Category Archives: Writing

So I’m Going To Be Teaching This Class. And Could Use Your Help.

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I like new frontiers.  That’s why I’m excited to be participating in Karen’s attempt to create a School of Ed at P2P University this fall.  It should be a neat opportunity to fiddle with what it means to do PD.

I couldn’t be more excited to be facilitating a course we’re calling “Common Core & Writing: Deeper Learning for All.”  I pitched the course as “a course on writing to learn for non-English teachers” and that’s almost exactly what I’ll be teaching1.  Better yet – some of my friends from the National Writing Project will be helping me to develop the course.

The six week course, which will begin mid-October, is going to begin with a deep look at the Common Core State Standards, and particularly the section of the standards that addresses the role of writing across the curriculum.2 Then,’ we’ll tackle writing in the classroom from two distinct lenses:

1.  Writing to Learn – the habits and bits of writing that you do to make sense of whatever it is that you’re learning and exploring.

2. Writing for the Disciplines – the writing that’s specific to content areas other than language arts.  How do historians write for each other?  Scientists?  Mathematicians?  And why does that matter? How can we help our students to write in these ways?

As a final project, participants in the course will use this protocol from the NWP to help them develop some writing assignments for their own classrooms that should result in some thoughtful writing for and with students.   We should all get some good ideas.

As I’m developing the collection of resources, I know that NWP’s Digital Is will be an important text for the group.  And I’m also reminded of Peter Elbow and Donald Murray and their essential contributions to writing as process and writing as something that teachers just, you know, do.

But I could use your help.

Here’s a Google Doc where I’m beginning to draft a collection of readings and resources for the folks3 who I hope will take this course.

I’d sure be grateful if you’d offer your favorites and help keep me honest by pointing participants to actual examples of the two areas I outlined above.

And of course, this entire experience is, for me, first draft thinking.  I’d be open to your ideas, suggestions, and feedback as I’m working to construct an experience that’s ultimately useful to teachers and results in increased use of writing in their practice.

Thanks in advance.  And perhaps I’ll see you in class?  Sign up opens soon.

  1. Er.  Facilitating.  Teaching.  Guiding.  Whatever.  The participants and I will experience it together.  And we’ll all take turns. [↩]
  2. Yes, technically, this is a rather large section.  Pretty much the entire language arts section.  But we’ll hone in on the specifics of writing for the disciplines other than language arts. [↩]
  3. Remember – a targeted audience of non-language arts teachers. [↩]
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Thinking. Making. Learning.

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This morning I had the opportunity to visit our school district’s Camp Innovation, a summer program for Kindergarten through second grade focused on engineering and exploration and inquiry.  In partnership with IBM, our district developed this two-week summer experience.  Here’s the formal description of the work:

Teams of students will work directly with IBM employees at the IBM facility, along with SVVSD educators and high school volunteers on important and relevant issues to building a Smarter Planet: transportation systems, water, cities/buildings, food, and energy. Each group will be facilitated by a SVVSD teacher, an IBM employee, and multiple SVVSD high school students who participate in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or IB (International Baccalaureate Diploma) programs. At the end of the two week camp, project exhibitions will be shared with community audiences to culminate the experience.

My informal discription?  Students digging in, asking questions, and wondering about the world.  Then doing something about it.  It was fun to watch, even for a few minutes.  Students and facilitators and volunteers were moving around, making things, discussing options, and clearly engaged in very important work.

Below is a video describing the inquiry cycle that the Camp Innovation team, a group masterfully facilitated by Paige Gordon, worked to build into every aspect of the students’ experience.  As I was wandering and shooting pictures and exploring student creations and how they camp has transformed a wing of office space at IBM into a design and fab lab, I saw the cycle in action, on the walls, and in the work of the students.  I’m looking forward to seeing the students’ final projects, which will be shared in a community event at the end of the week.  Thankfully, the entire experience has been well-documented by our district communications team, specifically Matt Wiggins1, and you can get a feel for the camp and the events as those videos emerge ((You can catch them as they hit the Web if you’d like.)

One more thing – as I was exploring the students at work, other district administrators who were visiting were remarking that it was essential that we get ideas like “So what?” and “How are you going to personally get involved?” into our “regular, during the school year” classrooms.

And that’s a fine thing to remark on.  I look forward to their, and our, continued efforts to mix design and tinkering and inquiry into the daily culture of our classrooms.

Here are more of the photos I took during my short visit.  Take particular notice of the “Prototyping Lab,” a large space full of supplies.  I’ll have more to say on the lab in a future post.

  1. The original version of this post had Matt’s last name incorrect.  My apologies. [↩]
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Leave A Little Love for Them

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I’ve been teaching an awful lot of Google Mail and Calendar classes lately, as my school district is moving into its new email platform1.  And I mention during these classes that students will have email next year.  In fact, it’s one of the big advantages for us – student email, somebody in the IT department figured, would cost us, at a minimum $500,000 – $600,000 to handle licenses and other odds and ends under our old system.

And the response to that’s been pretty positive.  We said when we started that we’d be offering email for secondary students only.  And then the elementary teachers started asking for mail for younger students.  Eagerly.  And we’re thinking about it and talking about how to make that work.

But I have to remind folks during the training that, even though the younger students are in the universal directory, and have access to Google Docs and other tools and services, they can’t yet access their email2.  So if you send a younger student an email, they won’t get it for several years.

It was when I said this out loud today, not the first time I’ve said it, but the first time I was struck by what that might mean, that I realized that there might be a feature in there.

Suppose that when these students do get to access their email boxes, they’ve a few important notes written by people who care for them waiting during their email orientation.  We could, if we wanted to, use the dormant email accounts of younger students in our district as a sort of time capsule for sending good stuff their way ahead of time.

I see plenty of reasons why the messages might never be read, or get lost among the clutter of notifications and odds and ends and whatnot that will also be waiting for those students when their mail’s turned on.  But wouldn’t it be neat to send care packages to the future versions of our students today?  Quick notes and longer messages of moments where they chose well, or were worthy of a moment’s pause.  An occasional picture or two or a piece of work that really, really stood out, perhaps?

It’s likely wishful thinking3 , but I suspect the sending of the messages, received or not, would be a useful and productive pause for each of us.  A time to honor the students our children are, and the people they may well be.  It couldn’t hurt to take a moment to write down a few words to a child.

And I like the idea that sometime in the future, a student in the middle of a moment of doubt would stumble upon a note from a time when they did something well, or worth doing, or worth sharing.  I like that perhaps they might get a chance to remember.

I say yes.  That’s worth doing.  Let’s make our digital spaces just as warm and inviting and kind as our physical ones.  ((And let’s make sure our physical spaces are warm and inviting and kind, too.)) Of course, our students who’ll have email access today, well, I suspect they wouldn’t mind a kind note or two, either.

So let’s get right on that, okay? If you’ve five minutes this week, jot a note, electronic or otherwise, to a student who’s up to something interesting.  Make their day.  And mean it.((And, if you’d like to write to your future self, there are certainly services that you can use to do that.  Try it out.))

  1. Google Apps for Education.  We’re excited about it. [↩]
  2. We have it shut down for them by policy. [↩]
  3. And perhaps overly optimistic.  I suspect some people who stumble across this post will worry about the fact that they’d be communicating with a student, that the communication might be dangerous because of future litigation.  To those folks, I’d say something like: let’s not let the worst of us eclipse the best of what we might be.  Choose your words carefully, but don’t stop being a good person.  Good and kind and thoughtful people are necessary when there are so many not good folks, or so many folks trying to prey upon our worst fears.  The best way to battle a bully is, of course, to provide a compelling model of better behavior. [↩]
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#ISTE11: On Longitudinal Web Presences for Writing, Learning, Being

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I had the opportunity to hear Paul Allison, one of my favorite teachers, talk at length about his work with Youth Voices yesterday. Usually, Paul’s asking about others’ work, or showcasing the work he’s doing – but not talking about the thinking behind the work. And I like it when he does so. I hope he’d do that more.

He said that the pedagogical and philosophical1 recipe for Youth Voices was something like:

  • James Beane and his work on breaking down the curriculum barriers and asking good questions
  • plus Paulo Friere’s thinking on asking learners to look for generative themes
  • with a dash of Peter Elbow who reminds us of the power of making things through free writing.

I need to return to all three of those folks and dig back in to some of their thinking.

But he said something, off the cuff, that I thought was really important. He mentioned that he’d been in the Youth Voices work for eight years2, and that students who started in tenth grade were able, in eleventh and twelfth, to return to the space and pick up where they left off. They didn’t have to learn a new space, and their work from previous years was right there.

That’s powerful and important and worth unpacking a little bit. Teachers who are using interesting technology with their students find themselves too often in the setup and infrastructure business – and that’s fine sometimes. But not every time or every lesson or every year.

One of the reasons I went to work for an IT department was because I wanted to help make spaces that had a life beyond one classroom. A student shouldn’t create one blog to suit the needs of every teacher that asks for work to occur in such spaces. Students create short term tools for what should be long term work, and they find themselves create blogs every time they start to do interesting work. The assumption becomes that the work they’re doing in these temporary spaces is throwaway work. When the unit, semester, or year ends, the space dies and the student is asked to create the next one.

That’s not how it should work.

What I love about Paul’s work, and the work of other folks who are thinking about the long game of educational spaces where work lives and breathes and mingles with other work, is that they’re building what I call3 longitudinal Web presences. Spaces where the portfolio happens as the collection grows. Places where the stuff a student made yesterday and the stuff a student makes today will be around for a student to add to tomorrow. Places that don’t die every few months or are subject to Teacher A or B’s personal web tool preference.

When Karl or Michelle or I talk about digital learning ecologies, or Paul talks about Youth Voices, I think that’s what we’re talking about. Teachers shouldn’t have to be in the creation and infrastructure business all the time. Nor should they be helping kids to cram important work into temporary places.

If you’re a tech director or a CIO, I hope you’re thinking about how to create these spaces. I also hope you’re thinking about how to help students return to them over time and to think through what they’ve made and how it resonates, or doesn’t, as they expand their knowledge and experience. In St. Vrain, we’ve built a few tools that help with this, but we’re nowhere close to figuring it out.

We do, know, though, and have been charged by our school board, that we are stewards of the work our students produce. That’s an important word – the IT department is responsible for looking after the students’ work. We’ve got to make sure it’s well taken care of and preserved and saved until they leave our care. And that they can take it with them when they go.

That’s what a portfolio should be. That’s worth making. Thoughtfully.4 I continue to be inspired and pushed by the work of folks like Paul who are building places of learning that last on the Web.

  1. My words, not his [↩]
  2. Eight years. How many writing spaces do you have that last six months. Learning, folks, is a marathon. [↩]
  3. Probably incorrectly, but playing with words is fun. [↩]
  4. Sometimes, the curbs matter and the making of the containers are essential, in no small part because the traffic on the road and the stuff in the boxes is precious and worth looking after. The road needs to last for a long, long time. [↩]
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#ISTE11: On #engchat & Pauses

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So last night’s #engchat, I think, went well – a good opportunity to be in physical fellowship and conversation with some folks and some virtual fellowship and conversation with others.  Thanks to Meenoo for letting me play along and for my friends at the National Writing Project for arranging the live venue1.

I think the process of pausing to write longer thoughts and ideas made for a better conversation in the chat – although it might’ve fiddled with the flow of the Twitter chat experience in a way that changed that – it was different, and puzzling, and, ultimately, useful.

For me, useful is high praise, so I’m feeling okay about the experience.  I will probably say more about the logistics and my takeaways in a future post, and I know that others are working on some reflection, as well – I’d ask folks to share their posts on the original Google Doc so that we can aggregate the experience.

I could think of no better way to summarize last night’s conversation than to use the words of those who shared in the prompt document – there’s lots of interesting reflection there, and you might want to read it in its entirety.

But, if you can’t pause today2 to read the whole thing, perhaps you’ve time for a found poem I’ve attempted.  All the words are from the Google Doc – many of them signed, but many others unsigned.  You can see the original attributions on the Doc itself.3

Here’s the poem – I hope it’s useful, too.  How’re you finding time to pause today?

  1. Fergie’s in Philadelphia.  Great place to be. [↩]
  2. Whenever today is for you when you read this post. [↩]
  3. And I’m hoping that this will lure you over there – there’s lots of good stuff that didn’t make the poem. [↩]
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#engchat: Twitter Chat with Purpose?

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So I’ll be hosting #engchat on Monday, June 27th.  For the last few months, I’ve been wondering about Twitter chats in general, and their effectiveness.  Of course, to determine their effectiveness, one has to have a sense of their purpose.  And I can’t aways seem to tell the purpose of Twitter chats in general other than to say that they’re topical conversations.  Folks get together and talk at one another, presumably about a particular topic.  Then we run off to the next thing.

I’m sure there’s purpose in topical conversation.  But I wonder about Twitter as the place for purposeful conversation.  Things move so quickly.  So briefly.  Does useful discourse occur via Twitter?1

More important – in the race for folks to talk, talk, talk, might it be possible that we’re forgetting to listen, listen, listen?  Or, worse still,  are we skipping the thinking, thinking, thinking?

Seems to me that’s worth exploring.  So, on Monday at 7pm Eastern, we’ll do just that, or at least make an honest attempt. #engchat will happen both at a physical location2 as well as via Twitter.  In addition, there’ll be pauses for writing together, as well as reading what we write.  The conversation will be punctuated by pauses.

That might be a useful thing.  It might not.  Here’s a page where I’m compiling a prompt or two and a rough schedule for the hour.  Would love your feedback in the comments or, if you’re feeling brave, as comments on the Google Doc itself3.

And, of course, I’d love to have you join us to consider the place of pauses in digital writing.  See you there?

  1. Or, at least, does the purposeful sort that one would hope to emerge from a topical conversation emerge from Twitter? I’m not saying Twitter can’t be purposeful.  But do Twitter chats foster learning?  Or are the the 21st Century version of drive-by PD? [↩]
  2. The details are still being worked out, but I’ll let you know when I know. [↩]
  3. If you’ve never made a comment on a Google Doc, then highlight the text you’d like to comment on, then go to the Insert menu and select “Comment.” [↩]
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Wondering Vulnerably in Public

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I had the chance to write this morning with friends and colleagues from the Colorado State University’s 2011 Summer Institute.  They were kind enough to let me come speak with them about some of the things I’m wondering about when it comes to writing and technology lately.

Our prompt, at one point, was taken from a comment Claudia left here the other day.  She asked:

Do your students know how you, the teacher, write? Can they catch you somewhere in the middle of your own learning process, doubting, wondering, as a vulnerable human far from the know-all/authority in the subject ideal?

Here’s what I wrote in response1:

I’ve discovered that more and more, I’m wondering in public. I’m wondering on Twitter, or via Evernote, or here on the blog, or in a half dozen other places, and it’s beautiful.  It’s messy and scary and contagious and weird – and it’s okay.

I used to be afraid of my words being seen or overseen or misunderstood.  Now, certain that they will be all of those things, I am less concerned.

That’s a certain shift – perhaps because of age or maybe overconfidence or just because of comfort with myself – but I’m less concerned about your reaction to my thinking.

No. That’s not right. As a writer and a teacher, I’m very concerned with your reaction to my thinking expressed via my words. But I’m less concerned with that reaction interfering with my ability to understand myself. That is to say – I’m okay with my thinking. And I’m growing more okay if you’re not so okay with it.
Mostly.

So, in writing to learn today, I learned a little bit about myself.  That’s good. Thanks, Claudia, for the great prompt.
You can read all the responses from the group, too, if you’d like.
  1. Most of this I wrote earlier.  I polished and embellished a little before publishing here. [↩]
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You Write with Students. Right?

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I find myself asking, more and more, in the work I do with teachers and students in my neck of the woods and around the country, a simple question:

When and where are you writing with your students?

I say this is a simple question, because, well, it is. You should have an answer to this question, and I hope that the answer is something like “Often. And Everywhere.”

But too often, the answer is more like “I really should, but we’re just so busy.” Or, worse, the answer devolves into an explanation of how the answerer isn’t a writing teacher, but teaches math, or science, or something else.

That’s just not good.

Writing is the gateway to understanding. In fact, it’s in the composition of ideas or responses or summary that we really begin to own the learning that we’re doing.

I try to anticipate the “but I’m not a writer” answer, too. I have a slide that’s found its way into many of the talks and workshops that I give. It looks like this:

I hope that folks understand that I am less interested in that they are spending time with words than they are with the tools of composition and making things. School is too often too passive – a study of only what other people have made, rather than a study of making things of one’s own.

So, when I ask teachers about when and how often they’re writing with students, I’m trying to presume that such making is occurring in our classrooms. But it’s not. Or, at least, people are keeping their making secret1.

I thought it would make sense to attack a few of the answers that I hear for why writing isn’t happening on a regular basis. Others’ statements are in bold. My responses to them are not.

I’m not a writing teacher.

One doesn’t need to instruct students on writing in order to get writing to learn to happen in one’s classroom. While it’s never a bad idea to read or otherwise engage at least some of the writing that you ask students to do, it’s not necessary that the focus of taking time to write should be on assessing the writing, or correcting student errors. There’s a time and place for that. But it’s certainly okay to ask students to use writing as a tool for understanding, for memory, or for exploration.

Don’t grade it.  But make time for writing.

I’m not a highly-qualified writing teacher.

This is a variation of the previous – but is worthy of its own response. “Highly-qualified” is baggage language brought into the classroom from educational policy. Since the federal government has cheapened the value of the phrase, I’d say we should strongly reconsider it ourselves.

Of course you’re a highly-qualified writing teacher. You’ve used writing to successfully complete your instructional goals in the past. You write email to parents and to colleagues and administrators. Somewhere, you probably picked up how to create a resume, or construct a letter of interest that got you your current teaching job. You read. Lots.2 You are highly-qualified to be a thoughtful reader and writer of your students’ work.

You’re also highly-qualified to be a cheerleader, a coach, and an enthusiastic challenger of what your students produce and share.  But you can’t be any of those things if you’re not making anything or asking them to.

I teach math3, so my emphasis isn’t on writing.

Baloney4.  Your emphasis, be you a teacher of equations, or of the scientific method, or of how to ensure the proper fuel/air mixture in a V-6 engine, is on helping your students to explore and discover the world.  Writing, as a tool for exploration, or declaration, or narrative, or whatever you do with words and ideas, is a part of your work.  Show me a mathematician who doesn’t write.  Point me towards a scientist who isn’t taking good notes or publishing and sharing her work.  Name an engineer that you know that doesn’t sketch or draft or fiddle with a pencil from time to time?

You can’t.  So your students can’t not write, either.

There’s no time for writing.  We’ve got so much stuff to cover.

You aren’t in the coverage business.  You’re in the student learning business.  And if you want them to learn the thing that you’re teaching, then they’d better be doing that thing, and thinking about that thing, and modeling their understanding of that thing in some constructive and/or reflective way.  Period.  There’s no time to not write.  Learning’s too important to leave up to osmosis.

Those’re a few of the more common excuses I hear for why teachers aren’t taking time to write with their students.  What have I missed?  Let me know in the comments.

And – make time for writing.  Soon.  It’s important.

  1. That is another problem probably worthy of it’s own post – why keep that secret? [↩]
  2. I desperately hope that you do. If you’re a teacher who isn’t still reading, well, that’s also worthy of its own post. [↩]
  3. Or science, or history, or underwater basket weaving. [↩]
  4. Or, if you prefer, bologna. [↩]
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Personal Curation. Or – Mix Tapes

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I’m working in a nearby district today, helping some folks think about their writing habits, tools, and toys, and we got to charting the tools that we use.  One participant in the session shared that she makes iMovies – but usually just for herself.

I thought that was interesting – making a movie just for one’s self.  But the more I thought about it, and the more she said about it, the more I realized that there’s nothing odd or unusual about that at all.  She suggested that it was a digital equivalent to scrapbooking.  And she’s right.

After thinking about it a bit more, I realized that personal media curation is very common.  Of course it is.  Media for me1.  By me.

  1. Perhaps “media for the me I’ll be.” [↩]
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