The National Writing Project is a professional development network for teachers whose mission is to improve learning in our nation’s schools by improving the teaching of writing. Their professional development programs promote teacher collaboration as the way to understand how student writing develops writing across grades and subject areas. The National Writing Project currently has over 200 sites in all 50 states and provides professional development to over 100,000 teachers annually.
The centerpiece of the National Writing Project’s teacher training is a summer institute hosted by each of the sites in their network. The individual sites develop their own curriculum while still adhering to the National Writing Project’s philosophy of teachers teaching teachers. Some of these sites, such as the Little Rock Writing Project in Arkansas, have begun to include workshops on student publishing. Paula Kerr, the Coordinator for Youth Programs for the Little Rock Writing Project explains: “One of the reasons we made it a big part of our summer institute is because most teachers don’t publish with their students. We’ve found that once we introduce them to it, they do it.” Shari Williams, a reading specialist and art teacher at Benton High School, as well as the co-director of the Little Rock Writing Project, has led some of the publishing workshops at her site. She agrees that teachers have very little experience with publishing but are very open to the possibilities it creates. “You know how you give teachers ideas, and they just go with them,” said Shari.
One example of how Shari encouraged the teaching of writing across the curriculum came after she led a workshop on bookmaking. A science teacher took what Shari had showed them and created a field journal out of a paper bag. “It folds over and makes pockets so that if you were going out to gather wildflowers you have the pockets that the bag forms, and you would sit down and write about where you found it and what it looks like.”
Another science teacher Shari trained used bookmaking as a way to teach the compare and contrast essay. Students study rocks, and they write down their research in their field book. “It kind of becomes a special place. They are doing some scientific research and writing in their book about rocks. They aren’t writing on a piece of notebook paper, but the teacher is trying make them write a compare and contrast essay.”
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
An Ethnography of 8th Grade Culture
Excerpt from Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Student Literacy:
Sheila Cantlebary a language arts teacher at Wedgewood Middle School in Columbus, Ohio, and Sharon Dorsey, the reading resource teacher, decided to substitute a publishing project for the regular language arts/reading curriculum in one of Sheila’s double-period 8th-grade classes. “We thought that if we were going to have publication as a goal, we should first discuss with the kids what they wanted to write about.”
“We wanted the students to do some sort of ethnography. Some of the samples that we brought in to show the kids were publications like the Foxfire books. We had The Preppy Handbook, The Yuppie Handbook, and The Valley Girl’s Guide To Life. After a lot of class discussion, the kids decided to do a book on their own 8th-grade culture.”
“We first brainstormed for categories that would help focus their research. They came up with eight categories: spare time, clothes and jewelry, books and movies, the slang of that particular school year, note writing, what middle schoolers eat, school rules, and music.” The table of contents hints at the detailed pictures of a distinct culture that await the reader.
Sheila and Sharon made it clear to the students that the book they were writing was theirs, yet they did create a structure, a process, to help the students create their book. The following description of this process is excerpted from a paper that Sheila and Sharon wrote for an Ohio State University course they were taking.
Stage 1. Choosing a topic for the project
If interest is to be sustained, the topic needs to have student appeal and approval. Motivation is all-important at the middle school level. The topic should be sufficiently broad to generate enough subcategories or spin-off sections to provide work for the entire class. Bring in models of other student publications.
Stage 2. Identifying categories of the topic
Through class discussion, divide the topic into workable categories for individual students or groups of students to develop.
Stage 3. Making a commitment to a category
In order to foster the development of student ownership, students must commit themselves to working on one of the categories of the topic. Students were asked to give a first and second choice for the categories they wanted to develop. At the same time they were asked to choose the student(s) with whom they wanted to work. This was done in writing after a period of consultation among the students. Sharon and I then took the student choices and formed working groups of two to five students. An effort was made to place each student with a friend of his or her choice. Groups were balanced so that a possible leader or organizer was present in each.
Stage 4. Pre-writing discussion
Pre-writing activities provide motivation for students as well as begin their actual thinking about the topic. Our classroom discussions provided language about the topic. Our whole class brain stormed “jot lists” under each of the categories on the chalkboard. File folders were given out to each group. In the groups each student took individual research and writing assignments. Each group had to present its plan for writing to the teacher for final approval.
Stage 5. Researching the categories
Working in groups or individually, students developed a set of questions they wanted answered about their category or subcategory. They determined how to get their answers. Some wrote and administered surveys. Some did interviews outside of school or by phone during class hours. For certain categories, student observation and field notes were the best source of information. The verbal language (slang) group had the teacher help design a form for recording field observations that was regularly used by the whole class to record the unique words or phrases of middle schoolers. The forms were collected each Friday and the findings were verified by the whole class for accuracy of meaning and appropriate contextual information.
Stage 6. Writing the first drafts
Individual students flowed back and forth between writing alone and getting direction or support from their groups to do their drafting. The teacher must serve as facilitator, orchestrating the movement. Sometimes at this stage, it is necessary to teach the whole class to give the students examples or models of what they can do. Classroom lessons in percentages and fractions were necessary for interpreting the surveys. Editing of grammatical and usage features was generally overlooked until the next stage.
Stage 7. Rewriting, revising, and editing
Many students do not comprehend what revision means or entails. So, in teaching about revising, the language arts teacher is developing a whole new concept and a new pattern of behavior for students.
Stage 8. Create a proofing mock-up
Only when they see the mock-up does the realization set in that this product will be read by a real audience of peers. They become aware of how their writing will represent them to the readers, and they become tremendously motivated to locate all the grammatical and usage errors. They recognize the need for additional artwork, catchier titles, and more vivid descriptions. Students see the need for changing the layout in order to emphasize text or artwork. This might be called the final editing phase.
Producing the ethnography worked as an interdisciplinary project. Sheila explains, “They were using math as they computed the results of their survey; they used techniques of the social sciences as they created forms for field notes and surveys, and they learned about the importance of details in writing.” They became experts at detecting boring writing and learned how to spice it with examples from real life, like the student who rewrote her “Jeans” article to include the story of a mother using a coat hanger to zip her daughter’s overly tight jeans.
Sheila says, “While doing a project like this isn’t a panacea for all the ills of the language arts classroom, motivation was much higher in this class than in my other 8th-grade classes. Eventually, when it came down to final publication time, we put in some marathon nights at the school, when the custodian kicked us out at nine or ten. Our best testament to increased interest occurred on the second to the last day of school — the traditional 8th-grade cut day. The typical class on this day had only eight students. But this was the day that Fresh Talk was to be distributed. Our class was in full attendance except for two excused students who came back later to get their copies.”
*Copyright © 1992 by Laurie King & Dennis Stovall. Published by Blue Heron Publishing, Inc. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
Sheila Cantlebary a language arts teacher at Wedgewood Middle School in Columbus, Ohio, and Sharon Dorsey, the reading resource teacher, decided to substitute a publishing project for the regular language arts/reading curriculum in one of Sheila’s double-period 8th-grade classes. “We thought that if we were going to have publication as a goal, we should first discuss with the kids what they wanted to write about.”
“We wanted the students to do some sort of ethnography. Some of the samples that we brought in to show the kids were publications like the Foxfire books. We had The Preppy Handbook, The Yuppie Handbook, and The Valley Girl’s Guide To Life. After a lot of class discussion, the kids decided to do a book on their own 8th-grade culture.”
“We first brainstormed for categories that would help focus their research. They came up with eight categories: spare time, clothes and jewelry, books and movies, the slang of that particular school year, note writing, what middle schoolers eat, school rules, and music.” The table of contents hints at the detailed pictures of a distinct culture that await the reader.
Sheila and Sharon made it clear to the students that the book they were writing was theirs, yet they did create a structure, a process, to help the students create their book. The following description of this process is excerpted from a paper that Sheila and Sharon wrote for an Ohio State University course they were taking.
Stage 1. Choosing a topic for the project
If interest is to be sustained, the topic needs to have student appeal and approval. Motivation is all-important at the middle school level. The topic should be sufficiently broad to generate enough subcategories or spin-off sections to provide work for the entire class. Bring in models of other student publications.
Stage 2. Identifying categories of the topic
Through class discussion, divide the topic into workable categories for individual students or groups of students to develop.
Stage 3. Making a commitment to a category
In order to foster the development of student ownership, students must commit themselves to working on one of the categories of the topic. Students were asked to give a first and second choice for the categories they wanted to develop. At the same time they were asked to choose the student(s) with whom they wanted to work. This was done in writing after a period of consultation among the students. Sharon and I then took the student choices and formed working groups of two to five students. An effort was made to place each student with a friend of his or her choice. Groups were balanced so that a possible leader or organizer was present in each.
Stage 4. Pre-writing discussion
Pre-writing activities provide motivation for students as well as begin their actual thinking about the topic. Our classroom discussions provided language about the topic. Our whole class brain stormed “jot lists” under each of the categories on the chalkboard. File folders were given out to each group. In the groups each student took individual research and writing assignments. Each group had to present its plan for writing to the teacher for final approval.
Stage 5. Researching the categories
Working in groups or individually, students developed a set of questions they wanted answered about their category or subcategory. They determined how to get their answers. Some wrote and administered surveys. Some did interviews outside of school or by phone during class hours. For certain categories, student observation and field notes were the best source of information. The verbal language (slang) group had the teacher help design a form for recording field observations that was regularly used by the whole class to record the unique words or phrases of middle schoolers. The forms were collected each Friday and the findings were verified by the whole class for accuracy of meaning and appropriate contextual information.
Stage 6. Writing the first drafts
Individual students flowed back and forth between writing alone and getting direction or support from their groups to do their drafting. The teacher must serve as facilitator, orchestrating the movement. Sometimes at this stage, it is necessary to teach the whole class to give the students examples or models of what they can do. Classroom lessons in percentages and fractions were necessary for interpreting the surveys. Editing of grammatical and usage features was generally overlooked until the next stage.
Stage 7. Rewriting, revising, and editing
Many students do not comprehend what revision means or entails. So, in teaching about revising, the language arts teacher is developing a whole new concept and a new pattern of behavior for students.
Stage 8. Create a proofing mock-up
Only when they see the mock-up does the realization set in that this product will be read by a real audience of peers. They become aware of how their writing will represent them to the readers, and they become tremendously motivated to locate all the grammatical and usage errors. They recognize the need for additional artwork, catchier titles, and more vivid descriptions. Students see the need for changing the layout in order to emphasize text or artwork. This might be called the final editing phase.
Producing the ethnography worked as an interdisciplinary project. Sheila explains, “They were using math as they computed the results of their survey; they used techniques of the social sciences as they created forms for field notes and surveys, and they learned about the importance of details in writing.” They became experts at detecting boring writing and learned how to spice it with examples from real life, like the student who rewrote her “Jeans” article to include the story of a mother using a coat hanger to zip her daughter’s overly tight jeans.
Sheila says, “While doing a project like this isn’t a panacea for all the ills of the language arts classroom, motivation was much higher in this class than in my other 8th-grade classes. Eventually, when it came down to final publication time, we put in some marathon nights at the school, when the custodian kicked us out at nine or ten. Our best testament to increased interest occurred on the second to the last day of school — the traditional 8th-grade cut day. The typical class on this day had only eight students. But this was the day that Fresh Talk was to be distributed. Our class was in full attendance except for two excused students who came back later to get their copies.”
*Copyright © 1992 by Laurie King & Dennis Stovall. Published by Blue Heron Publishing, Inc. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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