration? Are they advertisements for audience: “I am a writer– listen to me”? Do they need immediate response? How do tweets, feeds, and blogs mesh with the creative value we put on real time interaction  and what we get out of them?

So I share an enigmatic analogy of the way I envision tweets, feeds, and blogs:

Tweets are a quick walk past the shop windows of a thriving shopping district. It may be in daylight and during store hours, or it may be at night when the lights are lower and the “SALE” signs obscured by shadow. But I walk by and stop only to look at those that intrigue me. I could go back and enter the shop another time if I retrace my steps in this vast downtown, and if I want to come during store hours. As I pass by during store hours, I may stop in and speak to a shopkeeper. I may even buy something.  There is no predicting. I send a message of my own to others on the sidewalks by adjusting my scarf or changing my pace, but my message is quick and without depth: surface statement for surface judgment among a busy crowd. If I do fashion a message during off hours, no one sees it.

Checking my feed reader is my extra cup of medium ultra bold coffee-of-the-day, a stop on my walk for a mental cup of coffee, take-out. I enjoy it for a few minutes (perhaps I walk back past more Tweet offerings at the same time). I savor the flavor, but I may not remember to finish the cup if I am too busy with other distractions. I may decide not to stop at all for that take-out cup today.

Writing a post is deliberate coffee-and-conversation with someone else at the cafe table. This is not take-out. This is sit-down. There is a friend or new acquaintance there with me. We may talk about what we saw in the shop windows or not. But the words of the conversation matter. A post is deliberate, though conversational. A blog post is not a full meal– like writing an article or something for “print,” but it is careful and responsive. I may linger. I may even lose track of time because the conversation is so good. If I sit down for coffee alone, I still imagine the other person across the table and word my ideas so he can hear me best.

This analogy of tweets, feeds, and blogs tells the value of how I experience each, rather than the place of each in real time. The enigma is that the timeliness value is the inverse of the relationship value.  If blog posts — the experiences I value most– are cafe conversations,  they should become cold, abandoned cups of coffee when another person cannot hear them at the same time. The feed reader “take out” coffee should yield stale, gray flavor when it is not fresh. And store windows should lure me most because they are there for me any time in real time.  How I  experience each determines its value to me, and “real time” matters the least. Real time does not matter as much as deliberate, lingering time. Time does not matter as much as attention and craft. Maybe real time and time zones do not matter when we take the time to factor full creative process into the exchange. Don’t you do a much better job of saying things when you give the process time?

I began this post last week and allowed it to “sit,” thereby defying any timeliness whatsoever. 

First thing on a Monday, and the first tweet I see is Larry Ferlazzo’s response to today’s New York Times column on Scientifically Tested Tests. Even though my first magna-cup of killer coffee is still just steaming next to me, this one is worth a response. Larry is right that some of the suggestions from Williams College prof Susan Engel are “decent.” I would go so far as saying they are both logical and (sadly) innovative. Using a student’s own writing and using a flexible topic to draw on his/her own expertise in that piece is a terrific way to see student thinking skills, writing skills, and core achievement in language.  Larry is also right that one or two of the suggestions are a bit odd. If we were to “test” reading knowledge through a name-it-and-claim it author contest, the same teachers who teach to the test would make kids memorize lists of authors.

The column suggests two aspects of testing that can make it meaningful (my own emphasis and analogies added):

1.) Writing is a powerful and high-def way to see the details of a student’s accomplishments and understanding. As anyone involved with writing knows, writing is thinking. Writing about reading adds another layer of complexity by using one brain-rich process (writing) to discuss and reveal what is occurring in another (reading). Writing is thinking, and reading is a miracle of the human brain. Put the two together, whether in print, in electronic form, or in some mediated version, and you have a 1080p window into student learning and thinking.

2.)  That there exists a mutually agreed-upon “standard” for what defines  “well-educated children.”  Professor Engel assumes that everyone agrees on the standard she describes. I wonder whether they do. I read standards from states, professional organizations, and Common Core, and most of the time I say, ” Of course we want our kids to be able to do that.” But in the translation to assessing them, we risk either analyzing each standard down to the micron and thus trivializing it or losing the very global nature of thinking (and writing) through subdivision. The whole is greater than its parts, and perhaps this focus is what we have lost.

Larry wonders aloud how such high-altitude assessment can help inform teaching, and that is a good question. Having taught very, very bright kids for many years, I found one of the most stimulating and intellectually challenging parts of my job was analyzing what was going on in each child, his “strengths and needs,” when writing Gifted IEPs. Essentially, I was using global analysis–and a lot of writing, selected portfolio pieces, and regular observations in both my journals and students’ own journals to help describe where this child was now and needed to go next. The decisions were never solely mine. There was input from parents and from the students themselves, too. They were daunted by a 6 by 6 foot banner in my classroom that simply asked, “What do YOU think?,”and they took it very seriously.

But here is the rub: How do you take such a process of analyzing writing, selected student work, anecdotal input, and more, and make it consistent from student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school? How do you make it “scientific”? How do you enter it into a relational database for comparative analysis? How do you find TIME for such difficult depth? And in practical terms, how do you teach teachers and administrators to do it in  way that is meaningful to others beyond your classroom door? Such work requires analytical writing by the adults, a skill that, alas, they may not have learned well in school, either.

I keep coming back to writing as the 1080p view of accomplishment. Now, if we could start asking inspiring kids to write every day instead of once a marking period, perhaps we’d have taken a first step.

I am speechless. Those who know me are probably stunned that anything could silence this mouth. But the US DOE has done it to me and to millions of students, teachers, and minds with one stroke. They have eliminated funding for the National Writers Project (NWP) as part of the proposed Education budget. Carolyn Foote and Bud Hunt give the details, including Bud’s efforts to ascertain the rationale behind such a crazy decision. The story continues on their blogs, and I hope you will follow it as you scream via whatever medium works for you.

I am stunned at the notion that the NWP  might not have demonstrable impact on student achievement or might have to compete to prove its impact. The NWP’s impact is not only STUDENT achievement. It is discovery of adult voices for life. The NWP is the mental musical accompaniment that helps writers of all ages and stages find their voices, voices they will use to sing, speak, convince, debate, and contribute forever. Teachers who participate in the NWP go from classroom voices to real world voices. The NWP is not a school-specific approach to writing. The NWP makes writers.

The summer I spent in a NWP affiliate program drew me closer to articulating creative process and metacognition than anything I had ever experienced. I lived, survived, and thrived as I watched a kindergarten teacher next to me go from fear of writing to celebrating her voice among her peers and even in a wider world. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. If there were ever a viral learning experience, the NWP is it.

Policy makers and education critics tout the strength of alternative teacher certification programs in bringing experienced practitioners from any given field into the classroom. The NWP makes those in the classroom into practitioners of writing, lifelong writers who continue to hone their craft as they live among other (younger) writers. The NWP allows teachers to learn among their students in a community of writers and to articulate the experience with more authority than a nuclear scientist who walks into a physics class. The NWP provides both the experience and the vocabulary to help each teacher start a writing garden. The NWP experience is viral. The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

You are a blog reader. You are benefiting from the NWP.  Every student of every NWP teacher-participant benefits. And they go on to jobs where they can explain, argue, email, tweet — and perhaps stop to personally question word choice or paragraph substance as they live, survive, and thrive as writers in a world often bereft of deliberate word choice or thought about how we speak and write. Isn’t that the community of literate adults we want? The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers.

Now it is your turn to write to someone about the NWP. If you never knew much about the NWP or are not sure if it has had an impact on you, ask. Ask your former English teacher, kindergarten teacher, or any adult whose writing you admire: did you ever have anything to do with anyone who had participated in the NWP? Did your teachers?  If we could trace the connections between writers we respect and contact with NWP, how many degrees of separation would there be? Maybe we should be asking that out loud. If I could reach out to the thousands of students I taught over the years, I would remind them: I was a fellow of a NWP affiliate. And they would conclude: The NWP makes writers who make writers who make writers. Pass it on.

I just read a thought-provoking article on course blogging by Sarah Hurlburt, a college professor of foreign languages and literature. Her analysis of the issues swirling around setting up and evaluating the success of a classroom social blogosphere are dead on. It makes me sense a hollowness in attempting any use of web 2.0 without a strong basis in pedagogy and analysis of the intricate relationships defined and created by each tool. These tools really do require rethinking. We aren’t just shaping the soft clay of learning into differently-shaped vessels. When we use these tools, we throw the clay into a communal lump and let everyone have at it at once. And if no one ever even told us about the foibles of clay in the first place (cracks easily if not dried the right way, requires glaze to hold liquids, etc.), we as teachers are likely to end up with a useless –though possible pretty — BLOB. We at TeachersFirst (especially the Edge team) can review tools and place them in a context familiar to teachers and students, but we risk missing the point entirely in doing so.

Perhaps the real power of some tools lies outside of any known classroom context. And the classroom context one teacher knows is different from that another knows. The chemistry teacher is not a writing teacher. So, as Hurlburt points implies, the chem teacher would not know the pedagogy of writing that an English teacher or Writers’ Project fellow might find intuitive.

Blogs were tacitly tossed aside as “passé”  by many attending NECC this year, even though blogging was the hottest topic in 2006. I do not believe that this was because wikis or Second Life are so much better. I personally believe that writing is so high-level a constellation of processes that many never “get it.”  And many are intimidated by it. And if you don’t “get” writing, you’ll never be able to create a successful, authentically social blogging community.

Hurlburt’s analysis is from a post-secondary context. What if we took blogging down to the little ones where writing process is less encumbered by self-consciousness? If  ever there were an opportunity to build an extended writers’ response group, this would be it. Start with a bunch of third graders (they might have some keyboarding skills), and let them customize their blogs (Hurlburt is right about the personalization!). learn about response and revision as social creative processes, and build a supportive mini-blogosphere. I can’t think of a better way to lead kids into seeing the tools as extensions of themselves , helping them learn positive ways to interact in virtual spaces, and building their vocabulary about language and message before they venture into collaboration on a wiki or other, more complex social tool. (Of course, we’ll have to get the school to stop blocking blog tools…)

I suspect that those who learned to blog at age 8 would never stop. And wouldn’t that be a dream world: people able to express themselves instead of hitting each other? They might even be able to form a beautiful sculpture out of all that messy clay. I can dream. can’t I?

As teachers, we sometimes forget how large a public window opens into our lives. The Washington Post today tells tales of intrepid teachers in the Washington suburbs who apparently think frosted web-glass obcures all public view of their web presence. Wrong. I wonder, though: Is it wrong to provide a consciously open window, even to keep it crystal-clear on purpose?

Thinking about any web presence requires the same approach as your bathroom blind:

• If I keep it open, who will see?
• If I do reveal something, it implies that I want it to be seen by anyone.
• Is there a good reason to share?
• What others will inadvertently see it?

As a lifelong teacher, however, I ask one more:

• What can I teach this way that I cannot teach any other way?

My first decision would be to post a “See next window” sign on the outside of the bathroom blind, directing people, instead,  to a slightly-less-voyeuresque view of my living room. Now, I ask:

• What can I teach from my web “living room” that I cannot teach any other way?

I can teach that I am an art quilter and a writer, a side of me that splashes into  view immediately on the walls and in this blog window. My visual-spatial students and colleagues ask: how does this connect with what she does all day? Should I connect art  and/or writing into what I do all day?

I can teach that books  and TV can share a space in my life. Can they in YOUR life?

I can teach that family is at the center, and a dog closeby. My students and colleagues ask themselves what forms the center of their world.

I can teach that teaching and work sometimes make me tired (is that me on the couch, asleep?). The voyeurs ask: What is it that drives her to work so hard? What drives me?

I can teach that nothing is finished, even the space for the imaginary fireplace still down the list on our “ten year plan.” They ask: What am I willing to wait for? Are time and imagination as important as the final, tangible item?

I can teach that I don’t mind being honest and human, but that I will always try to present my best. A little dust is OK, though.

I even wash the windows (inside and out) occasionally. My windows are frames for viewing both ways, and I welcome the voyeurs. I have thought about what I will show them. I hope other teachers will do the same.

Why frost the glass when we can shed such light?