Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter 5; Content Area Writing: Chapter 4

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 91) “Choice generates a welcome chain reaction: it creates student buy-in, which in turn generates writing motivation, which in turn causes students to write better.”
Imagine that—giving students choice in writing actually has the same effects as giving students choice in what they read—they’ll actually want to do it! On page 90, Gallagher makes an excellent point in that we often have students do the type of writing they’ll neither do nor often see in the real world. Yes, yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten that we have those standardized tests looming over our students’ heads, but if someone is just a plain good writer, they’ll be able to do fine on those standardized tests. But if a student can only generate good standardized test-style writing, how is that going to benefit him after he graduates? I will go on record as saying the one thing I liked about our old exit exam versus HSAP is that the old one offered students a choice in their writing; they were given two prompts and had to choose one. However, with the HSAP, the scoring of it is not as rigid as the old one—there is not as much emphasis on conventions, so students have more leeway in how they write. Yes, they have to have a beginning, middle, and end, but they don’t have to necessarily format that into three or five paragraphs.

I love how in his traditional way, Gallagher doesn’t just tell us the problem. He provides lots of options that can be used in the classroom to generate student choice in writing then goes on to give ways to merge requirements with choice. Did anyone try one of the ideas Gallagher wrote about, or have you done something he didn’t mention that would be beneficial to us all?

Content Area Writing
I decided to go with having you all choose four of the eight strategies to read about in this chapter for a couple of reasons. First, I thought some of you may already be familiar with a few of the strategies. Second, I think the way Daniels et al present each strategy makes it easy to skim through the “What It Is” section of each to decide if that’s something useable for your classroom. So, did you have a chance to try out any of these strategies on your students, or how do you think you could incorporate one (or more) into your classroom?

Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter 4; Fair Isn't Always Equal: Chapter 9

Teaching Adolescent Writers, Chapter 4
“Voluminous reading alone does not make the writer, but those students who are readers come to the writing task with a marked advantage.” (Page 75)
It is rare that you have a student who reads a great deal but still has something lacking in his/her writing. (I actually can only think of two people I personally know that have this problem—one I taught and the other is an adult.) As students read more, they begin to adapt what they see in text to their own writings. This is yet another reason why SSR is so important. When students are given the opportunity to read what they want to read then they have writing models that they can learn from. Now, I am in no way whatsoever saying that I come close to the great J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) when it comes to writing, but when I read his book as a teenager—one of only two books I read as an adolescence because I wanted to—I discovered a whole new way of writing, and without realizing it, I started using things in my writing that he does in his. Giving students lots of opportunity to read gives them the “polished” models they need as examples of good writing, but we need not forget to model our own writing process so they can see how messy it is to get to that final piece.

Fair Isn’t Always Equal, Chapter 9
“Is the teacher in the classroom to teach so that students learn, or is he or she there to present curriculum then hold an assessment “limbo” yardstick and see who in the class can bend flexibly and fit within its narrow parameters?” (Page 114-115)
I know this book isn’t nearly as entertaining to read as Gallagher’s, but it does provide a lot of things to think about. I had us complete the anticipatory guide in class last week to get you thinking about some of the ideas in this chapter and to hopefully make it a little easier to read. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with every little thing Wormelli writes (is there anyone you agree with 100%?) but as a result of reading, I will definitely change the way I do some things when I return to the classroom. I definitely have a different view of having students redo work for mastery after reading the second principle, “Avoid penalizing students’ multiple attempts at mastery.” Why should we expect all students to master the same thing at the exact same time? While most will probably fall within the parameters of what we are looking for, we do need to take into consideration those who take longer to develop. I’m not going to say any names, but I can think of a couple of students who took longer than their peers to be able to handle diploma-track classes. In fact, one didn’t pass one of the HSAP subtests until two years after he finished his finished all of his classes. But guess what? Even though it took him longer to get through, he finally “mastered” the test and is now a high school graduate!