Teachers, Bloggers, Writers: Tell Your Story | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teachers, Bloggers, Writers: Tell Your Story | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teachers, Bloggers, Writers: Tell Your Story

Experienced education journalist Jeff Bryant is collecting stories about successful community schools and he would like to hear from you.

Jeff writes:

Education Writers, Bloggers, Podcasters, Content Sharers WantedA national network has organized a project to lift up stories from public schools about their success in using the community schools approach for transformational school improvement. There is a treasure trove of powerful stories about community schools ready to be told. There is authoritative research to validate the approach. And there are audiences eager to learn of an alternative to decades of failed education policies. But we need people – writers, podcasters, TV and print journalists, videographers and community leaders — to tell those stories to the American public. We can connect you to people in these communities so you can tell their stories through your own outlet, your social media channels, or in a regional or national media outlet to a much larger audience. if you’re interested in joining this network, contact Jeff Bryant at jeffb.cdm@gmail.com.
Jeff

Teachers, Bloggers, Writers: Tell Your Story | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Problem of Student Engagement in Writing Workshop – radical eyes for equity

The Problem of Student Engagement in Writing Workshop – radical eyes for equity

The Problem of Student Engagement in Writing Workshop

Imagine you are a teacher who says to students, “You can revise your work as often as you want to learn as much as you can and achieve the grade you want.”

Imagine you are student who replies, “No thanks.”

As a critical teacher and teacher educator, I have spent about 40 years not swimming against the stream but floating, isolated, in an entirely different body of water.

I have not graded assignments or given tests for about 30 of those years, and for nearly all of my teaching career, my students have experienced a workshop format for learning. Distinct from writer’s workshop in creative writing, the workshop I implement is grounded in concepts often associated with Nancie Atwell, who popularized workshop as designing instruction/learning around time, ownership, and response.

The instructional workshop model I practice allows students large blocks of CONTINUE READING: The Problem of Student Engagement in Writing Workshop – radical eyes for equity

Moving from Performing as a Student to Performing as a Scholar: More on Writing and Citation – radical eyes for equity

Moving from Performing as a Student to Performing as a Scholar: More on Writing and Citation – radical eyes for equity

Moving from Performing as a Student to Performing as a Scholar: More on Writing and Citation

The first time I recall being viewed as “good at writing” was in high school when I submitted a parody of my friends and teachers for a short story assignment; this was probably my junior year of high school during Mr. Harrill’s American literature class, and I am quite certain that I would be mortified by the story if I could read it now.

A couple years later, however, my “writer epiphany” came the spring of my first year of college. I very clearly mark the beginning of my life as a writer with a poem I wrote from my dorm room, inspired by being introduced to e.e. cummings in my speech course with Mr. Brannon.

To be blunt, I likely didn’t really write anything of consequence until my mid-30s—specifically my doctoral dissertation. And then, my life as a published academic really didn’t occur until I was in my early 40s (my 20s and 30s had a smattering of published poems, stories, and scholarship).

These realizations about writing quality over decades of formal schooling and so-called serious writing help inform my work as a teacher of writing. My undergraduates are unlikely to write anything of real consequence while in college so I see my job as helping them develop behaviors the support the possibility of CONTINUE READING: Moving from Performing as a Student to Performing as a Scholar: More on Writing and Citation – radical eyes for equity

Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

Unlearning to Write

In my foundations of education course, we discussed the role of evidence and research in education, highlighting the problem with experimental/quasi-experimental research and its use in the so-called real world of day-to-day teaching. I always use medicine as an analogy—such as the recently development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

What I hope to accomplish is to offer students a more nuanced understanding of evidence and research. I stress that based on my nearly 40 years of teaching, gold-standard research matters, but it rarely matters in teaching (versus medicine) the way that many people think.

Teaching and learning, I explain, are extremely complicated.

In the article we examined, Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence, one of the “popular” teaching practices Higgins and Coe claim there is “no evidence for” is discovery learning.

As someone who has spent four decades grounded in discovery learning and using workshop structures when teaching literacy, specifically writing, I find such claims to be condescending and off-base because they are overly simplistic.

In the listing of educational practices there is “no evidence for,” I ask students to consider how research in education often defines “works” or “doesn’t work” CONTINUE READING: Unlearning to Write – radical eyes for equity

Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons – radical eyes for equity

Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons – radical eyes for equity

Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons

In my three courses this fall, students are now all working on scholarly essays that incorporate high-quality sources (focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles). Since the work lies primarily in the field of education, students are using APA style guides.

Often when teaching students citation, we focus our lessons on (the drudgery of) formatting and idiosyncratic citation structures (APA’s annoying lowercase/upper case peculiarities, for example, in bibliographies) as well as the challenges of finding and evaluating a reasonable amount of valid sources to support the claims of the essay.

Students often struggle with evaluating sources for bias, and honestly, they are not well equipped to recognize flawed or ideologically skewed reports that appear to be in credible journals and are themselves well cited.

Part of the problem has been well documented by Gerald Bracey; citing Paul Krugman, Bracey confronts the rise of think tanks that promote their agendas through the veneer of scholars and scholarly reports. Then, Bracey notes, “[t]he media don’t help much. By convention, they present, at best, ‘balanced’ articles, not critical investigative pieces” (p. xvi). This is what I have labeled “both sides” journalism.

While scholarly writing and citation can often slip into a circus of minutia, one CONTINUE READING: Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons – radical eyes for equity

CURMUDGUCATION: Better Writing Assessment: Do Something Right

CURMUDGUCATION: Better Writing Assessment: Do Something Right

Better Writing Assessment: Do Something Right

If you aren't ready to take the no-grade plunge (or your particular corner of the pool will never support that choice), there are still ways to shift your thinking about assessing student writing. 

One of the biggest is to move away from focusing on deficits and mistakes.

Avoiding mistakes is not a useful focus for writing. For one thing, not making mistakes is an easy path to mediocrity. You can play the game without making any mistakes and still lose. You can perform the piece of music without a single wrong note or missed entrance and still be boring and bland. You can step out on stage, remember every line, hit every mark, and still be forgotten five seconds after the final curtain falls.

It is not enough to not do something wrong. You have to do something right. We've reached the point where software can write mediocre essays, and we've been stuck for years at the point where software can tell if a student has produced, at best, a mediocre piece of writing (though it also may fail to notice if the essay is far worse than mediocre). That's because all software can do is sample a gazillion chunks of what has been written before and kind of mush together and spit out a homogenized version of it. 

Human writers should do better than that. They should bring something new to the table, some CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Better Writing Assessment: Do Something Right

LEO’S TV – radical eyes for equity

LEO’S TV – radical eyes for equity

LEO’S TV

In the opening weeks of my first-year writing seminar, I introduce students to reading like writers (here and here), emphasizing that we are not reading to write literary analysis (as many of them have done for Advanced Placement Literature) but reading to explore and acquire moves and approaches for effective writing.

Since the first essay assignment is a personal narrative, I provide them with several essay examples and highlight “Peculiar Benefits” by Roxane Gay as a powerful model of what we are trying to accomplish—engaging the reader with personal narrative in order to ask the reader to consider or reconsider some larger idea or argument.

Today I read aloud, as I typically do, the first three paragraphs of the essay from the original online version of Gay’s essay at The Rumpus (many students read Gay’s Bad Feminist, which includes a slightly revised version). We had a robust discussion, and many students were interested in the essay and excited by the writing strategies we highlighted, centered around purposeful writing instead of templates or rules.

Once we ended that discussion, I noted that the three paragraphs included two places that were copyedited for the published essay in Bad Feminist. I asked if any students noticed those examples of what many English teachers and CONTINUE READING: LEO’S TV – radical eyes for equity

Adapting Elizabeth May’s “Trash Drafting” for Students-as-Writers – radical eyes for equity

Adapting Elizabeth May’s “Trash Drafting” for Students-as-Writers – radical eyes for equity

Adapting Elizabeth May’s “Trash Drafting” for Students-as-Writers

Science fiction and fantasy author Elizabeth May recently offered a really excellent Twitter thread about “trash drafting.”

As a writer and teacher of writing, I was particularly drawn to the final Tweet in the thread:

This emphasis on the proper place of editing in the writing process (attending to surface features later rather than earlier) reminded me of a dictum from Lou LaBrant (1946) that drives much of how I teach writing: “As a teacher of English, I am not willing to teach the polishing and adornment of irresponsible, unimportant writing [emphasis added]…. I would place as the first aim of teaching students to write the development of full responsibility for what they CONTINUE READING: Adapting Elizabeth May’s “Trash Drafting” for Students-as-Writers – radical eyes for equity

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research | National Education Policy Center

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research | National Education Policy Center

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research

This post is a short piece I wrote in 2011 for a special issue of the journal Teacher Education and Practice on “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship.” My one take is that research in education is not necessarily well positioned to enhance education; on the contrary, it often does more harm than good.  See what you think.  Here’s a link to the original.

Do No Harm

Education is a field of dreams and so is educational research.  As educators, we dream of schools that can improve the lives of students, solve social problems, and enrich the quality of life; and as educational researchers, we dream that our studies will enhance the effectiveness of schools in achieving these worthy goals.  Both fields draw recruits who see the possibilities of education as a force for doing good, and that turns out to be a problem, because the history of both fields shows that the chances for doing real harm are substantial.  Over the years, research on teaching and teacher education – the topic of the discussion in this special issue – has caused a lot of damage to teaching and learning and learning-to-teach in schools.  So I suggest a good principle to adopt when considering the role of research in teacher education is a version of the Hippocratic Oath:  First do no harm. 

The history of educational research in the United States in the twentieth century supports a pessimistic assessment of the field’s impact on American school and society.  There was Edward L. Thorndike, whose work emphasized the importance of differentiating the curriculum in order to provide the skills and knowledge that students would later need in playing sharply different roles in a stratified workforce.  There was David Snedden, who labored tirelessly to promote CONTINUE READING: David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research | National Education Policy Center

Writing as an Academic and Scholar – radical eyes for equity

Writing as an Academic and Scholar – radical eyes for equity

Writing as an Academic and Scholar

My transition to being an academic and scholar occurred in the mid-1990s after I had been a public school English teacher for more than a decade and a writer for almost two decades.

Looking back, one of the most pivotal moments of that transition was when Craig Kridel, a leading scholar of educational biography who would become the anchor on my doctoral committee, stood at the first organizing meeting of new doctoral students and announced the importance of being able to write well. He introduced me to Joseph Williams’s Style and forever changed me as a writer and a teacher.

I was in my mid- to late 30s when I completed that doctoral program, and I chose the degree primarily because I had the opportunity to write an educational biography (a non-traditional dissertation form and an under-appreciated research type, qualitative) and work with Kridel. You see, I wanted to write a real book and not a formulaic doctoral dissertation.

Of course, entering the doctoral program, I had yet to experience or fully understand just what writing a dissertation entailed—or what it would mean to CONTINUE READING: Writing as an Academic and Scholar – radical eyes for equity

How to Assign Writing When You Don’t Teach Writing – radical eyes for equity

How to Assign Writing When You Don’t Teach Writing – radical eyes for equity

How to Assign Writing When You Don’t Teach Writing

Over a decade ago, my university transitioned from an English Department-based composition sequence (often designated as ENG 101 and ENG 102 in many universities) to a first-year seminar format that would be staffed across all departments. This change, of course, meant that many professors with no background or training in how to teach writing were now teaching first-year writing.

The university fumbled this move quite a bit, but gradually the significance of that hurdle was recognized. We continue to find ways to support professors new and still learning to teaching writing.

Two of the foundational concepts repeated by those of us helping support these professors have been that teaching writing is not an inoculation (one course, or even a few courses, cannot produce students who need no more writing instruction) and that assigning writing is not teaching writing.

For many years, I have been posting my thoughts and strategies for anyone who is tasked with teaching writing or who must teach a writing-intensive CONTINUE READING: How to Assign Writing When You Don’t Teach Writing – radical eyes for equity

Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College – radical eyes for equity

Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College – radical eyes for equity

Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College

Three behaviors have over the course of about 40 years come to constitute a significant percentage of who I am—writing, teaching, and cycling.

Of those three, I have received the most formal education in teaching, completing all three of my degrees (BA, MEd, EdD) in education; in many ways, I am self-taught as a writer and a cyclist even though I would argue that I have developed a level of expertise in all three that are comparable.

Recently, I bought my first gravel bicycle and have been making the small but noticeable transition to gravel riding that has forced me to experiment with decades of cycling knowledge built on road and mountain bicycling in order to ride gravel at a level comparable to road cycling (my first and deepest cycling love).

This, I think, is at the core of all of my personas as writer, teacher, and cycling—behaviors that are all journeys and not aspects of my life that I can (or should) finish.

Even though, as I noted above, teaching is my primary career and what I have the most education in, I am perpetually learning to teach; and I count on my CONTINUE READING: Making the Transition from Writing in High School to Writing in College – radical eyes for equity

CURMUDGUCATION: Teaching Bad Test Prep Writing For Fun And Profit

CURMUDGUCATION: Teaching Bad Test Prep Writing For Fun And Profit

Teaching Bad Test Prep Writing For Fun And Profit

This is the sort of thing that the Big Standardized Test has brought us--Top Score Writing.

TSW is the brain child and property of Lisa Collum, who bills herself as mompreneur. Collum graduated from Florida Atlantic University about 16 years ago and went to work in 2004 as a writing teacher in a Palm Beach County School District Title I school and the Florida Virtual School . She became concerned that the school didn't have a writing curriculum for her to implement, and she had trouble finding one, so she created lessons. So far that makes her exactly like the vast majority of teachers.

But then she turned it into a business. She turned that business into some other businesses, too-she bought a private school (Coastal Middle and High School). By 2012, she had left the classroom and was running her million-dollar business full time. She wants other women to know that they can have it all.

It's a heck of a story, for sure, and I'm glad that it stars someone who actually trained for and worked in a classroom. Her inspirational video says that you don't have to have business knowledge--just an idea you're passionate about. 

So what idea has made Collum successful? The aim of Top Score Writing is right there in the name. This is a program with a single, focused aim--to get students a high score on the writing portions of the Big Standardized Test.

To its credit, it doesn't really pretend to be about anything else. It doesn't promise that students CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teaching Bad Test Prep Writing For Fun And Profit

Looking Back: On Raising the Academic Quality of Student Writing – radical eyes for equity

Looking Back: On Raising the Academic Quality of Student Writing – radical eyes for equity

Looking Back: On Raising the Academic Quality of Student Writing

My first-year writing seminars are grounded in two concepts—workshop structure (multiple drafts of essays combined with conferencing over long periods of time) and portfolio assessment (a portfolio of all course work is submitted for the final exam).

In that final portfolio, students submit final versions of all four essays, rank those essays in order of quality according to them, and submit a reflection that details the key lessons they have learned about writing as well as a few areas they need to continue improving.

This pandemic semester has added a significant and noticeable layer of stress to first-semester first-year students so I have adjusted the final weeks of the seminars this fall, ending in just a few days. One change has been to replace the usual Essay 4 assignment (an open assignment in which students submit a proposal for the type of essay and topic before submitting a first full draft) with the end-of-course reflection usually required in the final portfolio.

In class yesterday, we began brainstorming what key lessons my students have learned and what they see as areas still needing improvement. Over this past weekend, as well, I sent out an email that framed the organization of the semester, outlining how the essay assignments have been scaffolded in order to prepare these students to be academic writers (student writers) in the CONTINUE READING: Looking Back: On Raising the Academic Quality of Student Writing – radical eyes for equity

Confronting the Tension between Being a Student and a Writer – radical eyes for equity

Confronting the Tension between Being a Student and a Writer – radical eyes for equity

Confronting the Tension between Being a Student and a Writer

Titian: Sisyphus
Sisyphus, oil on canvas by Titian, 1548–49; in the Prado Museum, Madrid.
Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy

I worry about my students.

I worry, I think, well past the line of being too demanding in the same way being a parent can (will?) become overbearing.

Good intentions and so-called tough love are not valid justifications, I recognize, but there is a powerful paradox to being the sort of kind and attentive teacher I want to be and the inherent flaws in believing that learning comes directly from my purposeful teaching and high demands.

After 37 years of teaching—and primarily focusing throughout my career on teaching students to write—I have witnessed that one of the greatest tensions of formal education is the contradiction of being a student versus being a writer.

That recognition is grounded in my own experiences; I entered K-12 teaching, my doctoral program, and my current career in higher education all as a writer first.

My primary adult Self has always been Writer, but being a writer has remained CONTINUE READING: Confronting the Tension between Being a Student and a Writer – radical eyes for equity

Overstating Nothing: Why Students Often Write their Worst Sentences First (and Last) – radical eyes for equity

Overstating Nothing: Why Students Often Write their Worst Sentences First (and Last) – radical eyes for equity

Overstating Nothing: Why Students Often Write their Worst Sentences First (and Last)

I may have just read the worst essay I have ever read submitted by a student—since the beginning of time.

And that occurs in this context: I have been teaching adolescents and young adults to write for 37 years.

Of the tens of thousands of student submissions I have read, of course, this essay cannot really be the worst. But that sort of dramatic overstatement is exactly what brings me to discussing that essay and many just like it submitted recently as we near the end of the semester.

Again, as context, many of these essays have been submitted after more than two months of first-year writing seminar where I have explicitly focused on vivid and engaging openings and closings.

Here is the opening of that essay (lightly edited so readers can focus on what CONTINUE READING: Overstating Nothing: Why Students Often Write their Worst Sentences First (and Last) – radical eyes for equity

The Perfect Trap – radical eyes for equity

The Perfect Trap – radical eyes for equity

The Perfect Trap

Many years ago when I was teaching high school English in rural upstate South Carolina, I taught all three of the district’s superintendent’s children—two daughters and a son.

The older daughter in many ways represented both a uniquely smart and hard-working student and the paradox of the perfect student.

These were the early days of me learning how to teach writing well; these were the early days when I taught with a sort of earnest zeal that can never make up for the horrific blunders I imposed on several years of students.

Setting aside everything I did wrong—reminding us all that learning to write and learning how to teach writing are journeys—I was from the earliest days as a teacher firmly committed to students experiencing writer’s workshop and writing often, authentically, and with multiple drafts for each essay.

Most of my students then and even now have had very little experience with drafting, navigating substantive and challenging feedback, and teaching/learning experiences that sit outside the norm of grading and evaluation.

This older daughter was the top student in her class; she went on to excel in college and eventually eared a doctorate.

But she wasn’t the perfect student because she was fortunate to be so smart and having been raised in a very privileged home.

From the beginning, she simply revised her essays and resubmitted them CONTINUE READING: The Perfect Trap – radical eyes for equity

Russ on Reading: 7 Ways to Help Young Writers

Russ on Reading: 7 Ways to Help Young Writers

7 Ways to Help Young Writers

This week I have been reading a new biography of my literary hero, John Steinbeck, Mad at the World: A Life  of John Steinbeck by William Souder. In the book Souder quotes Steinbeck's favorite writing teacher, Edith Mirrielees, an English professor at Stanford University, as saying, "Writing can't be taught, but it can be helped." This put me in mind of the work  the psycholinguist, Frank Smith, who wrote an article titled, Reading Like a Writer, in which he posited that most of what a writer learns about writing is learned, not through instruction, but through reading in a special way - reading like someone who thinks they are a member of the "writing club."

Of course, even if writing can't really be taught and even if most of what a child learns about writing is learned by reading, there is still plenty of opportunity for the teacher to help, to be the guide on the side. Here are some good ways to help.

1. Provide regular opportunities to write on self-selected topics. In order to feel like a member of the writing club, kids need to view writing as a regular part of their lives. Daily writing time puts the developing writer into a perpetual state of rehearsal for writing.  For example, because I knew I would be writing this blog entry today, I have been rehearsing, reading, and jotting notes on CONTINUE READING: Russ on Reading: 7 Ways to Help Young Writers

Russ on Reading: Haiku: A Path to Poetry for Young Writers

Russ on Reading: Haiku: A Path to Poetry for Young Writers

Haiku: A Path to Poetry for Young Writers

Most young children love poetry, but when it comes to writing poetry they are often overwhelmed by the demands of rhythm and rhyme. Sense suffers as kids scramble for rhyming words.

My Mom

I love my mom oh so muchI love her more than chocolate - Dutch!She s me all the things I needAnd I help her to weed.

Now this poem, written by a second grader, is not without its charms, but it contains a mixture of the profound and the mundane that is typical of a child stuck in the rhyme versus sense conundrum. Freeing children from the demands of rhyme allows them to tap into the natural poetry that is within them. Haiku provides a structured, but non-rhyming. poetic form with which nearly all children can be successful. 

Haiku is, of course, the short poetry form that originated in Japan. Literally CONTINUE READING: Russ on Reading: Haiku: A Path to Poetry for Young Writers

CURMUDGUCATION: There Are No Writing Prodigies: What That Means For Writing Instruction

CURMUDGUCATION: There Are No Writing Prodigies: What That Means For Writing Instruction

There Are No Writing Prodigies: What That Means For Writing Instruction

Mozart was composing and performing at the age of 4. Shirley Temple made her first film appearance at age 3, and within two years was a film star. Pascal wrote a treatise on vibrating bodies at age 9. Trombone Shorty was leading his own band at age 6.

But there are no child prodigies in writing. No classic novels composed by a six year old. No world-altering essays written by some young person in second grade.

That means that every writer starts out at the same level of skill and quality—somewhere between very low and none. Every author you have ever admired, enjoyed, or been inspired by started out as a not-very-good writer.

And that means that the path of a writer is always one of continuous growth, an unending journey that takes each individual across a variety of landscapes. Each path is a little different, featuring different obstacles and rewards. Each path varies in length, not because everyone is born with a pre-determined destination, but because so many people say, “That’s it. I’m done trying to go down this path.” Some people are better equipped to make the journey than others, but you’d be hard pressed to find a great writer who says, “Yes, I stopped working on growing as a writer because I figured I simply had no room for improvement.” Nobody arrives at the top of the mountain because they somehow had the gift of magically transporting there.

The implications for teachers of writing are important. Teachers are going to meet students who are CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: There Are No Writing Prodigies: What That Means For Writing Instruction