Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 122) “When students understand the real-world purposes for writing (instead of simply writing to meet the next school assignment) they begin to internalize the relevance of writing, and more important, they develop an understanding that writing is an important skill to carry into adulthood.”
There are tons of different types of writing people use in the real-world, and there are some things we’ve just got to teach students to do or else they’ll be at a huge disadvantage when the graduate, particularly since so many of our students go into the workforce directly after high school. What if all senior English teachers taught the art of writing a thank-you note? How relevant would that be for seniors as they are receiving graduation gifts at the end of the year? It’s also an opportunity to teach them some etiquette—believe it or not, some people don’t know that they’re supposed to send thank-you notes for baby or wedding gifts. How many of you have seen the movie Summer School with Mark Harmon? (Other than Claire—I know it’s one of her favorites.) The gist of the movie is that a PE teacher (Harmon) is required to teach remedial English in summer school. He doesn’t know how to teach them but does find that relevance makes a difference, so he has the students all write complaint letters to companies they’ve had problems with. He teaches them how to write that letter and the language they must use—including using their real names instead of nicknames. (One student was named Francis, but everyone called him Chainsaw.) In the end, Francis received free sunglasses for his letter in regards to his faulty ones. What a great lesson! How many of us have ever been dissatisfied with a product or service? Teaching students how to properly write a complaint letter (i.e. including telling them that using the word “sucks” is not a good idea!) could benefit students tremendously once they graduate. Goodness only knows how many free dinners and gift certificates my sister has received because she knows the art of complaining in writing!
Content Area Writing
(Page 253) “Some tests encourage teachers to race through content never slowing down to help students think deeply about the material, thus encouraging endless data bytes promptly forgotten once the test is over.”
Anyone else, besides me, cram for tests in high school the night before, make a good grade, and don’t remember a dang thing from it? I remember those wretched vocabulary workbooks all too well. Twenty new words on Monday, complete the “exercises,” during the week, and test on Friday. I think I remember two words (deluge and prelude) from my four years of completing those books. What’s the point??? On a side note, I heard that if a student is given 20 vocabulary words a week every week from 1st grade through 12th grade and actually learns every one of them, it only makes up for 6% of the student’s vocabulary…he gets 94% of his vocabulary from other means, i.e. everyday conversations. Paul Thomas from Furman is the one I heard that from, but he didn’t cite a source, so I’m not sure if he’s the originator.
Anyway, we’ve got to teach students to think. We don’t need teach them to think like us…we just need to teach them to think! Many years ago, Paulo Friere equated teaching to bank depositing. Teachers give students information (deposit it) and expect them to spit that information back. What good is it, really, if students just regurgitate everything we tell them? Wouldn’t it be better for them to be able to learn how to think about our class topics and apply that information to other situations? If we just teach them random facts and want them to tell us that information on the test, very little of that information will be retained. But if we teach them how to think and analyze and give them those sorts of questions on the test, then they’ll “get it” and be able to apply that understanding to other things.
12 comments:
I agree wih you Diane. I think students would enjoy writing more if they understood the purpose of their writing and actually could use it. Like you said writing thank you notes or complaint letters. Those type writings have purpose for them. This can be tied in that writers write for a purpose. They have that in mind when they begin to write. I think Gallagher had some great activites for helping students dtermine the purpose. I really liked the purpose packets and purpose hunt activites. Those are activites everyone can get involved in and it is hands on. I love activites that get students involved. These are great activites to help students learn the different purposes of writing. Once they got that they can begin to use it for their writing.
I also agree with Gallagher about an audience. Even the shy students love attention for something they have done well. I use to have chemistry students make moles, only for the sole purpose of having fun. However, my students really got involved with that. They loved presenting their moles to the class, and they knew they would be displayed and the winners labeled. If I was still in the classroom I would come up with a writing activity that had students create a story about their mole that they would read to the class.
Content Area Writing
Two things stuck out to me about this chapter. I loved the idea where the teacher had the students write about a graph. They had to imagine what was happening; what was the graphing saying. I really could have used that activity i science. In labs we used graphs an table all the time. How much fun it would have been to have them write a story of what was happening. Amanda you should try this. I bet you would get some interesting writings and some good laughs. The other idea I really liked was the reflection sheet. This would help students look at the comments that had been made and help them improve their writing from the comments. I know I would make comments on lab reports; give them back for students to improve and then get them back with the same errors. That was so frustrating.
Kelly Gallagher’s examples never cease to amaze me. I mean, I just don’t see why I can’t think of these great lesson plans! I teach my students about various writing purposes and audiences; however, I love how Gallagher uses the assignment in which he gives them multiple writing pieces all on the same subject (like in the Chenney piece). Then students are able to identify the purpose for each piece of writing. I also think it’s important that we have students regularly write for these different reasons. In addition, I agree with the following statement:
“It is important for my students to know, however, that a writer’s notebook is not a diary. It is not a place to simply record a yearlong reflection on whether your true love is going to ask you to prom.”
The chart on pages 123-124 will prove to be helpful, along with the Writer’s Notebook Schedule on the bottom of page 124. I would love to use this with my students next year. It will give me a clear schedule of what types of writing I’d like us to cover over the year, and it will also provide a good means of analyzing the pieces of literature we’re working on. This schedule will also provide a good backbone for a writing portfolio in my class. I appreciated what Gallagher’s student did with the novel Night in which she wrote for the variety of purposes all about the genocide unit they were studying (Cubing Assignment).
Finally, I think the activity found on the top of page 130 is an excellent way to introduce audience. And while I know I discuss audience with my students, I think it’s important that they see the extreme variety of writing that all people do each and every day. After all, we write for many different reasons every day in the real world!
Chapter 10 in Content Area Writing emphasized that “tests provide quite limited information. Like a photograph, they offer a snapshot, a moment in time, seen through the narrow tunnel of one lens.” No matter how much I’m not a fan of standardized tests, I appreciated how this chapter focused on helping me to prepare my students better for writing in general, and, in turn, for these tests. Unfortunately, just as mentioned in this chapter, these standardized tests are going nowhere fast! We have to learn to deal with them. I also found myself agreeing with the section on rubrics. I use rubrics (oftentimes the HSAP ER rubric) when I do lengthier writing assignments. And while this rubric does help me, I feel sometimes it does not emphasize what I want. For example, I do not believe the rubric has a good balance between content and writing. Three of the four categories deal more with the writing, and only one section deals with content. While I can understand why the HSAP uses this rubric, I remind myself that this rubric does not always apply to every essay I give my students.
Teaching Adolescent Writers - Chapter 6
On. p. 138 in this chapter, Gallagher discussed how to create "Friday Night Lights" outside the classroom. He listed five implementation strategies. Number 4 (public writing contests) and number 5 (create public readings) reminded me of the media center's Poetry Festival that took place in February. One of the things that surprised me the most about our first Poetry Festival was the eclectic mix of students who participated. We had the media center regulars (coffee house brew crew, students that just like to hang out in the media center), but then there were also students whom I had rarely seen. The winner of the Poetry Festival was an athlete (how cool is that?), who asked he be one of the first to read his poem so he could run to soccer practice. I would definitely work with a team of teachers in the future to grow this event and encourage more widespread student participation. It might be advantageous to merge the coffee house and Poetry Festival since the two go hand-in-hand!
The coffee house students are constantly making signs and/or designing advertising for the coffee house easels. That is an example of real world writing (even though it is not formally assessed). Our students will be making signs or adverting various items throughout their lives (yard sales, an online ad selling a used vehicle, etc.).
Content Area Writing - Chapter 10
I enjoyed the authors' take on rubrics. On page 164 Daniels and Zimmerman encourage teachers to always leave a blank line in a rubric for "unintended consequences." What a fabulous idea! This is a win-win for both the teacher and students. Of course, the media specialist's contribution to a rubric (when collaborating on a lesson/unit with a classroom teacher) is to teach students how to cite resources and follow Fair Use guidelines.
Hey Diane! The word I remember from my weekly vocabulary/spelling list is chrysanthemum!
Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter 6
Content Area Writing: Chapter 10
What a great chapter, The Importance of Purpose and Audience! In my Career Preparation class, I had my students write formal letters to companies to receive information about various jobs that the companies offered. The students had a purpose and an audience in writing these letters which instill in them to do their best work. Most of the students received a packet back from the companies which was an added bonus. This was a valuable lesson for them and most were rewarded by the response they received in writing their letters. So, I agree with the author and you, Diane that the statement found on page 122, “When students understand the real-world purpose for writing (instead of simply writing to meet the next school assignment) they begin to internalize the relevance of writing, and more important, they develop an understanding that writing is an important skill to carry into adulthood.” As I mentioned earlier, I witnessed this first hand, and my students realized the importance and a valuable lesson of how and why it was important to be able to write a formal letter correctly through this activity. In reading this chapter, it reminded me how this activity built a lifelong lesson how important the purpose and audience influence students in producing a better writing piece. This year, my students are creating a short story, and I spoke to the students to keep in mind the purpose and audience they wee writing their stories to. I asked them to keep in mind who they were writing their stories to younger children or their peers, and to keep that in mind as they work on their stories.
As always Gallagher provided me more incite and strategies to teach my students on the importance of purpose and audience. He presented mini lessons that I will definitely incorporate in my lesson plans: (pages 124-130, and 133-134) 1. Students revising the purpose of others’ writings by cutting out newspaper articles and revising them with a different purpose in mind. 2. Purpose packets- taking clippings from newspapers and magazines- and determine the primary purpose for each piece. 3. Purpose Hunt- After teaching the eight purposes of writing given on pages 123-124 have the students hunt through newspapers and clip examples of the eight purposes of writing. 4. Exploring Thinking Before Determining Purpose- page 127 by having students cube a topic. 5. On page 130- By using the simple example how an audience determines how you communicate a small expression “Hello, how are you?” What way you may say or write something. 6. Author’s chair- at times my students share their writing and I like how Gallagher made a special chair for these occasions. Hey Pam is this where you got the idea of having a chair in your classroom; I have always admired it (smile!). 7. Golden Lines- reading aloud the best lines from students’ draft papers.
In reading Gallagher’s book Teaching Adolescent Writers I could go on and on about the many strategies and lessons I have gained from this author. All I can say is Thank you Mr. Gallagher!!!!
Content Area Writing
This chapter, “Writing for Tests and Assessments”, stirs different emotions, question, and opinions in me. Can test alone reveal students’ actual learning? Diane, I too crammed for test and afterwards not remembered anything from it later. Some students are better test takers than others but may have a vast knowledge base than the former. Who can say that he or she cannot perform better in demonstrating this mastery in the work place? So, I definitely agree on page 253 when the author stated “OK, so it’s complicated”.
On page 254 under limitations of test, reason number 5 stood out for me- “A test captures only one moment in time. At best you can see what the student knows but not the value that has been added. Did he get a lot from the unit, or was it material he already knew before it started? It takes a portfolio of work, with written reflections by the students, to observe that”. My opinion is maybe that could be the way to solve the limitations that test offers, but this too could be biased and by the way very time consuming to grade portfolios on every single student. Also, this chapter provided educators ways we could integrate essay writing with our teaching which was beneficial to me; and Diane you stated and summed it up so well that the most important lesson to take from this chapter is to teach students to think! Students need to go beyond the small picture to a much bigger picture by being able to move further up the hierarchy of thinking skills that Bloom’s Taxonomy guide encourages in all of us.
Teaching Adolescent Writers Chapter 6
Summer school is a movie that I like a lot too! Along the same lines, one of my students has a slight obsession with his favorite athlete to the point where he uses the athlete’s name on some of his papers. One day I asked the student if he ever thought about writing a letter to this athlete. He said the athlete was so famous that he knew he’d never hear back from him. I recommended we tried anyway and that week, all my students picked out favorite athletes, actors, actresses, etc. to write to. When no letters were returned weeks later, the kids were kind of upset, so we talked about persistency and trying again. About a month after the second letter was written, this student received a letter from that athlete thanking him for writing a second time and apologizing for not writing back sooner.
I enjoyed the target bulletin boards and “golden lines” A lot of my kids have low self esteem particularly with their writing. Being able to pin point at least one line in all of their work that stands out with give them confidence and a reference point to work from. Target bulletin boards on top of displaying good writing is a great memorization tool because the students still see it every day, often multiple times per day.
Content Area Writing Chapter 10
There’s a quote on the very first page of this chapter that I identify with very well. It says in reference to tests, “Like a photograph, they offer a snapshot, a moment in time, seen through the narrow tunnel of one lens.” I’ve always been a person who struggles with tests; as many of my students are, and would much rather prefer writing or a portfolio of information. Even on the Praxis PLT I took last weekend, I felt much more comfortable with the essays than I did the multiple choice, when the essays were worth a higher majority of the grade and consumed the most time. Tests, although necessary, alone are not a true measure of more than just that moment in time.
Diane, I certainly agree with you that having the students regurgitate information will do nothing for them. Teaching them how to think on their own and use a variety of approaches in real life situations will last them a lot longer than one test, given on one day.
The idea of using students to grade each others oral presentations is a great way to include everyone and provide an audience that is often unused. I love that students were also allowed to include food, dance, music, flags and family memorabilia. The more concrete objects students can relate to, the higher the connection usually is.
Last, giving students previous tests taken by others is an idea I like a lot. It requires our students to use deductive reasoning to determine why the right answer was right and think about why the wrong answer may have been chose.
Ch. 6 – Teaching Adolescent Writers and Ch. 10 – Content-Area Writing
Chapter 6 of Gallagher’s book is fabulous as are most chapters in his book. One of the quotes that really stuck with me during the reading has been mentioned by a few people. It’s about the writer’s notebook not being a dairy. I agree, and sometimes that is very hard for the students to understand even with writing journals. I have tried this year to give the students ideas to consider for their journals instead of just telling me how their day was, or what they did last night, or what they are going to do this weekend. I like to read about different topics than that, but sometimes it takes a while for students to open up. Granted a writing journal and a writer’s notebook are different, but they both involve trust on the student’s part to share certain aspects of their lives. Three-fourths of the way into the year, I am starting to get that from some of my students. My other quote is on page 125. Gallagher says, “I want to make sure that my students see my trials and tribulations as I, too, wrestle with the different authentic purposes for writing. I want to reemphasize the notion that good essays do not just magically appear; rather, they are the end product of a lot of hard work and experimentation.” He is right, and I have written, along, with my students on numerous occasions, and that modeling does spur them on to try harder with their own writing. I haven’t been able to find the time to do this with every single assignment, and I hope that as each year goes by, I get better and better with this modeling and the “side-by-side” writing. I am definitely a role model for reading and love to read with them and talk about books. I need to take my enthusiasm for reading and transfer it to writing.
On p. 259 of Content-Area Writing, it says, “If tests with essays and extended responses have become such a big part of school, it stands to reason that we should teach kids how to navigate them. Not only are we helping young people succeed, but we are making the tests more valid. This is not teaching to the test. When students handle essay tests more fluently, there is less interference from struggles with the writing so they can better show us what they know.” I agree completely, and that is why I teach the HSAP essay as a separate writing genre from other types of writing. For the most part that is the only time for the rest of their high school careers that students will have to write such a formulaic piece of writing on such a lame topic (so do you know how I feel about this test?). The key here is to stress that this is test writing and teach it as such, and then teach many other types of writing, like the thank you note and the complaint letter, that have more relevance to their lives.
Teaching Adolescent Writers Chapter Six
Content Area Writing Chapter Ten
Yes, Summer School is one of my favorite movies, but I had actually forgotten about the writing complaint letters part until Diane mentioned it. (I love the movie because it focuses on improvement. If you haven’t seen it, it’d be a great rental over spring break or the summer.)
Writing for authentic purposes and people (audience) is very important for our students. It’s obvious authenticity and true purpose will never make it to standardized testing (we can’t even get them to give students a choice of topics much less true audience and purpose), so it’s up to classroom teachers to provide writing opportunities that students see as authentic. I love the fact that Gallagher makes the point that writing isn’t always written with a singular purpose. Good writing doesn’t fall strictly into one of the four domains we’ve traditionally taught kids—expository, descriptive, persuasive, and narrative. I think his strategies for teaching purpose are great (Purpose Packets and Purpose Hunt). Ruth Anne, maybe we can work on this together for next year.
As for Content Area Writing, we all know that writing on standardized testing will not change in our lifetime; so if we want to do right by kids, we almost have to teach standardized test writing as a separate genre as Pam said. It’s like learning to play a game! Carlie just took the writing part of the PASS test (PASS has replaced PACT); before she got out of the car that morning, I told her that if the prompt asked her to write about something she didn’t know about or had no experience with to just make something up and to be sure she had a beginning, middle, and end and to throw in a simile or two. I liked the use of the word navigate in the quote Pam referenced because that’s exactly what we need to do. Navigating requires thinking. If we teach kids to think about writing as well as teach them how to write for different purposes and audiences, even if the purpose and audience are linked to standardized tests, the majority of our kids will do fine.
I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy the reading, because most of the time I have trouble trying to apply the strategies to my class. However, I got a bright idea while reading Gallagher. What if I had my students rewrite their lab report for different purposes? This would be real-life. Scientists conduct experiments in labs in real-life, and then reports and articles are written on their findings. I think it would give true relevance to the lab-work my students do in my class. And like Daniels et. al. was saying, I could use their re-writes to assess what they really learned during the experiment. I do sometimes use lab-work to assess what my students know about a given topic instead of giving a written test. Sometimes instead of having a huge test that covers weeks worth of material, I will use the lab analysis to assess whether my students have understood certain material.
Teaching Adolescent Writers- Chapter 6
I just think Kelly Gallagher has some great ideas. I really enjoy what he has to say about reading and writing. I enjoyed Gallagher’s take on the Purpose Chart. I used this for the first time last semester with my ENG III class. I think it really helped students to connect with what they were reading and built on the skill of citing the text for support. I would also like to incorporate the RAG Competition idea when we peer edit essays. I think it is important for students to know what their strengths are in papers and not just weaknesses or areas of improvement. Finally, I really like the idea of Targeting Bulletin Boards. What a great way to showcase work that meets certain criteria. I also think that if you gave the students the target prior to the writing assignment, then perhaps students could really zone in on that criteria. If students were to zone in on a different area each time, then perhaps by the end of the year their writing would really have improved.
Teaching Adolescent Writers
Chapter 6
Content Area Writing
Chapter 10
It’s a known fact that the majority of our students hate to write...or maybe it’s just my class...they always want to know “why,” why do we have to write, what’s the importance in it—well duh, it’s because we are mean people and want them to suffer! (I’m just kidding!) I really like how Gallagher breaks down the writing trials and tribulations and places it in a modern, student-friendly perspective. “We write to express and reflect, inform and explain, evaluate and interpret, and to simply seek a common ground,” states Gallagher. And further more, I like how he has set up a “Writer’s Notebook Schedule.” This is something I plan to implement into my classroom.
Hopefully by doing this it will meet all the needs and reasons for writing. It’s so important that we express to our students why we write and it is also important to try and relate it to more relevant material, as many of you have stated. You would not believe how many of my students think it is appropriate to fill out a job application using a pencil and they do this simply because they do not know that it is not ok and looks unprofessional. They also think it is ok to use “text language” on job applications. When we make writing relevant, they learn to do what is right and acceptable.
My response to these chapters was primarily a personal reflection of my development as a reader. So, I'll be sharing some of the connections I made as I was reading.
But first, in response to your comment about Thank You notes, Diane... Last night, I was waiting for the brownies to finish and I was reading "The Last Lecture," by Randy Pausch. In one section, he describes a candidate applying for a program. She was a good student, but not quite exceptional to the degree that they wanted to accept her. As he was flipping through her file, he came across a thank you note she'd written to a support staff member (someone completely not connected with the acceptance crew, so she couldn't be sucking up.) It made such a big impression on him that they accepted her and now she's an Imagineer.
Also, Lisa, I agree about the reflection sheet. Sometimes I wonder why I bother (or why the students aggravate me about whether or not I've graded their work), since they don't pay any attention to the mistakes they made or comments I left them.
Content Area Writing
When I was in my English 101 class, I kept turning in horrible pieces of writing. Finally, my professor sat me down for one assignment and asked me who I was writing it for. Once we got that sorted out, she said it completely changed my writing.
Also, on p. 258, it says, "[Oral Presentations] not only widen the students' audience but also encourage the creation of understandable explanations that inform listeners." I met a nuclear physicist on the plane back from Germany. He quoted some scientist who said that if someone couldn't explain a theory/idea/concept in a way that a non-scientist could understand, then this person didn't understand the concept himself/herself. To test him on this, I literally spent most of a nine hour flight asking him different questions about physics. Most informative flight ever!
In response to Gallagher's chapter, I was wondering why Airport doesn't have a literary journal. Have we ever had one? I just think it would make such a difference if students knew they could submit their writing for publication.
TAW Chapter 6
CAW Chapter 10
I agree with Ruth Anne- why can’t I think of great lessons like this! But Gallagher make many valid points here, continuing with his argument that students need it to be real for them to get the real purpose of writing. On page 122, he says that maybe WE should consider shifting from the strict traditional discourses and have our students explore the reasons real writers write. I love the chart on page 123-124. That would be a great resource for students to refer to in their notebooks. I think we often forget that even good students struggle with writing and that little things like a chart could help them out.
I like what the authors said about not abandoning good writing for the pressure of the standardized testing. Not only writing, but I think that we as teachers should search for alternate ways of assessing our students. The authors have included several ideas. The oral presentation is good but some of this takes a little additional set-up but it is worth in it in the end when student performance has increased.
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