For Thanksgiving, thank a teacher

students-teacher by me

Teaching during the days up to and right after the holidays can be a challenge. Try having your students compose hand-written Thank You notes to a former teacher if you're looking for a quick activity around Thanksgiving and other holidays.

Here's a link to the activity

We did this in class today, and within a half hour my students wrote honest, poignant missives which of course is good in and of itself. But there's research to back it up why it's good for the people who receive the notes. In an article in Psychological Science, Kumar and Epley (2018) found that the people who received gratitude letters, "significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why expressers were grateful, overestimated how awkward recipients would feel, and underestimated how positive recipients would feel."

Most of the notes were to people who were still teaching in our city, so my administration agreed to hand deliver them to those schools. Looking forward to what my students hear back from their former teachers.

Ideas for starting your classes

Bulldogs Read by me

How do you start each class? In my last post I talked about ways to start the school year, but what about every day after that? The first few minutes set the tone for how the rest of the session goes. Some of the teachers I know have an opening quote on the board that the students respond to as soon as they walk in the door. After 10 minutes they invite students to share their responses; otherwise, move on to the day's lessons. Activities like this and the ones below allow teachers time to do attendance, touch base with students, etc. while still giving students a meaningful task. Here are ways I begin my classes.

Greetings

When possible greet the students at the door. I can't always be at the door when they arrive, but when I am, I always welcome them to the day's class. I do this because I'm genuinely happy to see them.

Silent reading or writing

This year the AP English Language students will read from a nonfiction book of their choice for the first 10-15 minutes of class. The goal of this assignment is to complete at least one nonfiction book a semester. That allows a slower reader to choose a long book and time enough to complete it. If students finish a book, they move on to another. 

Students share the load

Why should teachers have to do all the work? Once the class has completed some preliminary discussions about writing style, I have students do some of the work of beginning the day. At least once a quarter students are responsible for choosing a passage from their free-reading book to share with the class. Here's a link to the assignment that I collaborated on with my colleague Bryan Jeffreys. Even if you don't have students choose a passage from their reading, I've seen variations of this activity where students choose some inspirational words, read them to the class, and then read aloud their reflection on why they personally consider that quote inspirational.

It's been said that we never get a second chance to make a first impression. The same can be said for each class we teach.

The glory of unfinished learning

Photo by Sarah Beth Anderson

If you're a writing teacher, you've probably encountered the following situation: a colleague from another discipline waves a student paper at you and complains "these kids can't write." It happens to me at least once a year.

In the past I've told these colleagues that maybe the assignment wasn't clear enough or that perhaps they should treat this as a draft, as another step in the writing process, that surface errors are most likely related to performance – not competence. But a lot of times content area teachers don't plan on doing multiple drafts of a paper, and I sense that they walk away from our conversation even more convinced that student writing skills are on a gradual decline.

But I just came across a book that sheds more light on this. According to Lee Ann Carroll in Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, research shows that student writing appears to be weaker when they encounter new and unfamiliar expectations. Student writing develops because they must take on new and difficult roles in a discipline that they've probably never encountered before. It's reasonable to assume that students' new learning is creating all the cognitive load and that their early writing reflects this.

This all reminded me of the 1972 Donald Murray essay, "Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product." In the essay, Murray notes that since most English teachers were trained to analyze a product like a sonnet by Shakespeare and that they focus their critical attention on student writing as if it were a product. According to Murray, the problem with that approach is that a teacher's "attack does little more than confirm the student's lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves." Murray instead argues that teachers should "glory in the unfinishedness"of student writing.

So now when a colleague approaches me with the complaint that writing teachers like me aren't doing enough to prevent the next generation's slow slide into illiteracy, I've got another answer. Content area teachers might anticipate initially weaker writing as students deal with new concepts in unfamiliar disciplines – that's a sign that they're learning.

Then I'll advise them to make sure their assignments are clear and to build in some time for revision.

Smart students

I came across this article about how smart Finnish teenagers are, based on a test adminstered by the OECD. Of course the causes are complex, but a couple of ideas struck me.

Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

The article interested me for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that the English Department at my school is currently having discussions about what students should read next year. This part of the article speaks volumes about the Finnish students' success:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000. One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

Another key idea comes out when a Finn student discusses her foreign exchange experience in an American school: "The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write." The article doesn't oversimplify the differences in the two nation's education system, but I still couldn't help but notice that a curriculum that fosters reading and writing produces successful results.

Aritstotle and authenticity

A lot of the teachers I’ve been listening to lately have been distraught over plagiarism in their students’ writing. I try to sympathize, but I can’t relate. I’m not having those issues. When writing begins with inquiry, makes connections to the self’s place in the world, and sourcing is transparent, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

At the same time I’ve been reading about Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle – the connections and interdependence of speaker, audience, subject; the appeals to logos, ethos, pathos; and the added elements of context and purpose. When we compose from that framework, plagiarism is an awfully alien concept.

Painting by Raffaello Sanzio from Wikimedia Commons and is a public domain image

NCLB & authentic writing

The National Commission on Writing released Writing and School Reform a while ago outlining how authentic, personalized writing instruction can happen in today's standard-driven classrooms. If you haven't read it, it's worth reading now.