Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter 2; How to Teach Students Who Don't Look Like You: Chapter 2

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 37) “But there is another valuable reason why our students should be doing more writing across the curriculum: the act of writing extends knowledge. Putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) creates new thinking. The act of writing is generative.”

Y’all correct me if you think I’m off base here, but I think that many non-English teachers are hesitant about including writing in their classes because they aren’t very confident in their own writing and don’t think they know how to grade student writing. The thing is that teachers don’t have to be great grammarians to incorporate writing. Writing across the curriculum isn’t meant to make sure every student knows how to write an essay with no errors. As Gallagher points out in the quote above, writing helps students think, and isn’t creating good thinkers important? I think as we continue to read Gallagher’s book and the Content Area Writing book (if we EVER get it—did I mention I’m not responsible for ordering that one?) that we’ll discover tons of ways to incorporate writing into our class to extend learning.

How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You
(Page 18) “The key to building the critical mass of students goes back to relationships. If you have a good relationship with your target students, you can begin to build a critical mass of students to focus on achievement goals.”
Don’t y’all think that our relationship with students is at the crux of everything we do with them? It seems to me that everything goes much more smoothly in the classroom if you take the time to get to know kids and show a genuine interest in them. Heck, if they know you care about them and you screw up something, they’re much more forgiving of you. I think that by getting to know them as individuals, you can get a better understanding of their cultures—and if they even adhere to any of the typical traditions within their cultures.

Content Area Writing: Chapter One; Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter One

Content Area Writing
(Page 4) “But for now, we need to admit: We are not tapping kids’ vast out-of-school authoring experience.”
I have been reading so much lately about the “Digital Divide” between students and teachers these days. The Digital Divide notes there are two kinds of people: Digital Natives (those—students and probably some of you younger teachers—who have always been around technology) and Digital Immigrants (those of us who are a bit older, haven’t always had the technology, and are learning it—okay, some of us are learning it). The problem is we Immigrants aren’t acknowledging just how important of a role technology plays and are losing lots of opportunity for good teaching because of it. I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t know how to text (nor can I understand how quickly kids can do it), but how cool would it be to have students write a text message conversation between two characters? What about creating a MySpace page for a historical figure? Or even have students create their own blog pages related to class? Kids do a whole lot more writing than we give them credit for, and we’ve got to start incorporating that into our lessons. Do they need to learn how to write traditional things like essays, resumes, etc.? Of course they do. But I think we can use the Native style of writing as a tool in our classrooms to extend learning as well.

A bit of extra commentary about this: Nicole, I think you are a Digital Native. I remember last year when we went to see Jim Trelease for a class, he used overheads for his presentation. I didn’t even give it a second thought, but I remember you commenting that you wished he had used something more updated like PowerPoint!

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 6) “…between 1998 and 2002, the scores of twelfth grade students declined, with lowest performing students showing the greatest declines. Only seniors writing in the 75th percentile or higher showed any growth from 1998; all other twelfth-grade students declined.”
This is one of my biggest concerns. I feel like we do a really great job on getting our students prepped for HSAP in ninth and tenth grades then once they finish, sometimes the attitude of “Okay, they passed, so they can write; we don’t need to spend any more time on that” takes over. The thing with HSAP is that just because you pass it does not mean you’re a great writer. HSAP writing is just one genre of writing and we need to make sure kids understand that. I’ve seen some pretty high scores for the HSAP with students who were not the most fabulous writers. So, how do we stress the importance of good writing beyond the tenth grade?

On another note, since Gallagher brought up the whole NAEP test and the State Department has just released AYP information, I wanted to make sure that y’all are aware of what the NAEP test is and its significance. NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) is a standardized test that is given to random schools across the country. Subtests are given on a variety of subjects including reading, writing, and math, among others. You know how we in South Carolina are constantly getting slammed about our lousy test scores, we have too many kids failing PACT and HSAP, blah, blah, blah? Here’s the thing that most people don’t get: South Carolina has some of the highest standards in the country and our definition of what basic, proficient, and advanced on our state tests are higher than what other states set for their tests. So, when our students take the NAEP tests, the ones who scored proficient and advanced on our state tests score about the same on the NAEP test. MANY other states have an inflated sense of what is proficient and advanced performance. Their students may score proficient or advanced on the state test, but when they take NAEP, they’re bombing out and scoring much lower…their students are really no different their ours; they just have an easier grading scale, so to speak, on their state tests.