Cathy Larson
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Roadmap for Writing Success

10/28/2015

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I spent this past weekend in Las Vegas. While driving the endless hours by myself through the Mojave Desert, I had lots of time to think -- lots of time. And my thinking led me to wonder about the parallels between my roadtrip and writing.

The connection between the two may not be obvious at first glance, but I will argue the parallels are intriguing -- and I guarantee I had plenty of time to work through the complexities of the connections before arriving on The Strip.
Let’s start with your own trip … a journey down memory lane. Think about your adult life and the various experiences you’ve had with writing.

In your professional life, you may have had to write a marketing proposal, a website landing page, an RFP, or a cover letter for a new job.

In your personal life, you may have written Christmas letters, Yelp posts, flyers for your kid’s school, or donation requests for nonprofit organizations in which you’re involved.

Whatever the writing task, I would bet the first step you take is finding a model. You probably visit Google and type in something like “Sample Marketing Proposal” or “Effective Flyers for Nonprofit Events.”  And if you don’t visit Google for your sample, you may ask a friend or colleague for one. Or your sample may even be something you’ve written before that you can use as a springboard. We all do it. We all do it, because we all need to know what a good final product should look like -- we need to know the “destination.”

It’s the most natural first step.  I promise you I couldn’t have made it to Vegas if I didn’t know I was headed to Vegas -- my “destination.”  

So why in the classroom do we assign writing without providing students with a destination -- a model text? A model text just like we need when we write?

I would no sooner have taken off on a road trip to Vegas or any other location without first having looked at where I was going. Knowing my destination allows for me to plan what freeway to take, avoid the roadblocks, estimate total driving time, calculate gas requirements, and arrive at the right place.

In the same vein, I would no sooner assign an essay in my classroom without first giving my students a model, so they can find the same success I had in finding my way to Vegas.

Let’s use a literary analysis argument essay as an example. If I ask my students to write a literary analysis argument essay, I show them their destination through sample essays -- examples of well-written essays that show them what’s expected. We spend significant amounts of time evaluating these samples together for their elements of good writing, including: organization, transitions, balance of evidence and elaboration, length, audience, claim. Then, and only then, can students confidently take off for the destination, because they now know where they’re headed.

Are you wondering at this point if all the essays will then look the same?

I can guarantee they won’t. This is because the how of achieving a well-written essay comes with individual style. Just like every driver handles a trip to Las Vegas with a different style -- speed, pitstops, alternate routes -- a student will do the same.  This is where detailed directions come into play.

When road-tripping, not only do you need to know your destination, but you also need these detailed directions for getting there. The same holds true for writing -- writers need both the destination and detailed directions. In the writing classroom, the detailed directions come in the form of rubrics.

Rubrics provide the details for how to arrive at the destination, the final product, successfully. Students need to know how they will be assessed, what will be scored, to what extent each category will weigh against the final grade, and any number of other specific requirements for the task. This information helps students learn how to write more effectively. They learn where they took a wrong turn and how to improve their trip next time out.

Without models and rubrics, how would a student know how to improve or what to focus on in order to achieve the next level of sophistication, mastery or competency? Why send them out on the road without preparation? Why set them up for failure? Without the pairing of these two tools, writing becomes just one more rote activity that has little impact on student achievement.  
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Therefore, let’s provide students with a roadmap for success -- before we set them out on their writing journeys. ​
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Are kids reading enough?

10/16/2015

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I am an avid reader.

I love the thriller genre: John Grisham, James Patterson, David Baldacci, Dan Brown. And because I’m a teacher, my schedule allows me the luxury of spending hours and hours in the summer reading stacks of books from the library. I especially enjoy returning to my favorite authors, because I relish revisiting the characters. I want to see where their lives are going, how their careers are progressing and what new trouble they’ve gotten into. They feel like family somehow.

But I also love to read new authors and discover new characters. A few years ago, I admit now publically, I was into sappy romance novels: Jude Deveraux, Sandra Brown, Nicholas Sparks. I return to these periodically, but I read them in my backyard, as opposed to my front, so no one knows.

During the school year, I read the classics. And when my own kids are reading a new young adult novel, I sometimes pick it up alongside them. Additionally, you can find me in the middle of job-related professional development books at any time during the year -- those for teachers about writing, reading, instruction and trends.

Several years ago, I found myself immersed in the world of nonfiction, including Freakonomics, biographies and everything by Malcolm Gladwell I could get my hands on. These books offered me new perspectives and loaded me with great discussion topics for get-togethers with friends.

As a kid, I grew up reading Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Nancy Drew, V.C. Andrews, and Danielle Steele.

You get my point. Clearly I’m a reader. I always have been.

This last week I attended a full-day professional development seminar. The keynote speaker was Penny Kittle. She is a teacher, author, and advocate for inspiring readers, writers and teachers. Her message was powerful; however, one line gnawed at me. She quoted a Scholastic study wherein they reported that kids are losing interest in reading as early as the age of eight. I couldn’t believe it. Eight? How does a child lose interest in reading at eight? I didn’t get it.

I went home that night and asked my own kids, ages eleven and thirteen, about their reading interest. Turns out, the Scholastic study holds true in my own home. In a home full of books, magazines and adult readers who model reading every day, my own kids aren’t reading -- and don’t enjoy it. How is that possible?

This phenomenon got me thinking.

Reading for me is easy; I know how to adapt my reading for intensity based on the complexity of the text. I have the stamina and skills to work through reports of educational data, factual statistics in news articles about world events in which I have no background knowledge, beginning chapters of books from new authors whose characters I don’t yet know, and anything else I choose to pick up. But I can do this because I’ve practiced reading my entire life -- literally every day from the time I could.

Is it possible our teenagers today don’t like to read because they have been out of practice since the age of eight? Is it possible the reading our kids do in school doesn’t inspire them to want to read or teach them how to read?

Asking a ninth grader to read Charles Dickens if he hasn’t done any reading for the past three years is like asking that same child to play on the high school soccer team when he hasn’t practiced soccer since elementary school. I wouldn’t expect a child -- in either scenario -- to perform well.

Practice builds skill, and Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 book Outliers, suggests that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” How do we expect our kids to “rise to greatness” -- get through college and have a successful career -- if they can’t read and don’t practice?

At home, we need to inspire our kids: help them find books that interest them, encourage them to try new genres, talk to them about what we’re reading, expose them to the reading expectations for adults -- get them to practice.

In the classroom, teachers need to be not only doing the same, but also teaching them the skills and strategies necessary to tackle complex texts for a variety of purposes. And this needs to be done every day -- in every class -- by challenging them with a wide variety of text types.

Kids need to read -- and need to be good readers -- in order to question the world, find bias in the generally accepted, inform the uninformed, wonder about their place in the world, and argue for the sake of empowerment.

They need to read in order to be great.

And then maybe, just maybe, with practice -- they’ll learn to love it again, too.
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Are our kids engaged in their learning?

10/12/2015

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The days of passive learning are over. The days of teachers being the keeper of knowledge, the sage, the owner of content are gone. My memories of how to be a student -- and yours -- are behind us.

With the advent of the Internet, knowledge has become a commodity. It is everywhere, all the time, in any form. The teacher’s role no longer lies in disseminating information and being the stewards of that information; it lies, or at least should, in engaging students in that knowledge to help them make meaning from it. If all we offer to our kids is memorization tasks and rote repetition, we are failing them.

Let me explain.

When I think back to my education, I sat passively in the classroom, diligently taking notes, filling in worksheets, staying whisper quiet, answering questions at the end of a piece of literature, listening to teachers pontificate, and regurgitating information to earn my A on any given test as best my memory allowed. Sound familiar? I will argue it’s the same education most of us received. And it worked because knowledge was hard to come by. We’d spend hours in the library finding content from rows of encyclopedias, magazines and books only accessible through card catalogs and glasses-clad librarians.

But times have changed. Our childhoods do not resemble those of our children’s. And the role of education, the teacher, and the student over the past twenty years has changed because of it. If our students are only being taught in this nostalgic, old-fashioned approach, they are going to enter their adult world at a disadvantage.

Because the world of today requires a workforce who can problem solve, work collaboratively within cross-departmental teams, write about innovations in science, technology and medicine so that humanity can be changed for the better, and be critical thinkers who can take this onslaught of information and make sense of it in a global economy. This doesn’t happen in a “traditional” classroom. It happens when the classroom embraces 21st century learning and engages our kids on a level that is hard for us -- their parents -- to understand.

So how does a 21st century student engage in their learning?

They need to be active in it.

An engaged student reads critically with a pen in hand, writing to create meaning, plan, problem solve, ask questions, and explore an idea. An engaged student interacts with other students in pairs or small groups, listening actively  in order to respond, clarify, challenge, and critique ideas and conclusions. An engaged student experiments with content to make sense of it, applying new-found skills and strategies to think and act creatively. If true learning is to occur, then students have to be engaged participants in the process, and not merely products.

Most teachers pick up on cues as they teach and can tell when a student in not interested or engaged. As a teacher myself, I act on what I see and adjust to try to engage all students -- tap kids on the shoulder, call a student’s name, tell a personal anecdote, vary my intonation, walk around the room, and even ring a bell to help kids find focus. No matter the technique, however, I have come to realize that a lecture is still a lecture. And a lecture is still a passive activity.

The solution is simple -- increase student engagement by increasing student activity. This doesn’t mean more; it means different. Get them moving. Get them talking. Get them writing, discussing, debating, synthesizing. We need to be challenging our students with lessons so engaging and active that it’s hard for them not to participate.

Now that I’ve written it, I guess the solution really isn’t simple at all. And not only is it difficult for a teacher, it is just as difficult for a parent. How do we become an active participant in our own child’s education -- in a system that we’ve all been through, but in which we now feel completely estranged?

The typical question, “Did you get your homework done?” will no longer suffice.

It means that we need to start having dialogue with our kids that helps us engage. We need to begin asking questions about how they learned, what they contributed, when the spoke, and why the content matters.
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The questions are very different. They ask how they have been a participant in their own learning. The better our questions, the more thoughtful and engaged our kids will be about their education -- turning their educational journey from just another commodity into a tool for unlimited success.
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What is a grade?

10/5/2015

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I am a runner.

But I haven’t always been a runner. In fact, I only started running in October of 2013, and it wasn’t until just a few months ago that I was even comfortable calling myself an actual “runner.” Please don’t make any assumptions here. I am not fast, competitive or elite. I simply get out several times a week and work up a sweat pounding the pavement. Then once every couple months, I like to challenge myself to a half marathon. I run for a sense of accomplishment. I run because I have encouragement. I won’t lie -- I also run because I love collecting the medals.

No matter my reasons, the one consistent among runners is the need to train. The training gives me, and all runners, opportunities to attempt new routes, test new running shoes, try new gels and chews for fuel, plan for water breaks and enable me to finish every race.

This school year I’ve been thinking quite a bit about running as a great metaphor for grades. I am an English teacher, so let me use writing for this example.

I will argue that training to run a marathon is similar to training to write.

Day one, I didn’t start by running three miles. I started by running one quarter mile. Day one, my seventh grade students didn’t start by writing a complete literary analysis essay. They started by understanding the organization of a thesis statement and paragraph.

I wasn’t able to complete my first half marathon on my own. I had a plan from a professional and support from my running buddies. My students didn’t complete their first full essay on their own. They participated in the scaffolded lessons and learned from model texts and peer critique.

And you know what else didn’t happen during my training? I wasn’t judged or evaluated or graded. And I don’t judge or evaluate or grade my students during the training process either.

Just like in running, when learning to write, each training session is meant to build on the next. I want to see my students improve their stamina, endurance, energy, knowledge and skill with each opportunity to practice. I monitor and encourage them. I support their learning. I feed them new tips as they progress. This is what a good training program does.

I made a commitment to run, just like I commit to helping “train” my students to become better every day -- better at reading, better at writing, better at communicating.

Where does the assessment of my training happen? At the finish line. I’m not graded on my training days. These days are practice, and each training day is important. But not each training day needs assessed. So why do we assess our students on every one of their training days?

Students need the freedom to practice. Time and freedom and space to take a risk. As a teacher, I want my students to take these risks with writing. I want to see them rearranging sentences, adding dialogue, incorporating imagery, building a new scene in a narrative, adding paragraphs for intent, and challenging themselves to embed evidence in new ways.

It takes every day to get to an end. But it’s not until my students cross the finish line that they are graded or awarded a medal of achievement -- a grade that gives them feedback on their level of proficiency or mastery.

We live in a society where everything is measured, evaluated and ranked. We are leeching the fun out of learning by assessing everything that gets turned in. We are penalizing children on mile three of thirteen in the first weeks of a month-long training program.

What would happen if we did away with grades? I am not necessarily suggesting this is the answer, but I am suggesting that grading is a subject that teachers need to be discussing. Why do we take 50% off of an assignment simply because it’s one day late? Why do we grade every practice assignment? What do we want classroom grades to reflect? Can we move away from grades as punitive and move towards grades as an assessment system that is reflective of standards?

I don’t have the answer. All I have is a drive to make sure my students are rewarded for taking risks, feel safe to experiment with the content, and want to practice without fear of losing points.

Let’s give our kids their “medal” when they cross the finish line -- and not discourage them from finishing the race.

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