Eduholic

Family Magazine, a Northern Virginia-based publication on parenting, is including content from Congressional staff, and it’s my turn. I thought I’d use this week’s post to work out some ideas and reflect on publication as an aspect of the writing process.

The piece I agreed to write, way back in August, was “The Write Stuff.” In the spirit of commercial tabloids, I will provide “Five Tips to Turn Struggling Scribes into Scribbling Superstars.” I can dash off 800 words on this quick; I’ve been working on this trick for fifteen years and counting.

After a pithy lead my five bullets will be about freewriting, paragraphs, concrete examples, snapshots and grabbers. My subheads (this is the fun part): Free the Writing Willy, Building Blocks, Like What?, Click!, and The Beginning Comes Last.

This reminds me of a gig I had a few years back, penning monthly for Sylvan Learning Center’s e-newsletters. For a few hundred bucks a pop I wrote on subjects geared to the anxious parents of C students, like “Color-Coding: The Key to Your Kid’s Success.”

I reminisce not just about the pennies from heaven, but to illustrate the point that writing begets writing. Every piece I’ve published in the past is in my writing today, which is why I want my students to begin publishing now.

When I say publish, it doesn’t have to be in Family Magazine. It means writing for a specific audience and purpose in a defined form. This week, my eighth graders are drafting short articles for a newsletter to parents.

You’ll recall from last post that I’m unfolding the writing process slowly. First we got into the swing with freewriting. Now, with our newsletter drafts, I’ve introduced writing workshop.

Workshop is so integral to my approach that I forget that not all teachers use it. The set up is that there are four kids in a group, and each brings four copies of a typed double-spaced draft. The basic rules are simple. The author reads his piece out loud, then shuts up (not permanently, but long enough to hear the group talk). The paper needs to speak for itself; if the readers didn’t “get it,” it’s valuable, if at first a little painful, for the author to hear that.

The group has a protocol, too. Writing circles are not for red-penning or tearing a paper apart. They are for responding in a genuine and constructive way as readers. I liked the part where… I want to know more about… This reminds me of… These are some of the “conversation starters” with which I equip students. Simply asking an author a question — What did the alien look like?—can be one of the sincerest forms of feedback.

In answering a reader’s questions, an author is prewriting, which leads to revision. (Good writers anticipate questions and answer them as they go.) Understanding that revision is a fundamental part of writing is one of the big leaps for student writers. Too often, untutored writers think proofreading is revision. Moving a comma from here to there or “fixing my sentence structure” is not the same thing as inserting a snapshot or writing a new lead to hook the reader.

Speaking of hooking the reader, here I am at the end of a post and I haven’t done what I set out to do, which is write a draft for Family. But I do have a plan, and a group of eighth graders to workshop with on Monday. I’ll get to work on that draft, and in the meantime I invite you to share a comment below about how writing workshop or publishing happens in your classroom.

(Note: Read on to see the workshopped draft sent to Family.)

The Write Stuff: Five Tips for Reluctant Writers
Emmet Rosenfeld for Family Magazine 10-1-08

Clutching a pencil with white knuckles and throwing yet another crumpled ball of paper at the trashcan are familiar signs of writer's block. But writing can be a joyful and liberating act of self-expression if kids have the tools and training to outrun the blank page boogie man.

After more than fifteen years as an English teacher of students ranging from elementary to college, I've found five sure fire ways to catch writing lightning in a bottle. Read on to learn how freewriting, paragraphs, concrete examples, snapshots and revision can turn your struggling scribe into a scribbling superstar.

Free the Writing Willy
Freewriting is a basic and helpful exercise for any writer, novice or accomplished. It's a form of conditioning, like weight-training for the athlete, that builds writing muscles, promotes fluency and voice, and allows a writer to capture thoughts quickly instead of getting stuck in a frustrating culdesac of "I don't have anything else to say."

How do you do it? The simple answer is, Keep the pen moving. Start with small chunks of time, building up from three to five minutes at first, then to longer sessions of ten to twelve minutes. The point is not to sprint, or write until the hand cramps, but rather to keep a steady pace and never stop. Freewrites are never checked for grammar or spelling; in fact, they are often not even shared. The idea is to capture raw ideas and follow thoughts where they lead. We can mine freewrites for ideas or "golden lines," but this kind of expressive writing doesn't need to be correct to be perfect.

Building Blocks
Once fluency has increased by regular freewriting, a writer will be more comfortable facing a variety of writing tasks. These can range from an essay test in history class to a short story in English, or even more transactional forms like a letter to a local newspaper to argue for the installation of lights on the soccer field.

Whatever the purpose and whoever the audience, a writer needs to communicate clearly. And the best way to do that is to learn to think in terms of paragraphs. These are baskets filled with related ideas. Some teachers advocate a topic sentence at the top of a paragraph. That might help some kids but it tends to produce writing that is formulaic. A better approach is to ask, of each and every paragraph, what is the controlling idea? Once you know, weed out sentences that don't help the cause.

Like What?
A common malady of poor writing is vagueness. "At the beach we had a lot of fun," for example, is a sentence that may make the writer herself smile, as she recalls chasing sand crabs and digging a huge hole with plastic shovels to catch the incoming tide. It is not, however, a sentence that makes the reader smile. There just isn't enough information to make us feel much of anything.

Writers must always favor concrete examples over abstractions. This applies when writing about a personal experience, or in a subject like science or history. "Show don't tell" is another way of saying it. Don't write "Johnny was scared." That's pure telling. Instead, try "Johnny's eyeballs bulged out of his head like blood shot ping pong balls." With the use of specific detail, the reader gets the picture.

Click!
Barry Lane is a writing teacher who talks about the use of the "snapshot." When I'm conferencing with students about their paper, I ask: if you had a magic camera, at what moment could you snap a picture that would capture the essence of your topic? Once they've decided, this is the basis for a snapshot that can bring the paper alive.

Technical tips for writing a succesful snapshot are to keep it in the present tense, and use lots of sensory detail. At the magic moment, what can we see, hear, touch or feel? Using this technique, the boring sentence about the beach gets gritty with sand that sticks to our ankles, and a plane flying along the shoreline trailing a banner for Sharky's Crab House makes us want to keep on reading.

The Beginning Comes Last.
Sometimes the first words are the hardest. Student writers need to give themselves a break. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time. In fact, it doesn't even have to be good. Heck, you don't even need to write complete sentences-- a lot of times, a list is a good way to get going, or a sketch or a web or just plain freewriting.

Explore your subject in a low risk way, and generally speaking, a certain logic will emerge. For me, in writing this piece, I did some writing on my blog to warm up, and discovered that I wanted to talk about five different ideas. When I sat down to the keyboard, it wasn't too hard to crank out a couple paragraphs about each one.

Notice that what I didn't do was worry too much about a formula ("Write the topic sentence first and then three supporting sentences.") Having a rough outline to begin is often useful, but what's important to remember is that writing is thinking. I don't always know what I'm going to say before I start, and I certainly don't know how I'm going to say it. What I do know is that once I start, I'm on my way. And with these simple tips, your son or daughter will be, too.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

9: 53. I’m writing fast. Not at a sprint, more of a brisk walk. I’m timing myself to see how far I can get in ten minutes, because this is the assignment I asked my 8th graders to do today and I want to do it, too. Actually, I asked them to do it three times this weekend, not all in a row. For each time, in a comfortable setting where they can focus, they are to freewrite for ten minutes and then get a word count. We will get the average words per minute based on this as a baseline for each student.

One of the goals, I told them, is to increase fluency. This does not just mean words per minute, of course. It is the ability to outrun the censor in your brain, to let ideas spill onto the page in a generative way, that freewriting develops. Even now, typing, my ideas are outrunning me and I have to consciously keep my rhythm regular. Of course, the experience on a word processor is different than with pad and paper, and one that might be more suited to IM’ing kids today. But there’s something about writing in a marble comp book, and despite my previous declarations to the contrary (March 17, 2008), I don’t in my heart or my hands believe that handwriting is dead.

Back to our task. Still walking briskly. I didn’t just throw the freewriting assignment out there without preparation. We’ve been building up to it. As I mentioned earlier, we started with baby steps: 2-3 minutes at a time after book presentations. “Just keep the pen moving,” I instructed. “Use the book topic as a diving board.” Most of those quick writes ended up being addressed to the presenter, and saying something like, “I thought it was cool in your book when…”. In other words, not really genuine freewriting, more feedback. That was okay—the assignment’s fault, not the kids’.

Next step was yesterday in class, where we did a topic BS (titter here). That’s brainstorm. Kids made lists of twenty or more topics in their writer’s notebook, with plenty of chances to steal from one another. To facilitate this cross fertilization, I interrupted them every few minutes of bs’ing to “zoom around the room.” Roll call style, I asked each student to call out one topic from their list. We discussed along the way what made a good topic, and that topics could be a word, phrase, question, or even some other form. Pencils were waggling to keep up. For homework, they had to do one 10-minute freewrite on one of their newly generated choices.

Today, we really ramped up the freewriting. Note that what I’m about to describe is direct instruction. In the past, I’d operated under the assumption that “They’ll pick it up,” or, “They get it. It’s easy, just keep the pen moving.” Now, low and slow, I’m trying to make sure that I don’t assume they have a skill that I haven’t taught. So, here’s the fun lesson: Free write wars.

10:03 (I won’t stop now, but that’s ten minutes. I’ll try to get my average words per minute later. By the way, this might not be my most literary post; sometimes I wordsmith these to death. But I’m trying to do like I asked kids to do, so let me keep going and outrun the editor).

Free write wars. 4-5 kids per team. One chart paper and sharpy, 45 seconds a turn. Give the group one minute to choose a topic. “Sports” is too general , but “paintball” is okay. If they don’t have one, I give them one on the spot: Apples. Or, my personal favorite, bicycles. I’ve got a lot of memories related to riding bikes.

Anyway, that’s the set up. Turns it into a game, something 8th graders love. There was also a rule that it has to make sense, more or less. No writing “and, and, and, and” just to up the word count. Ready, go… and even kids who had been putting their head down because they were “done” before the end of the two-minute freewrites earlier were now engaged and excited.

After 45 seconds, “Switch!”, and the next kid starts writing. And so on. At the end, before doing a word count, a reader shared what the group wrote. It was disjointed, but there were snatches of good freewriting—associations, colorful language, a deep thought—that I was able to point out. And mostly, lots of giggling.

To get the count, see how many words are in each of the first three lines and get an average. Then, multiply that by the number of lines. Each group announced its total, and there was built in motivation for round two.

For the second time, a new topic and a confident focused approach by each writer. I extended the time to 1 minute per kid. We had 3 teams of five in one class, 3 teams of four in the other. If you have larger classes, just make more teams. Extending the writing time by fifteen seconds in the second round did not slow the game.

The fluency increased in the second round, for the most part. A team of squirrely boys went from 55 words to 105, changing topic from apples (teacher-provided) to football. A team of rather more studious girls went down, from 128 on graduating from the 8th grade to 119 on the Olympics (their total in round two was still the highest in the class). They speculated that the second topic was just not as stimulating as the first, so they wrote a little less feverishly.

My favorite bit was by Don, in Round 1 on bicycles: “I love riding bikes I always go down the big hill at the top of my pipestem I like to lean to the side and make quick turns.” Punctuation be darned, when you’re shooting down a half-pipe I bet that’s how it feels.

I wrote too, by the way, and not just because I was needed to make the numbers even. It helps to talk to them writer to writer, and to model the fluency I hope they achieve (or surpass!).

So that’s the sequence of freewriting lessons we’ve done so far, and I’m almost at the end of my second ten minutes. (By the way, I told them to find different times to write, not to do the sessions in a row. Hope they do what I say and not what I do, but then again, if they get excited enough to write for twenty minutes at a shot, something’s working.) By the way, my word count for the first ten minutes here is 481, and my word count for the second chunk (eleven minutes, it turned out) is 658, for an average of about 54 words per minute.

When they come in on Monday, I’ll record their baselines, but we’ll also start to mine the journal entries for topics for the first paper, a personal narrative. Stay tuned as we work our way from madman to architect in coming weeks. 8th grade writing rich with voice and clarity to come.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’m no golfer. But once when I was taking a couple cuts at a kid’s birthday party at Top Golf, a dad who is gave me some good advice: “Low and slow,” he said, meaning that one should draw back the club head in a deliberate way before hitting the ball. Since then, that phrase pops back into my head every time I pick up a club.

I’ve been trying to apply the mnemonic to my teaching too. Take the summer assignment my 8th graders brought to class on the second day. Inherited from last year’s teacher, the hefty requirement included doing response logs on three assigned books, preparing an oral presentation on another choice book, and writing a five-paragraph essay on what it feels like to be homeless (in response to Jerry Spinelli’s Milkweed.) That’s a lot to have teed up right from the start, which means I need to think carefully about my swing.

In the past, I might have dutifully collected all the work at once and tried to grade it as the rest of the quarter unfolded around me (generating lots more new work to grade each week). Maybe I would have waded through its various elements by the time interims rolled around, having a big grade to show for it and a bunch of stale work to return to kids who barely remembered reading the books in the first place.

Taking a more balanced approach honors the time and effort kids put into their work, and also gives us a chance to reinforce important skills and content. In the spirit of low and slow, here’s how I’m handling the summer assignment.

To start, we did a “Got it?” activity on the first day to make sure everyone had the required elements on time and in the correct format. A simple completion grade accounts for about a fifth of the credit. If a student realized while sharing that something wasn’t quite right, he wrote a comment on the rubric to explain where the work fell short. Responsibility for this quick, clerical check was shifted from me to the students.

For homework, I asked students to color code their reader response logs in the margins: yellow for summary, green for discussion; blue for personal connections, and red for critical thinking (including a recommendation). The next day, kids entered the classroom saying things like, “I didn’t have any red,” or, “Is it okay that I had blue and green together in the same paragraph?” By engaging in this metacognitive activity, students could see for themselves how and how well they’d used their “readers’ toolbox.”

As to the oral presentations, instead of listening to a mind-numbing string of them, they’re sprinkled through the week, a few per day. I’m asking kids to take notes each time on a graphic organizer where they record three key ideas, feedback for the presenter (one “plus” and one “to improve”), and rate whether or not they would read the book themselves.

Taking notes makes them listen well and practice the invaluable skill; evaluating the presenter let’s them see what works and what doesn’t (which may help their own presentation). When we’re done, I’ll ask each kid to choose one of the new books to read based on those personal rankings. As an added bonus, we’re freewriting for a few minutes after each book talk, introducing a practice that kids will use a lot in my class to generate ideas and promote fluency.

Let’s not forget the dreaded 5-paragraph essays. I attached a kid-friendly 6 Trait guide to each, and for homework, students had to read and rubric a partner’s paper, then pen a 7-sentence letter of feedback. There’s one sentence for each trait; the seventh can be a question, a stroke, or anything else constructive (“Thanks for not hitting me in the head with that kickball at recess…”). With the feedback, kids revise once more before handing in the paper.

I admit I’ll never know what it feels like to crush a golf ball three hundred year straight down the fairway. But because my approach to the summer assignment was “low and slow,” when we’re ready to move to a new unit together as a class, we will have reactivated prior knowledge (What makes a good reader response or oral presentation?) and established norms (All work should be neat, complete and on time; Writers revise based on peer feedback).

Most important, using a feedback loop and implementing metacognitive strategies right from the start sends the message that that this class helps kids learn how to learn. For us teachers, that’s hitting the sweet spot.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)