Who Said It: A Carousel for the Classroom

It was a few years back when I came across an image on social media with quotes from Shakespeare and Hip Hop. Then I found one that was Batman or Shakespeare. Recently @mrsorman posted Green Day or Whitman? I love these quotes for a classroom activity. My students are kicking off a mystery unit and I have immersed them in video and print texts of iconic murder mysteries. I thought Agatha Christie or Wednesday Addams would be perfect to use as a hook for this unit.

Whether you make your own (I use @Canva’s carousel templates) or purchase another teachers, you can use these in many different ways to engage active learning and critical thinking skills. Here are five ways to incorporate Who Said It? in your classroom this week:

1. Gallery Walk – Post the quotes around the room and have students walk around viewing and recording their answers. This technique allows students to be actively engaged as they walk throughout the classroom. Students can work together in small groups to share ideas and respond to the quotes or work independently and they provide evidence to support their answers.
2. Bulletin Board – Looking for a low stakes activity but visual eye candy for your classroom wall? Post all the quotes on a bulletin board and you might even post the answers underneath for students to check their guesses.
3. Station Rotation – This can be one of your stations or learning activities that students rotate through. Kick it up a notch as a hot potato game and use that plush hot potato. First, all members of this station sit in a circle. Then, squeeze the Hot Potato to start the music and pass the spud to the player next to you or even across from you. Toss the tater back and forth, up high, down low, around and around. When the music stops the person holding the potato takes a quote from the jar, reads it aloud and then provides an answer aloud. Play a few rounds to have other group members answer additional questions in the jar.

4. Online Game – Choose an on line game platform like Booklet, Kahoot, Quizlet Live, or Quizizz to test your students literary knowledge. This can be played as a hook or bell ringer to start class or use as a wrap up after discussing elements of mystery.

5. Silent Debate – To help students practice argumentative writing, students can select a quote or randomly choose a quote and then have to defend their answer by writing a short response with two pieces of evidence to support their claims.

If you would like a copy of this Who Said It deck, please email me. There are about twenty quotes in total.

Zooming In On Setting for Study of Author’s Craft and Some Creative Writing

Setting is an important part of any story because it explains where and when the events take place. The setting helps create the mood and set the tone for the literary piece. We often ask students to analyze the setting by examining the surrounding environment, background, historical place in time and geographic location and notice how the setting impacts the character and conflict in the story.

Studiobinder.com defines setting as, “A setting is the time and place of a story. Setting is either outwardly articulated to us, or discretely suggested to us. It can be suggested by weather, clothing, culture, buildings, etc. In screenwriting, setting is written into the slugline of a scene heading. But setting isn’t just the location of a scene, it’s the time in which it exists as well.”

My students will be starting our mystery unit and I want to help use more descriptive language so we will spend the next two weeks focusing on setting in film, stories, and their own writing. I have created this playlist to help students understand the depth of setting in literature.

Looking at excerpts from Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious and Laura Ruby’s York students are able to see how authors communicate the setting by describing the environment and how characters interact within the environment.

This unit is an introduction to understanding author’s craft and structure.

Craft and Structure:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.4
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.5
Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.6
Analyze how differences in the points of view of the characters and the audience or reader (e.g., created through the use of dramatic irony) create such effects as suspense or humor.

Eating Insects Argumentative Assignment

The New York Times published a video that is a perfect introduction to an argumentative essay writing assignment. Check out the video below:

What Insects Can Learn From Lobsters About Rebranding | NYT Opinion

This opinion piece was fascinating and very informative. It offered multiple perspectives and was also interesting to watch. I used the video to introduce an argumentative writing assignment this week. Students first watched the video and took notes in their Writer’s Notebooks. Then, we discussed the key ideas in the video and students shared whether they would eat insects or not.

The next day I provided students two different articles about eating insects. One article I paired down from a Time Magazine article by Aryan Baker titled “They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?” (February 26, 2021). The second article from EatCrickster.com, “Edible Insects: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” by Amy Gardner, I also edited to provide more of the cons for farming and eating insects. Students read the articles and coded the text. Then we created a PRO/CON chart on the Smartboard collaborating the findings from the article.

Now students will write an argumentative essay about whether food companies and restaurants should introduce insects into the Western diet for daily consumption and an alternative source of protein. 

Writing Assignment: Eating Insects

Eating Insects Argumentative Writing prompt

Write an argumentative essay about whether food companies and restaurants should introduce insects into the Western diet for daily consumption and an alternative source of protein. 

• Write a multi paragraph argumentative essay in which you take a stance on the topic of whether  food companies and restaurants should introduce insects into the Western diet for daily consumption and an alternative source of protein. 

• Make sure you establish an argumentative claim, address potential counterarguments, and support your claim from the sources you have read. 

• Develop your ideas clearly and use your own words, except when quoting directly from sources.

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) and Writing Instruction

I am currently participating in a study to understand more about Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) as a model for struggling writers. The goal is to teach the strategies that students need in order to write clearly and concisely. 

According to Graham, Harris, & McKeown, 2013, the SRSD approach consists of explicit teaching of:

• general and specific writing strategies, such as:
  • using the right vocabulary,
  • being mindful of the intended reader,
  • creating interesting introductions and conclusions
• the knowledge required to use these strategies;
• ways to manage these strategies;
• the writing process; and
• one’s behaviour as a writer
  • self-regulation
  • self-instruction

Just like we teach students the habits of proficient readers, teachers need to articulate the habits of good writers. Writing researchers identified what good writers do: plan, monitor, evaluate, revise, and manage the writing process. These strategies should be taught explicitly for learners to apply them to a writing task. 

Elements of SRSD Instruction

Instructor modeling of strategies is essential to SRSD and must explicitly show learners how to create meaning. Graham and Harris (2005) describe a five-step process. By completing the following scaffolded instructional sequence, teachers can help learners gain confidence in the strategy and learn to use it automatically for more independent learning.

1. Discuss It. Develop and activate background knowledge. Discuss when and how learners might use a strategy to accomplish specific writing tasks and goals. Talk about the benefits of becoming a more proficient and flexible writer. Address any negative self-talk or negative beliefs the learner holds, and ask the learner for a commitment to try to learn and use the strategy. Discuss how the learner should track progress to document the use and impact of the strategy.
2. Model It. Model the strategy using think-alouds, self-talk, and self-instruction as you walk through the steps. Discuss afterwards how it might be made more effective and efficient for each individual, and have learners customize the strategy with personal self-statements. Ask students to set specific writing goals. Model the strategy more than once with various sample texts; for example, use a graphic organizer to demonstrate how to comprehend various texts of a similar genre (persuasive arguments or editorials). The Modeling stage is a key component for students. When students can read strong and poorly written writing and discuss it they are able to name and identify elements of good writing. Similarly, when teachers demonstrate writing and think aloud throughout the process, students are able to monitor their own thinking and improve their own writing.
3. Make It Your Own. Strategies are composed of multiple steps, similar to a checklist. When steps are captured in a mnemonic or acrostic sentence, they are easier to remember. Paraphrasing or re-naming the steps in a mnemonic or creating a new mnemonic is fine, provided that the learner is able to remember the steps that the names represent. Customizing the checklist or mnemonic helps learners make it their own.
4. Support It. Use the strategy as often as possible, in as many ways as possible. Instructors and other students can be supports, offering direct assistance, prompts, constructive feedback, and encouragement. When you introduce a new type of application (a new genre or writing frame, for example), it may be appropriate to model the strategy again. Learners can rely on charts and checklists too, as they learn the strategy and make it their own, but all of this should fade as learners become familiar enough with the strategy to set their goals, monitor their use of the strategy, and use self-statements independently.
5. Independent Performance. Learners come to use the strategy independently across a variety of tasks. For example, learners may begin to draw graphic organizers without being prompted as a means to help them comprehend and plan.

Strategies like Acronyms are also helpful for students to remember the steps of the writing process and can act as a guide or checklist for students to write well. For example, the POW+TREE strategy helps writers approach an essay-writing task and check their work as they become more independent (Harris, Graham, Mason, & Friedlander, 2008).

POW, represents and emphasizes the importance of the planning process: 

Pick my idea and pay attention to prompt 

Organize

Write and say more

The TREE acronym is a memory and visualization tool that helps writers structure their essays: the Topic sentence is like the trunk of the tree that supports the whole argument; Reasons (at least three) are like the roots of the argument; Explain is a reminder to tell more about each reason; and finally, Ending is like the earth that wraps up the whole argument. Think sheets or graphic organizers shaped like stylized trees that learners write in as they brainstorm and plan can prompt the internalization of this strategy.

References

Graham, S. (2006). Strategy instruction and the teaching of writing: A metaanalysis. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 187–207). New York: Guilford Press.

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2005). Writing better: Effective strategies for teaching students with learning difficulties. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools – A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education. Available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/WritingNext.pdf.

Book Review: 4 Essential Studies by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher

What are the core units of study that you teach in your English Language Arts class? Essays, Literature, Poetry, maybe argumentative writing? In Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s newest book 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency (Heinemann, 2021), there is a deep dive into teaching essay writing, poetry, book clubs, and digital composition.

Now for a disclaimer, I am a HUGE!!!!! Kittle and Gallagher fan. Ever since I participated in a workshop 18 years ago with Kelly Gallagher at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York I was hooked. I have read every one of his books, adopted Article of the Week in my middle school classroom, and even use many of his texts in the college classes that I teach. If I am at NCTE or ILA, I will go to a Gallagher and Kittle workshop because I know that the information they provide is practical and timely. So, this book was something that I was eager to dive in. Let me highlight the key points presented in each section.

The Essay

How do we as teachers bring students’ voices to the forefront of essays. So much of essay writing that is taught in school is bland, rote, and formatted in a constricting five paragraph essay. But that is not the types of essays that we read outside of school. Check out Sam Anderson’s essay in The New York Times, “I Recommend Eating Chips.” or John Green’s collection of essays in The Anthropocene Reviewed. These writers write compelling and insightful essays that make readers pay attention to the insight, perspective, and point of view. Teachers want to provide opportunity for students to write meaningful essays that honor and amplify their voice and agency. We might need to experiment with form — while throwing out the five paragraph essay template to write authentic essays that blend forms and hone in on craft and structure.

Some teaching moves one can make to help students with their essay writing include providing lots of model and mentor texts and have students complete a WRITE AROUND to notice and name the writing craft moves. Additionally, providing students with lots of TIME TO WRITE and low stakes opportunities to develop their writing and voice. Kittle and Gallagher write, “A volume of ungraded practice gives them opportunities to play with their ideas – some which they will develop into polished essays using craft moves they learn in this study. We know that the quantity of writing will move more writers towards proficiency.” (page 13) Teachers must MODEL THE WRITING PROCESS for students and write along side students. Have students read, analyze, and IMITATE WRITING PASSAGES, Kittle and Gallagher call this writing activity, “kidnap the structure and style”. Don’t forget to allow time for students to conference, work in writing groups, and opportunities to revise, reflect, and evaluate their own essays.

Book Clubs

Similar to writing, volume is key when teaching reading and readers. Kittle and Gallagher write, “Book clubs motivate us to read. They deepen our understanding of not only the book but how others read and interpret the same text. Books stretch out thinking, and they expose us to books and authors we may not have otherwise missed.” (Page 45) Students practice the habits of life long readers when they engage in book club conversations, books encourage readers to talk about the topics addressed in these texts. More importantly, “rigor is not in the book itself, but in the work students to understand it.” (pg. 47) It requires teachers to choose books that are relevant and provide opportunities for students to reflect and by writing daily in their Reader’s Notebooks.

Excerpt from Penny Kittle’s Notebook in response to reading. There are so many more beautiful notebook excerpts from student’s notebooks pages 65-72.

Poetry

“Professor Thomas C Foster notes, poetry “offers a window into the human experience.” (page 80). Kittle and Gallagher call poetry, “little mysteries.” There needs to be a balance in poetry analysis and poetry writing. Inviting students to create and write their own poems and “start with playing, wondering, free writing, reading and listening to poems, creating notebook lists and phrases, and imitating. ” (page 82) Again, volume is key when teaching poetry. For poetry lists you can find more on Penny Kittle’s website.

Here are two poetry writing exercises to try out with students and lots more in the book:

Spine Poems – students collect books from the classroom library or their own personal library and stack in combinations so that the titles on the spines make poems.

Crowd Source Poetry: Using a Google Form, a teacher can crowd source poetry lines to build a community driven poem about an event, person, theme, or central idea.

Additional poetry lessons and activities include teaching figurative language, having students emulate a poetry form, host a poetry tournament to immerse students in a poetry study by theme or genre. Host a poet of the day – I actually do something similar to this with my poetry playlists providing students with a menu of poets, poems, and poetry forms.

In terms of assessment, Kittle and Gallagher created an “Excellence in Poetry” Grading Menu where poems are not graded individually but students are provided with choices and each student turns in a poem for inclusion in a classroom anthology. There were also six different poetry analysis assignments/exams.

Digital Composition

We live in a digital and visual saturated culture and to think that literacy and texts does not blend digital media. Kittle and Gallagher state, “Digital composition is not just engaging, it is necessary.” (page 117) Let’s put our students interest first and support them as content creators and creative communicators while practicing digital citizenship. Possible digital composition assignments include: designing public service announcements (PSAs), create a movie from a notebook entry, make a podcast, and analyze digital texts.

If you are looking for practical ideas to implement in your English Language Arts classroom tomorrow than Kittle and Gallagher’s book with give you four unit of study that support deep students learning and at the same time help students to practice essential skills needed to be critical thinkers and consumers of information while at the same time honoring student voice, choice, agency, and creativity.

Multigenre Projects

In my book New Realms for Writing (ISTE, 2019) I introduce a multi genre project my students create based on a World War II topic, research, and historical fiction.

As stated in the book, “Why just box students into writing one genre per unit? There are limitations to teaching narrative, informative, argumentative writing in isolation. Each genre has its strengths and drawbacks. In fact, when we read essays and articles these genres are often blended together.  If teachers allow students to show their understanding and knowledge of a topic with a variety of genres there is choice and creativity. This goes beyond just allowing students to choose the genre or format to showcase their understanding, what if students could blend genres in one assignment to produce a multi-genre piece.  In this chapter I introduce  the concept of multi genre writing: the ability to write in more than one genre to present understanding and build new knowledge.”

Multigenre Projects are not new, educator and author, Tom Romano describes in, Blending Genres Blending Styles (2000),  “In short, multigenre projects entail a series of generic documents that are linked by a central premise, theme, or goal. They may forward an argument, trace a history, or offer multiple interpretations of a text or event. They are rigorous forms of writing, involving all of the elements of a traditional research paper: research and citation, coherence and organization, purpose and aim of discourse, audience awareness, and conventional appropriateness.”

As an end of the year project I wanted to create a multi genre project where my students were at the forefront. Since we just finished reading books and discussing themes of identity, I adapted a project I found online that focuses on our stories and identities. Students were to create multigenre project as a means of reflecting upon middle school and how that has shaped us into who we are today.

Here are the specifics: 

• A title page with a creative title.

• An introduction serving as a guide to readers.  This will introduce the event you’re reflecting upon and help us understand why this topic is important to you.  Likewise, it gives you an opportunity to explain how we should read your documents.  This should be ½ to 1 page long.

• Three (3) separate documents from three (3) different genre categories:
  • The  Narrative Writing Category
  • The Persuasive Writing Category
  • The  Informational Writing Category
  • The Poetry Category
  • Visual Artistic Category

*You can add a fourth category and document for extra credit

• An artist statement paragraph for each document at the end of your project answering the following questions in complete sentences:
  • What is the message of this document? 
  • Why did you pick this genre for this specific part of the story? 
  • How does this document show the larger theme of your story? 

At the end the year it is inspiring to see students write with gusto about topics related to friends, sports, uncertainty, grades, losing a loved one and procrastinating. One student even said to me that this was the best project they have worked on so far — that is something you do not hear often when it comes to a writing assignments.

As for the different writing examples within the genre categories, students had lots of choices.

As these final projects are turned in, I cannot wait to share some of the highlights.

Where I’m From Book Assessment

I came across the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon, an American author from Kentucky, who has published in many genres, including picture books, poetry, juvenile novels, and articles.:

Where I’m From

I am from clothespins,

from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.

I am from the dirt under the back porch.

(Black, glistening,

it tasted like beets.)

I am from the forsythia bush

the Dutch elm

whose long-gone limbs I remember

as if they were my own.

I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,

          from Imogene and Alafair.

I’m from the know-it-alls

          and the pass-it-ons,

from Perk up! and Pipe down!

I’m from He restoreth my soul

          with a cotton ball lamb

          and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch,

fried corn and strong coffee.

From the finger my grandfather lost

          to the auger,

the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box

spilling old pictures,

a sift of lost faces

to drift beneath my dreams.

I am from those moments–

snapped before I budded —

leaf-fall from the family tree.

The poem has so much vivid imagery. The moments are also metaphors and requires students to make inferences reading and rereading the poem. The reader gets a clear picture in their mind of the childhood farm George Ella Lyon grew up on in Kentucky. The poem highlights the role of family, culture and childhood help to develop ones sense of identity.

My students read the poem silently first and then I read the poem aloud. After hearing the poem and reading the poem students sketched an image that stood out from their understanding of the poem. Students shared their sketches with their elbow partner.

Students were asked to work in small groups to deconstruct the poem:

1. Go back into the poem and count how many times the lines begin with “I’m from…”
2. Find a sensory description with vivid imagery using smell, touch, taste, or sight
3. Find a metaphor and decipher it’s meaning
4. Identify the memories vs. present time
5. What else do you notice?

After ten minutes we returned back to the large class to discuss our findings. We discussed how each of the choices that Lyon made when writing her poem were significant, small items in her life that helped to shape who she was. T.

Now I love the idea of students creating their own “Where I’m From” poems about themselves but since we have been reading choice novels about identity, I had students create an “I Am From” poem based on the protagonist in their reading book. Students were asked to think of significant items in the protagonists life, things that helped shape their identity, family beliefs that molded what they believe, and a description of their place within their family using figurative language. The results were awesome.

The first student example is based on Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue:

I am from a land that no longer welcomes me

A country where I cannot return, despite all the people demanding I do

Surviving, not thriving, in a new land that is almost as welcoming

Stuck with a name that isn’t my own

Where it is normal for me to leave school bloody and beaten

Working with classmates who refuse to acknowledge who I am

Who continuously mix up my home country with another, collectively deciding to turn away and disregard the differences

I am from a mom who is stronger than any hero

A sister who’s as smart as a textbook, but as cold as my favorite ice cream

We don’t talk anymore, all that’s left behind are memories

And even those are fading

I am from a step-dad who beats my mom to a pulp, but also keeps us afloat

A biological dad who decided we weren’t worth the trouble

Who moved on without a second glance in our direction

I am from riches and wealth, turned to dirt and no lunch

I am from a wonderful childhood, cut too short

Forced to grow up too soon

Missing my culture that encourages respect 

Unlike my new home, where respect is scarce 

Trying to keep my light alive by cracking jokes, although they are always met with silence

I am from everyone I had to leave behind

Everything I couldn’t save

Everyone I couldn’t protect 

I am one with the stories of the past, only true to me

Built from the everlasting tales, allowing me to live and learn

I am from a jasmine house where the memories are fond and my life began

Reminiscing in the scent of flowers, swans, sapphire blue rivers, and chests full of gold doubloons

I am from everywhere, everyone, and everything

A mosaic 

A reflection

A montage of the past

A collection of moments

Here is another student example based on Elizabeth Acevado’s Poet X:

My family is from the small religious island of the Dominican Republic

Where my Mami fled for America

But I am from the city

Where nobody sleeps

The part of Harlem where creepy men lurk at every corner 

I am from a school just a train ride away

Where most students skip class and fool around 

I am from a town that sees me not as a person but an object to mess around with

My life welded to live invisible, trying to hide from all those demanding to play with me 

I am from a life in which I can trust only me to stick up for myself

I am from a family in which respect is nowhere to be found

From disappointed looks and lecturings parties

From church every Sunday and an Earth rotating around God

I am from a mother who resorts to violence at every given second and a father who seeks no part in my life 

I am from a safety net that is my twin brother by whom I am connected to by twin powers

Yet from a family in which my gay brother is unjustly unaccepted and my freedom seeking self is restrained by thick chains and barbed wire

I am long gone from the days of the ice skating rinks and peaceful church with Father Sean

No longer remembering the love my Mami and I once shared

I am from a suffering family through and through working to mend our knotted, beaten family back together 

I am a little girl inside a big body who seeks safety and acceptance yet gets met by hatred and harassment

I am a girl who wants everything she’s never supposed to have

Someone who wished for a boy but gets meet by misogyny 

I am from hours of being discriminated against and named a ‘cuero’ and days of questioning who I am 

I am from a tight ship revolving around strict rules

From a confusing and curious brain that goes against my family’s teachings 

And a girl who wishes to write poems peacefully 

From a life scarred by the appalling cent of my burning notebook filled with my problems I never solved 

I am from the secret poetry club restricted by my hate filled Mami and knees that burn from the rice buckets 

From the safe warmth of Ms. Galiano the only women who showed kindness and encouragement

I am from a world of great bravery learning how to express my pain and share my joy

A place in which I shall share my poems freely and safely to the world

I am a woman who shall honor and stay true to herself

Podcasts Are Mentor Texts Too

According to Iowa Reading and Research Center, “Mentor texts are written pieces that serve as an example of good writing for student writers. The texts are read for the purpose of studying the author’s craft, or the way the author uses words and structures the writing. The goal is to provide students a model they could emulate in crafting their own piece.” Mentor texts are samples of writing for students to model and emulate for their own writing. As a teacher, I am always reading and collecting mentor texts that I can utilize in my classroom for teaching all types of reading moves from sentence structure, vocabulary, voice, and even punctuation. An effective mentor text is one that we can read and reread to unearth the beauty in the writing.

Who is to say that a podcast can’t be a mentor text. My students are currently writing original mystery stories and when I came across Lethal Lit: A Tig Torres Mystery, I was enamored with this engaging mystery that blends Serial Podcast content with Riverdale teen drama. In the podcast series, teen detective Tig Torres returns to her small hometown of Hollow Falls, where her aunt was framed as a serial killer ten years earlier. With help from her new friends, Tig investigates the twisted mystery. But as she gets closer to the truth, the killings, each based on murder scenes from classic literature, begin all over again…with her as the final target. The podcast is six episodes, each episode under 30 minutes.

I introduced the podcast series to my students during a mini-lesson on Mood and Tone when we listened to the first episode together to understand the mood and tone in the show’s exposition. Students constructed interpretations about the setting of Hollow Falls and the people who inhabit it. I provided students with a listening guide to help catalogue the murders, clues, and suspects throughout the entire series.

Listening to the podcast the dialogue is riddled with pop culture allusions that can be another mini-lesson and the voice of the protagonist, Tig Torres is worth re-listening as students create their own characters with distinct and unique voices. In using this podcast as a mentor text, I want to “help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats.” (the National Writing Project).

Students will complete a choice project based on their listening of the entire series too.

A mentor text does not just have to be a piece of writing, it can be a visual text like a movie or image, it might be a song or poem, and even a podcast. Mentor texts can be ones that students can read independently as well as with teacher support. Think about the texts that you use as mentor texts for your students, what are the lessons that can grow out of these texts and how they might inspire our students to be stronger and more effective writers.

Supporting Writers in Blended Learning Environments

In Chapter Three of my book New Realms for Writing (ISTE, 2019) I spend time addressing teaching essay writing. In the beginning of the chapter I write, “Essay writing is the foundation of secondary school. As much as I desire to focus on creative writing and diverse formats in my classroom, that is not the reality. My students are still working on literary essays throughout their schooling;  learning and writing  in a format that exists across content subjects, standardized tests, and throughout college.  Students learn the five paragraph essay in order to articulate their thinking about their reading and showcase their understanding. How does one help students to do just that, while at the same time show original thinking about their reading, include textual evidence, maintain voice and individuality? Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, models and mentor texts, discussions, and scaffolds.”

State tests might be on hold during the pandemic but helping students with essay writing in a blended learning environment has not wavered. My students continue to write essays as well as creative writing pieces but the essay itself is like climbing Mt Kilimanjaro for many of my 8th graders. Whether it is formulating a thesis or claim or finding the strongest pieces of evidence to support their claims or thesis, writing an essay can be an arduous task. The more my students write and the more opportunities they have to practice collecting evidence and writing, they will grow as writers.

This year I created a guide book on Bookcreator.com for students to access written and video instructions, graphic organizers on how to tackle each part of the essay. Think of it like a collection of Flipped lesson on essay writing. You can view the book HERE.

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Graphic organizers are great tools to help support student writing. When I create a graphic organizer I am thinking about where the students are at and what necessary scaffolds are needed to help them accomplish the writing task. In this graphic organizer students organize information about their reading — it helps students articulate their understanding and show the relationships between their thinking about a theme in the text. Some of my students might need a more modified organizer depending on their needs and accommodations. In this modified version of the graphic organizer I provide students with an evidence bank and adjust the essay format to three paragraphs versus a 4-5 paragraph essay. In addition to providing class time for students to write their essays and freeing up lessons on the writing process, I held writing conferences daily during class time, lunch time and after school.

Throughout the week I organized daily writing conferences with students. During the 6 minute conference time I would start by asking students “How’s it Going” — yes, this a line from Carl Anderson — a great lead into the conference. Then, I would ask students how I could help them, where they had questions or concerns. During the conference a student might read aloud their writing to me, ask me to read aloud a paragraph or help them to structure the conclusion without saying the same thing over and over again. This one-on-one time with students was beneficial for me because I was able to collect data on them as a writer and add notes in Powerschool. Writing conferences were beneficial the students because they were getting guidance and recommendations to make their writing stronger. Many students also worked with their peers for editing and feedback.

Writing is a life long skill. The more writing we allow students to do in our classroom, the stronger writers they become. Providing students with models, mentors, graphic organizers, sentence starters, and opportunities for revisions helps them grow and develop not only their writing skills, while at the same time build vocabulary, grammar, and language awareness when writing for academic purposes.

How do you support your students as writing to provide opportunities for growth? What are the writing lessons that you have found ageless in a blended learning environment? Share your ideas in the comments section of this blog.

#WritingMatters

I’m excited to be on this week’s episode of the #WritingMatters podcast with Dr. Troy Hicks @hickstro by @getwritable! We discuss my book New Realms for Writing (ISTE 2019) and ways to support the diverse writers in our classrooms.

Here is where the playlist for all past Season 2 episodes or you can visit the landing page for all the Writing Matters podcasts.