jonathan's edutalk

passion and practice

2012-01-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

Somewhat to my surprise, Pearson Publications has accepted for publication a book that 7th-12th grade teachers in the San Jose Area Writing Project have been working on for the past five years, under the able guidance of my colleague Professor Mary Warner, who serves as Co-Director of the program. The book will be called Teaching Writing in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice. It's due out in the early spring of 2013. Since my own opening chapter addresses the primary focus of this blog, addressing the question of what practices in the teaching of writing might best reflect what we've learned over the years as concerned practitioners, I'm taking the liberty of posting it in its entirety in this blog entry. I hope you find the time it takes to read this long entry is time well spent.

Chapter 1

Founders of Writing from the Heart: Personalizing the Theoretical

by Jonathan Lovell

In introducing Teaching Writing in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice with attention to the theorists and theorist-practitioners who served as pioneering founders in the teaching of writing from the heart, my goals are two-fold. I am demonstrating the practical but profound influence these founders have had on our practices as teachers of writing, using my own experiences as a writing teacher as an example. Additionally, I am also putting some flesh on the bones of these seminal thinkers, showing how what they wrote was deeply enmeshed in what they did as practitioners themselves, and in the often profound influence they had on other teachers at very practical levels. For those readers who were not fortunate enough to be participants in the profession during the time these founders were active, my hope is that the personal accounts I give of my interactions with this group of highly original and influential thinkers will provide an avenue for others to come to understand them and their work directly and memorably. It is especially important that this act of recollection and tough-minded homage be done during this “era of assessment,” since the broad, comprehensive, and inspiriting view of language growth that was/is uniformly espoused by these founders is in grave danger of either being marginalized, or even more tragically, simply forgotten.

And so the story begins:

Scanning over the meager collection of books devoted to the teaching of English at the secondary level, my eyes lighted on a slim paperback publication entitled Language, the Learner and the School, by Douglas Barnes, James Britton, and Harold Rosen. I was nearing the end of my second and final year of study at Oxford University, visiting Blackwell’s Bookstore for any help their collection might provide for a position I’d soon be assuming in the United States, teaching English to 10^th and 12^th graders at an independent day school in Wilmington, Delaware.

The answer, I was discovering, was “not much.” Blackwell’s devoted only a small segment of its extensive Broad Street floor space to the general topic of education, only a shelf or so to English Education. There wasn’t much to choose from, but I had to start somewhere. I bought the slim Penguin paperback and brought it home to my digs on Woodstock Road, just north of the university, to see what help it might offer.

The perspective of the University of London Institute of Education researchers described in the book drew me in immediately. What happens, the researchers asked, when students move from being taught by the single teacher of their primary classrooms to the six or seven different teachers of their subject-centered secondary classrooms?

How do students understand the sometimes conflicting “subject-centered” academic language used by these different teachers? And how does the language these different teachers use to describe and explain their different subject areas compare and contrast to the language the students themselves might use to explain what they’ve learned in their various classes?

I was so intrigued by the differences between the “expressive” language the seventh grade students in the study used to convey their understanding of what they had learned and the academic language used by their teachers that I vowed to conduct my own small classroom experiment as soon as I began my own teaching. Rather than tell students what I thought they should notice about the short stories we were reading for our 10^th grade curricula, I would take out my notepad and write down what they said. And I was prepared to wait quite a long time, in silence, before I said anything myself. Otherwise, so I reasoned, I could not be sure if what I was listening to was my students’ own “expressive” language or their desire to sound as much as possible like their teacher.

It turned out that my students did have to endure quite long spells of silence in those first few weeks of my teaching, and I’m not certain that I made very productive or beneficial use of the student-centered language that I learned as a result. What I did learn was that the majority of the students I taught were simply not very interested in talking about short works of fiction that had been “pre-packaged” by a publisher who cared little about what interested them, and who marched them doggedly through groups of stories according to what these works of fiction revealed about the salient characteristics of the short story genre. It did not matter if I did not say a thing, in other words, since the organization and academic focus of the anthology we were using spoke volumes “on my behalf.” While I gradually abandoned my experimental role as an observer and recorder of my students’ responses to the short stories they were reading, I did not forget the impact that reading those initial research studies had had on me as an eager and expectant young English teacher.

When I returned eight years later to the work of this group of researchers, their writing had become much better known, both in England and in the United States. Led by the influential teaching and writing of James Britton, author of Language and Learning (1972) and head of the English Department at the London Institute for Education during the mid to late 1960s, the world of English Education that I re-entered in the fall of 1977 was abuzz with discussions of “expressive writing,” writing-across-the-curriculum, and the development of writing abilities from the early to the later teenage years. I had been hired for my first university level position at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York City that fall, and my job was to organize an MA program in English Education for prospective secondary level teachers and create new PhD programs in the teaching of reading and writing.

I was qualified, however, for neither of these roles, having managed to get through my interview by doing some quick research in the field of composition studies, and somehow managing to persuade my interviewers that I knew what I was talking about. When the spring semester came around, however, I was in deep trouble. I was responsible for teaching a course entitled "Composition for Teachers of English," and my audience was composed of both the dozen or so MA students I had begun to work with that fall as well as about thirty hardened New York City high school English teachers who were taking the course to move up a notch on their salary scales.

What made teaching this course especially troubling for me, however, was my own writing. I was trying to complete the second chapter of my Yale University dissertation--a study of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti--but what I was in fact doing was crossing out sentences and paragraphs I’d written months earlier, and feeling like I was sinking slowly and inexorably into an ever-deepening verbal morass. What I really needed to do, I remember thinking to myself, was re-title my course "De-composition for Teachers of English." That's a subject I knew something about.

I managed to make it through the first few Monday evening classes, making up the course as I went along. Following the graduate school model with which I was most familiar, I lectured to the class about the research described above by James Britton, John Dixon, and Douglas Barnes that I’d stumbled into before I began teaching at the high school level. As this research evolved in the late sixties and early seventies, it paid increasing attention to the disconnect between the "expressive language" students might use to convey their initial responses to what they read, and the overly dry, academic language they were required to use in their writing, especially as they moved from 7^th to 12^th grades.

While this body of research was indeed quite important, the lecture-discussion style in which I presented it to my class was a disaster: a modeling of just the sort of dry academic language that Britton, Dixon and Barnes were arguing against. Just how disastrous was revealed to me by a note my chair left on my desk a few weeks into the semester. "I thought I'd better pass along this letter written to Larry Cremin [the then President of Teachers College]," it read. "I wouldn't take it overly seriously, but it does suggest problems that might be worth addressing." A student in my class who was teaching at the innovative private day school to which President Cremin had sent his own children wrote the letter. In the letter, she referred to a lecture that Cremin had recently given on the need to bring a greater sense of professionalism to teachers at the K-12 level. An excellent way to start in this direction, she suggested, would be to fire a recently hired assistant professor who was teaching a course entitled "Composition for Teachers of English."

I felt numb. I'd been found out. In my imagination, visions appeared of a phalanx of emissaries from the president’s office coming into my next class, lifting me bodily from behind my podium, and carting me away. My students were cheering.

I was sitting disconsolately at my desk, expecting to momentarily find myself and my belongings unceremoniously dumped onto the street, when two of my graduate students walked into my office. "We heard you were having some trouble with that course in the teaching of writing," they told me. "We thought you might find this book helpful. We use it in our basic writing courses at City College and we’ve both found it very successful."

The book was Writing Without Teachers (1973) by Peter Elbow. I figured that at that point I had nothing to lose, so I began reading. What drew me in immediately was Elbow's account of himself as a writer. Like me, he’d had more and more trouble with his writing as he progressed from college to graduate school. What drove him into the world of teaching composition, he frankly admitted, was that he’d become hopelessly stuck in the writing of his own dissertation. Since his inability to write disqualified him from any potential job he might get teaching English Literature at the college level, the only job he was qualified for, ironically, was as an instructor of freshman composition.

But Elbow did more than write about his own travails as a writer. More usefully for me, he outlined a program for addressing the deep-seated doubts and failures of nerve and confidence that he suggested we all face as writers. Start by writing in short bursts, not letting your “editorial mind” prematurely censure what you’ve written. Try writing these short bursts at unusual times of day and in places you’re sure you couldn’t possibly write. "Writing in difficult circumstances" I came to call these writing exercises, practicing it by writing before I'd had my morning coffee, or on the New York City subway as it lurched its way from one end of Manhattan to the other.

But equally as important as this focus on getting one’s writing going were Elbow's insights into the importance of getting response to one’s writing. Just as the internal editor in our mind tends to censure our work prematurely, so do those who respond to our writing. And yet getting response is crucial to discovering what we have to say. "So rather than reading a writer's initial drafts silently," Elbow suggested, "have authors read aloud what they’ve written." Once through a first time so listeners gain a sense of the content of the writing, then once again a second time so they gain a sense of its emerging shape. Elbow further argued, quite surprisingly and innovatively, that rather than having listeners suggest revisions to the writer, they should describe the after-the-fact effect of hearing the author's words read aloud. Listeners could start by recalling words and phrases they’d remembered from the piece, then they should summarize the piece as a whole, and finally they should tell the author what hearing the piece read aloud led them to think about as they were listening to it. These “showing,” “telling,” and “metaphoric” responses should be written down by the listeners, Elbow suggested, then read aloud and handed to the authors who'd who had their pieces responded to in this interestingly non-judgmental fashion. In this way, authors could decide how to revise their writing so that it produced effects on listeners that they liked, or that they admired in other pieces they'd heard in their small groups of writers and listeners.

I was fascinated. I decided to put Elbow's approach to the test, producing a “composition manifesto,” as my students came to call it, for my next class. “We will write each week,” I announced to my class, “including your instructor." And I went on to explain that we would form small groups of five or six, read our pieces of writing aloud to one another, and respond in the ways I'd just learned from reading this fascinating new book. And we would document what happened to us and to our pieces of writing as we went through this process, using ourselves as objects of study to explore and examine this innovative method of writing instruction.

And, at least for me and the students in the class that chose to stick it out, our writing--and more importantly our appetite for producing and revising our writing--did indeed improve. Steadily, obviously, and often quite dramatically. I later came to see that what I was doing as a teacher of composition was creating a community of respectful and skilled listener-readers as much as confident and competent writers. That's what those elaborate rituals of response were all about: educating ourselves to the discipline of becoming the readers we’d always hoped for as writers. In the process of becoming these listener-readers, I further came to understand, writing was “brought out” of us--writing that responded directly to, and was in a sense the creation of, this new community of readers and writers.

Four years later, however, my family and I moved cross-country from Connecticut to California. My wife had been offered a faculty position at UC Berkeley, and in response I left my tenure-track position at Teachers College, assuming a one-year position at UC Davis, where I'd be teaching freshman composition. I was by then in my mid-thirties, having become devoted over my past four years at Teachers College to the teaching of writing and the field of composition studies. I thought I was pretty hot stuff.

At Davis, I wasn't.

There, I was one of forty-odd composition instructors. Some were graduate students in English, some were Davis residents, and a few like myself were PhD's in English looking for full-time tenure track positions elsewhere. Everyone taught the same course, using a session-by-session instruction manual based on Frederick Crews' Random House Handbook of Rhetoric and Composition. My three trice-weekly freshman composition classes met in one of the enology labs on campus. A large lab table spread across the entire front of the class, where I would be greeted each morning by the smell of souring grapes, made redolent by the Davis campus’s 100-degree September heat.

But the students. Products of California's affluent and protected suburbs, they treated composition instructors as service providers whose purpose was to insure that they, the service recipients, maintained their 4.0 GPAs. "What must we do on this comparison/contrast paper to get an A?" they would ask. Or "Could you tell us exactly what you want on this descriptive writing assignment?"

They'd arrive at my office hours, graded papers in hand, asking me to show them which words, phrases, and commas they should change to upgrade their paper from a B minus to an A. Soon, they were coming up to me as I walked into class, asking me with an edge to their voices if I might "make the next assignment clearer," so they would "know what I wanted" and could "give it to me.”

I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to go to bed, pull the covers up over my head, and assume a fetal position. Most of all, I wanted to shake my students by their shoulders until their collective teeth rattled, saying to them: "Write about something that matters to you, for the love of heaven, or I will go completely bonkers!" I was not in the best frame of mind, that is, to be a conscientious and dutiful service provider for my ever-anxious freshman students.

I particularly recall driving to Davis one morning, numb with apprehension, with a pile of thirty "classification" papers sitting expectantly on the passenger seat. In these papers my students had been asked to "select a generic group of things and describe the features that distinguish the sub-categories that make up this group." Although I'd skimmed these papers the night before, I now had to re-read and grade them before my first morning class, one hour away. Every single paper, it seemed to me as I sat at my enology lab table working doggedly to complete this task, described the bicycles ridden on the Davis campus, and the various sub-categories into which these bicycles might be classified.

"What should we do, Sir, to get an A on this paper?"

"Write about something that matters to me," I wanted to scream, "or I assure you I will start swinging from the trees outside our classroom windows and loping across campus on my legs and forepaws."

I was in the middle of my first semester, my desk at home littered with piles of composition assignments I could not bear to look at, when I received a call from my former chairman at Teachers College. Because our decision to move to California was made quite late in the prior semester, my chair had decided to leave my position vacant for a year so that a departmental committee could conduct a proper search for my replacement.

"We have an interesting candidate for your English Education position," my chairman said. "I wonder if you could help us out." He explained that while the candidate's research had been in the general field of English Education, she'd focused her studies on elementary level students. "But it's first-rate stuff," my chairman said, "really first rate. Could you give this candidate a call, perhaps have her send you her current work-in-progress, and write an evaluation to the search committee of her appropriateness for the position?"

"Glad to," I replied, trying to sound confident and in charge of my life. "Do you want me to be an advocate for the position as well? I would suspect she's being courted by other universities." My chairman replied that he’d be pleased if I would, describing the candidate as a “rare find."

I called her the following weekend, and in response to her asking if Columbia usually called candidates as parts of their searches, told her that hers was an unusual case.

"'Unusual' good or 'unusual' bad?" she asked me.

"'Unusual' good," I said, mentioning my chair's reference to her as a "rare find."

"How would he know? What's he read of mine he likes so much?"

This is more difficult than I'd anticipated, I thought to myself. I wonder what she has written? So I asked her about her research.

She told me she was just now writing the fourth chapter of her dissertation. It was an account of the two years she’s spent as a participant-observer in a third and fourth grade classroom in southern New Hampshire. As she described her research, her voice became animated, recounting in lively detail both what she'd discovered and some of the frustrations of conveying the excitement of these discoveries within the rigid rules governing the writing of an NYU dissertation.

I asked her if she might send me what she’d written so far, telling her I’d enjoy reading what she’d just described, and that it would help me write a letter for the Teachers College search committee on her behalf. "How do I know you'll write in my behalf?" she asked me. "You haven't read what I've written. Only listened to what I've said about it."

I laughed, telling her she'd just have to take that risk.

The manuscript arrived a week later on a Saturday: 300 pages wrapped in brown paper. I started reading immediately. The content drew me in at once, fascinated. Here were third and fourth graders writing exactly as I wanted my college freshmen to write: choosing topics of consequence to them: experimenting with different modes of writing--narrative, poetry, drama--to express what they knew or wanted to explore about these topics; getting thoughtful and respectful feedback on their pieces from both their teachers and fellow classmates. And the writing that the students in these classrooms produced was absolutely stunning. Several years later, when I used the book that emerged from this dissertation, Lessons From a Child (1983), as one of the textbooks for a college level writing course I was teaching, a student came into my office shortly after the class had begun, asking anxiously. "You don't expect us to write as well as the kids in this book, do you?"

I wrote the author a postcard after reading the first chapter, telling her how much I admired what I had just read. Further responses followed, singling out passages for praise, raising questions, and occasionally making suggestions for revision. After every few chapters I wrote a longer response, summing up what I felt that section of the manuscript had accomplished and where I thought the author’s argument was taking me. For the next two weeks, this riveting narrative, a study that focused primarily on the writing growth of one student moving from third to fourth grade, held my attention almost exclusively.

Finally, I was done. It was as if I'd been in a kind of trance. I woke up, looked around, attended to the many papers that had been accumulating on my desk in my “absence,” and returned to the chore of teaching my Davis classes, now oddly at peace about my overly eager students and my own tepid commitment to them. I wrote an enthusiastic review of the candidate for my former department, which I first showed to my then middle school aged daughter. "It's well written, Dad," she remarked, "but this person does walk on the ground like the rest of us, doesn't she?"

The author of that small but seminal volume, Lessons from a Child, was Lucy Calkins. As it turned out, she was selected for the position at Teachers College, where she is still teaching today. Having written, among many other publications, the highly successful Units of Study for Teaching Writing (K-2 and 3-5), and having directed the influential Teachers College Reading and Writing Project over many years, it’s now clear that she does indeed walk on the ground like the rest of us, only a good deal more sure-footedly and quite a bit faster!

In the spring and fall of 1982, however, the University of New Hampshire based group through which Lucy Calkins was introduced to the field of composition research was just starting to gain wide attention. Its leader was Donald Graves, known at the time primarily through his authorship of the Ford Foundation monograph Balance the Basics: Let Them Write (1978). In this powerful study, Graves had pointed out that for every dollar spent on the teaching of writing, one hundred dollars are spent on the teaching of reading. Even more tellingly, he noted that for every dollar spent for research on the teaching of writing, one thousand are spent for research on the teaching of reading. His conclusion was that by not taking advantage of a child’s initial urge to write rather than to read, we significantly underestimate the power of the “output languages” of writing and speaking in favor of the “input languages” of reading and listening.

This monograph, along with the fact that Graves was receiving the David H. Russell Research Award for authoring this study and concurrently publishing his seminal work Writing: Teachers and Children at Work (1982), was creating quite a stir in the hallways and sessions of the 1982 NCTE Annual Convention in Washington, DC. As a rather wide-eyed attendee at this conference, I was greatly impressed with the energetic and dedicated coterie of younger scholars that Don Graves had drawn into his orbit: Lucy Calkins of Teachers College (discussed above), Nancie Atwell of Boothbay Harbor, Maine (soon to publish In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents in 1987), Mary Ellen Giacobbe of Atkinson, New Hampshire (later to publish Talking, Drawing, Writing: Lessons for Our Youngest Writers in 2007), Linda Rief of Durham, New Hampshire (later to publish Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents in 1992), and Tom Romano of Edgewood High School in Trenton, Ohio (soon to publish Clearing the Way: Working with Teenage Writers in 1987). But I was also impressed with what I took to be the fundamentally important perception about language growth on which much of the research and practice of this University of New Hampshire group was based.

This perception might be expressed by observing that while most parents would never dream of putting their hands over their children’s mouths if they uttered the words “mama” or “papa,” telling them not to speak until they could say the words “mother” or “father,” something analogous was happening quite routinely in the teaching of writing in our nation’s public school classrooms. Rather than recognizing and honoring children’s desire to write, as well as their confidence they had something important to say, and rather than learning the predictable patterns of “invented spelling” that children routinely use when they begin to write, teachers were closing the door on these nascent efforts at written communication, focusing their attention instead on handwriting, spelling, and the basic punctuation conventions of simple sentences. By imposing this adult perception of the “fundamentals” of written communication prematurely, teachers of younger children, and not a few older children, were unwittingly creating a nation of students who either hated to write or were convinced that they were terrible at the practice of this fundamentally important skill. It was just as if those parents had indeed put their hands over their children’s mouths when they began to speak. The analogous result would be that we would have raised a nation of children who would have been essentially chastised into silence.

That’s effectively what we’d done in our practices in the teaching of writing, specifically in this era of ever-increasing high-profile assessments. Rather than capitalize on the simplicity and depth of Graves’ innovative understanding of how students might grow as writers, and how we might assist them more humanely and productively in our practices as teachers, we were increasingly focusing on segmenting writing into component parts that were “testable,” and in the process largely destroying our students’ urge or desire to write.

I had the opportunity to try out this understanding of language development with my own younger daughter the following spring. Holly was in the second half of her first grade year at a public elementary school in Berkeley, California, and was having a terrible time with her reading. In order to provide her with extra help at home, her well meaning teacher was sending short mimeographed and stapled together “children’s books,” with stories that contained only the words the first graders had learned in school. My daughter hated these dry, often nonsensical stories and would simply refuse to read them, despite all the gentle prodding her father tried to provide.

After nights of frustration, I finally hit on the option that should have been obvious to me from my growing familiarity with the work of the University of New Hampshire researchers. I had Holly tell me the story that she “heard” behind the bare bones of the restricted vocabulary children’s book she was being required to master. As she told me the quite wildly invented “recreation” that was beginning to inform her understanding of her no-longer-so-simple story, I would write this longer narrative on the facing pages of her small mimeographed text. After a number of repeated readings, with much laughter, of this facing page “subtext,” Holly was gradually persuaded to “return” to the restricted vocabulary of her simple story and read it as a dim whisper of the story it was, so to speak, trying to become. This personal experience of the difference that a teacher could make by attending to the language capacities of a young reader or writer, rather than his or her perceived limitations, deepened my conviction of the importance of the work being carried out during the 1980s by teacher-researchers at the University of New Hampshire.

A few months after these enlightening experiments with my younger daughter, I applied and was selected for a position as an Associate Professor of English and Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. The commute was not ideal—I’d fly up to Reno on Sunday and fly back to Berkeley Thursday evening—but the community of public school teachers and university faculty to which I was introduced was eye-opening and inspiriting. One of my new position’s job requirements was that I collaborate with a group of K-college teachers who formed a professional development community known as the Northern Nevada Writing Project. While I had some familiarity with the Writing Project through my collaboration with Sondra Perl and Richard Sterling, the New York City Writing Project Directors while I was at Teachers College, my experience was still quite limited. As part of my on-the-job training for my new position at UNR, might I apply for the Bay Area Writing Project’s upcoming Invitational Summer Institute? I did, and was rewarded with the richest and most consequential professional development experience I’d known since becoming involved in the field of English Education.

I spent over four and a half weeks in the summer of 1984 in the company of 25 other K-college teachers on the UC Berkeley campus, under the direction of Jim Gray, founder of the Writing Project. Having now served as a director or co-director of 28 subsequent summer institutes, it seems clear to me that there is a compelling connection between the inspiration for attending to younger students’ beginning writing development among the researchers at the University of New Hampshire and the more or less concurrent founding of the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-70s.

Both the University of New Hampshire program under Don Graves, and the University of California Berkeley/Bay Area Writing Project program under Jim Gray, began with the perception that there were talents and abilities among their target populations that had gone largely unnoticed because these quite different populations had not been given the opportunity to “see” the emergence of their own abilities in a concrete and convincing manner. In the case of young children, this was largely because most teachers believed that several small “steps” needed to be mastered before younger writers could “walk” with confidence as mature writers. In the case of practicing teachers, the worker-supervisor model under which the field of public school teaching continues to function today made it highly unlikely that administrators would see their “teacher-workers” as sources of valuable and insightful knowledge. Looked at from this perspective, neither the young writers in Don Graves’ initial studies of elementary school children in Atkinson, New Hampshire nor the mostly middle and high school teachers who made up the Bay Area Writing Project’s initial 1974 Invitational Summer Institute were accustomed to being heard or listened to with the idea that they had something important to say, something important to teach the rest of us.

In the University of New Hampshire research studies, what gives young writers the confidence they have something to say is the time and the patience their teachers provide for them to think through and draft and revise their pieces of writing. In the Writing Project summer institutes, what builds this confidence in having something worthwhile to say is the amount of time—generally about an hour and a half—that every participant is given to present a workshop demonstration of a “best practice” in the teaching of writing to the other participants in the institute. Both practices accomplish similar goals. They begin with individuals who are uncertain or deeply skeptical that their “words” are worth listening to, and they provide these individuals with an attentive and respectful audience, an audience that helps to bring forth the very “words of consequence” that the young writers or selected teachers are half-convinced they do not possess.

It is no accident that both programs have come round to a belief in the fundamental importance of teachers as writers. The forerunner to the Writing Project, as Jim Gray explains in Teachers at the Center (2000), led to the somewhat accidental creation of “afternoon writing groups” in which small groups of teachers write and get response to their writing. This now-standard feature of all Writing Project summer institutes was an unanticipated outcome--during pre-1974 years when Gray’s summer institutes were located on the UC Davis campus and were NDEA funded--of several high school teachers’ desire to “try out” some of the practices in the teaching of writing that had been presented during the “practice oriented” morning sessions. Similarly, it was only in his later writings that Don Graves began to understand and stress the importance of teachers consistently bringing their own experience as writers to their conferences and mini-lessons with their students. A major legacy then of Don Graves and Jim Gray is this focus on teachers as writers.

This same focus on teachers as writers marks the contributions of three final founders of “writing from the heart”: Donald Murray, Ken Macrorie, and James Moffett. All three exerted a profound influence on the ways that teachers of writing thought about their practice, and all three were models of the fundamental importance of linking the teaching of writing inextricably with the practice of skilled writers.

It was Don Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition (1968) that I read, along with Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (1971), in preparation for my 1977 interview for the English Education position at Teachers College. I was not then familiar with the term “process writing” or with the notion that a piece of writing might go through several stages between inception and finished product. What struck me in Murray’s accounts of his own practices as a writer, however, was how authentic, and not infrequently, how moving they sounded. His own words fairly leapt off the page, and it was clear to me that the urgency and vitality of what he had to say were directly related to the honesty with which he described, and often dissected, his own practices as he moved slowly and often painfully from initial draft to final product. The “lesson” conveyed to me by Murray’s book was two-fold: writing is far more messy and labor-intensive than had been generally acknowledged by traditional approaches to the teaching of writing, and the most convincing and heart-felt instruction in this field of endeavor would come from someone who was himself or herself a passionate practitioner.

While I was not fully aware of it at the time, I’m certain today that it was Murray’s call to arms in this respect that led me to insist, in my “composition manifesto” to my Teachers College students, that we would all write, “including your instructor,” and that we would reflect on what we’d learned about our own writing in relation to our teaching of writing, as we progressed from draft to draft on our various pieces of writing. I’m equally certain that it’s Don Murray’s message that reverberates in my mind today as I ask the participants in our San Jose Area Writing Project Summer Institutes to use their end-of-institute evaluations, in part, to describe their experiences with their afternoon writing response groups, and to reflect on what they will take from these experiences to their classrooms in the coming year. Two of the participants’ responses from our 2011 summer institute indicate the power of the connection that teachers begin to make once they see themselves as writers teaching writing:

In the afternoon writing groups I discovered several important things. Most important to me was that I was able to express my thoughts and feelings through my writing and sharing with my group without hesitation or apprehension. My group gave me positive feedback and useful ideas on how to improve my writing pieces.

Because of this positive experience with writing groups I will use this form of working in small writing groups or possibly with a partner in my classroom to help students get positive and useful feedback from their peers, of course, after a lot of modeling. Assigning a set time for our afternoon writing groups made it possible for writing to happen. In this way I will be sure to include in my lessons writing time, not just district writing on demand or reading prompts but good old fashioned “just write” about anything.

--Mary C, First Grade Teacher

My experience with my afternoon writing group was very cathartic. We would meet after each morning session and debrief everything. Most of our afternoons were spent talking and reminiscing. After writing and reading so much, but having little time to comment… most of us were bursting at the seams to share… anything and everything. We found ourselves sharing stories, life experiences, quotes, comments, concerns, etc. We would jot down ideas, etc. then parade home with “homework” and writing assignments. It turned out that this was what led to the majority of the creative spark for me. I would take most of this home, let it percolate, and then start my actual writing around 10 pm or so.

I think the biggest experiences I will take to my classroom for this coming year are the options that were provided by our Afternoon Writing Group facilitator and the fact that, sometimes, you just have to talk about things before you write. Sometimes I assign things without talking through them. I think it would help to allow students to sit in writing groups of about 3 or 4 to bounce ideas off one another before they start writing. This could help get their creative spark lit.

--Katie N, 9^th-10^th Grade Teacher

Both these responses demonstrate the significance of Don Murray’s insistence that teachers of writing not only “talk the talk” but also “walk the walk.” As we face increasingly formulaic approaches to the teaching of writing in our public school classrooms, spurred on by concerns with whether or not we are preparing our students successfully for “writing-on-demand” statewide tests, it is helpful to remember Don Murray’s frequent admonition that creating pieces of writing worth reading involves a process that is by nature messy, unpredictable, and unceasingly difficult.

If Don Murray represents the typical New Englander in his dedication to a strong work ethic shading towards simple dogged persistence, Ken Macrorie represents the constitutional irreverence of the typical westerner. He never met a grammar rule he didn’t like . . . to break. Born in the Mississippi River town of Moline, Illinois, Macrorie frequently evokes in his stance toward writing, and in his own writing voice, an echo of Mark Twain: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author” (preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). It therefore comes as something of a surprise that during his long career Macrorie was a good deal more involved than Murray, who was five years his junior, in working within traditional organizations in the field of English Education. He was a Professor of English at Western Michigan University from 1961 to 1978, where his focus was on teacher training (or “re-educating teachers trapped in unproductive teaching methods,” as he put it). He served as editor of NCTE’s professional journal College Composition and Communication from 1962 to 1964, when it was regarded as the leader of the assault on the “current traditional” paradigm in writing instruction. And finally, he served for thirteen years, both before and after his retirement from WMU, at the renowned Breadloaf Graduate School of English, a summer master’s program conducted under the auspices of Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he taught practicing high school teachers to become writers and to take that knowledge back to their classrooms.

In terms of the focus of this chapter, however, it will be Macrorie’s re-conceptualizing of the writing of the traditional research paper that will serve to illuminate his many contributions to the field of writing instruction. The book that introduced most of us to Macrorie’s boldly original reconsideration of research writing was Searching Writing (1980), or as the book was more helpfully re-titled in 1988, The I-Search Paper. In Chapter 6 of this book, you will read how two middle school teachers, Brandy Appling-Jenson and Carolyn Anzia, and one high school teacher, Kathleen González, have adapted Macrorie’s I-Search Paper strategies for their own classrooms. In this chapter, however, I focus on the impact Macrorie’s original text had on my teaching of my initial freshman composition classes at San José State University in the fall of 1987.

Like most college level freshman composition programs, San José State required the completion of a “research paper” as part of every student’s introductory level writing requirements. On the one hand, I understood the rationale for this requirement, since such “academic” writing would be routinely required of students as they moved on to higher level university classes. On the other hand, I was all too aware of the pull my students would feel toward simply “lifting” their material from previously published sources, and was not myself unsympathetic to this pull. It’s one we have all felt to one degree or another, after all, and it’s especially understandable when beginning level college writers are placed in academic environments where they have very little notion of what constitutes authentically compelling academic writing. This dilemma is compounded for beginning level college students, moreover, by the fact that their instructor in a college classroom is often far more knowledgeable about a given topic of research than they are themselves. Wouldn’t it make sense, in such a situation, to “make use” of writing that had already passed muster, so to speak, rather than venturing into the dark and uncharted waters of academic prose on one’s own?

This is where Macrorie’s understanding of what it meant to search, whether for an obscure bit of evidence that might illuminate a larger academic argument or for something as relatively mundane as the best price on a car stereo system, came to the fore. He urged writing instructors to start small, to begin by making such searches interesting and relevant to the lives of one’s students. I can’t recall if Macrorie also suggested a Graffiti Board Gallery Walk to heighten interest in these initial searches, but that’s what I did with my own San José State freshman classes. Everyone wrote down their research question on a large piece of poster paper (with one nervy freshman writing in his, somewhat predictably, “what is the meaning of life?”) and then everyone in the class did a gallery walk past these posters, writing graffiti-like comments on these “Graffiti Boards” if you knew something about the search’s object or if you had a suggestion for the author about how he or she might pursue the search.

The next steps were to “research one’s topic” (which I translated for my students into “find out what you can, over the next few weeks, about the object of your search”) and to keep a running record of the steps one took to move closer to discovering answers to his or her search/research question. At least one interview with one informant was required for the search, and these I customarily prepared for by setting a question for the class as a whole and then bringing in an informant that the class could collectively interview. A further requirement was for a “saturation report,” where the researcher would describe a setting that had come to be significant in his or her search. As with the whole-class interviews with a pre-designated informant, I would generally take the class on a short “field trip” around the building in which the class was being held, and ask everyone to select a setting they found memorable and describe that setting in a way the rest of the class might recognize.

The culmination of the I-Search paper was for students to write a narration of their pursuit of their question, starting with what they knew or didn’t know about their topic; an “argument” that explained to their readers why the question they were pursuing was important to them; the steps they took to learn the answer(s) to their question (including the interview and the saturation report); and a conclusion that summarized what they had learned by the time “the whistle blew” and they had to end their search; and what their next steps might be, should they be fortunate enough to take up this search once again at a later date. Needless to say, issues with plagiarism were simply non-existent with such a rich and compelling experience of “researching” a question of one’s own choosing. What quite surprised me, however, was the vibrancy and liveliness of my students’ voices in the papers they turned in.

I was so impressed with the papers I read that I sent a batch to Macrorie himself, living then in retirement in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He wrote back a month or so later, explaining that it took him some time to read through what I’d sent him and asking me to please send less next time. While he could not fully understand, he went on to write, how my students managed to survive my “barrage” of instructions (I used what I called a “running syllabus” with my students, writing a one page single-spaced narrative anticipating what we would be doing for each successive class), the papers they wrote clearly demonstrated that I must be doing something right. “They are a delight,” he concluded. “So loose in the saddle, so lively, so uncluttered with the usual hogwash of freshman compositions.” I could hardly have asked for a more satisfying recognition of my students’ writing abilities, nor a more compelling argument for the value of re-conceiving the research paper as a authentic quest, placing the student writer at its center.

In focusing on the final founder of writing from the heart, James Moffett, I return to my early days teaching at The Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Delaware, then fast-forward to my final two years teaching the Teachers College course in “Composition for Teachers of English” described earlier. My purpose in doing so is to illustrate the profound influence that the theorists discussed in this chapter have had, and continue to have, on the practice of writing at all levels, and also to illustrate how these theories might be practically applied in actual, concrete teaching situations.

At Tower Hill, I enjoyed and was stimulated by teaching my 12^th graders, but it was my 10^th graders I truly loved. They were at such a volatile and important stage in their intellectual and emotional development, and I came to believe that if I taught wisely I could make a big difference to their lives. What was at issue, to my mind, was whether or not I could persuade my 10^th graders to entertain more than one point of view on a given subject. I used to put it to myself in fairly simple terms: either I will be successful in this endeavor over the course of the year or my students would become . . . Republicans--a segment of the adult Wilmington population that I believed was already far too numerous.

What frustrated me in trying to come up with teaching practices that would serve to jostle my 10^th graders from their often quite strong allegiance to a single pre-determined position was the pervasive influence of the five paragraph theme. As described by Janet Emig in The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, the “Fifty-Star Theme,” as Emig nicknamed the five paragraph theme, was both frustratingly persistent in the secondary level English language arts curriculum and wholly unrelated to any real purpose or practice in the larger world:

Why is the Fifty-Star Theme so tightly lodged in the American composition curriculum? The reason teachers often give is that this essentially redundant form, devoid of content in at least two of its five parts, exists outside their classrooms, and in very high places-- freshman English classes, business communication, and in the “best practices” of the “best writers.” This fantasy is easy to disprove. If one takes a collection of writers who current critical judgment would agree are among our best, can one find a single example of any variation of the Fifty-Star Theme? The answer is no. (97)

I found I could persuade my 10^th graders to “inhabit” a point of view different from their own by engaging them in dramatic re-enactments—a practice I took great pleasure in when I came to teach my unit on Romeo and Juliet--but when my 10^th graders wrote an argumentative or persuasive paper, all the intellectual and emotional suppleness they displayed in their dramatic re-enactments went out the window. Was Friar Lawrence to blame for Romeo and Juliet’s tragic deaths? He certainly was, so argued my 10^th grade students, and here is how we will prove it to you. We will devote our first paragraph to a thesis stating that he was guilty, then we will write three “body” paragraphs in which we will locate details from the play (or more likely from Cliff Notes versions of the play) that support our thesis, and we will finish with a concluding paragraph that reminds you that Friar Lawrence was indeed guilty of the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet. While I found myself, not too surprisingly, assigning more and more dramatic re-enactments and fewer and fewer “persuasive papers” for my 10^th graders as I progressed from my first to my third year of teaching, I never found a satisfactory way of addressing the deeper question of how to dislodge my students, at least in their writing, from the safety and security of their pre-determined positions.

Eight years later, at Teachers College, when I began teaching my “Composition for Teachers of English” course for a third time, I faced a similar but more vexing version of this same “I dare you to challenge my pre-determined opinion” mind-set. My writing course now used both Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1973) and James Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968) as its primary texts, and had become well enough known and highly enough regarded to attract a small but vocal population of TESOL graduate students. “This business of a student-centered approach to writing development is perhaps well and good for English speaking students,” they argued, “but it simply will not work with our ESL adult populations.” These TESOL teachers were quite clear that what their students needed were clearly structured lessons with a strong focus on grammar and conventions. “How are they going to avoid making mistakes in their writing unless we, as their teachers, point these out to them?” they would ask. “And if we were to put this Elbow nonsense to use in our classrooms, all we’d be doing is having the blind lead the blind.”

While I did not think these opinions about the writing development of adult ESL students were necessarily correct, I could not challenge them effectively as a practitioner since my own experience was limited to a single summer’s teaching in Hong Kong in the mid-60s. How might I introduce points of view that gently questioned these quite plausible pedagogical certainties? How might I do so without claiming more than I could reasonably claim on the basis of my own quite limited teaching experience with adult ESL learners?

Conveniently enough, the answer came right from Moffett’s Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Start by understanding how difficult it is, I imagined Moffett suggesting to me, to theorize about best practices in the teaching of writing to ESL adults. To do so convincingly involves not only imagining a large general audience of readers, but also the ability to hypothesize “what could happen” in many future ESL classrooms beyond those in which one has actually taught.

These imagined admonitions came from a theory of discourse that Moffett had been developing since his early years teaching English to high school students at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. As presented in the collection of articles that formed the basis of his book, this theory posited that all acts of written communication could be understood as occurring at one point or another of a “ladder” of increasing abstraction regarding the “distance” between the author and his or her subject on the one hand, or between the author and his or her reader on the other (see Figure 1 below). A writer writing notes to himself or herself about an object or event that was close at hand--“what is happening”--would be engaged in writing that represented the closest possible “distance” between author and both audience and subject. Conversely, a writer presenting a theory about “what might happen” in a periodical designed for a general readership would be engaged in writing that represented the greatest possible “distance” between both subject and audience. It did not take me long to realize, given this perspective on writing an “argumentative” paper, that I was asking my Teachers College TESOL students to write persuasively from something akin to the farthest points “out” in both directions of Moffett’s abstraction ladder: telling “what happens” in adult ESL classes while addressing a wide (although wholly imagined) audience of general readers.

Figure 1: James Moffett’s Ladder of Abstraction*

		I (speaker, writer)

		DRAMA (monologues, journals)
	Self to self Inner verbalization		Recording what IS HAPPENING

	Self to another person (outer verbalization); familiar, trusted audience	NARRATIVE (story)	Reporting what HAD HAPPENED
		NARRATIVE (story)	Reporting what HAD HAPPENED
		EXPOSITION (analysis definition)
	Self to known group; familiar audience		Generalizing WHAT HAPPENS
		ARGUMENTATION
	Self to anonymous group; remote audience		Generalizing and Inferring WHAT WILL, MAY, COULD HAPPEN
YOU (audience)				IT (subject)

Assisted by a sequence of mimeographed writing assignments then circulating among those familiar with Moffett’s work (soon to be published, in 1981, as Active Voice: A Writing Program across the Curriculum), I began to design a cumulative sequence of writing assignments along lines suggested by Moffett’s ladders of abstraction. My professed purpose was to present a practical application of Moffett’s theory of discourse so that everyone in the class could experience this rather complex theory first-hand. My subversive goal, however, was to see if I might unsettle some of the fixed notions of conventional, grammar-oriented writing instruction that were held to so vehemently by my TESOL students.

I started by asking my students to write from the perspective of a speaker on a soapbox in Central Park who was advocating for practices in the teaching of writing that were the opposite of those presently held by the author. What would such a speaker say to defend his or her position? What arguments and examples would such a speaker use to convince his or her listeners of the compelling nature of his or her point of view?

Next, I asked my students to write out a dialogue between this strident soapbox speaker and themselves, toning down the stridency of the speaker’s stance so that the conversation might be civilized and even-tempered.

Third, I asked my students to imagine that the speaker moved upstate so that face-to-face conversation was no longer possible. I advised that the conversation be continued, but this time as an exchange of medium length letters (I suggested four; many students wrote six to eight).

Finally, as this sequence of writing assignments evolved as I taught it for my second and final year at Teachers College, I asked my students to step back and imagine they had just discovered this exchange of letters and had decided to edit them for publication. They would provide a preface in which they told readers something about the backgrounds of the two writers, insofar as they had been able to “unearth” these personal backgrounds in their “research.” They would also say something about the importance of the topic these two letter writers were addressing—a level of importance that led them to decide to publish this consequential exchange of views.

As it turned out, I never did add the final step I had originally envisioned for this sequence: transforming this final “edited exchange of letters” into a formal argumentative essay. I think what we all realized by the time we became “editors” of these two correspondents’ exchange of letters is that the forcefulness of one or another of their opening points of view was far less interesting than what motivated them to adopt their initially antagonistic stances and what led them to engage in extended correspondence with one another. What I do know for sure is that I simply stopped hearing about the “one right way” to teach writing to adult ESL students, or to non-ESL high school students in New York City public schools for that matter, and I did hear a great deal about the “characters” that my students had brought into being as a result of the seriousness with which they assumed their roles as editors. What I would say today is that this particular sequence of writing assignments utilized my 10^th grade students’ ability to “inhabit” the role of someone other than themselves, putting this talent in the service of helping us all to view those holding opinions diametrically opposite to our own with greater understanding and sympathy. And isn’t that what “teaching towards adulthood” is all about? This is the contribution that Moffett helped us realize: we were all teaching writing in a wider “universe of discourse” where our roles were to help our students and ourselves come into greater awareness of our capacities not only as writers but also as more fully developed human beings.

The chapters of Teaching Writing in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice that follow introduce a wide range of teaching practices that have been refined and modified over the years by middle and high school teachers committed, as were these founders of writing from the heart, to the centrality of writing in their English Language Arts curricula and to the potential of each of their students as writers. While the last twelve years, with its emphasis on educational policy focusing exclusively on “accountability” as measured by test scores, have unquestionably been difficult and frustrating times for these teachers, they have each found ways to “make their writing curriculum work for them,” to borrow Tim Gunn’s memorable dictum from Project Runway. Since each of these teachers is also a writer, as well as a colleague with whom I’ve worked directly in one or another of the Invitational Summer Institutes of the San Jose Area Writing Project, they also represent a group about which I’m especially proud. Not only have they found a way to bring their passion for writing and the teaching of writing to their students, they have also found the time, energy and commitment to bring what they have learned to the wider audience of this book’s readers.

References and Resources

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, l987.

Barnes, Douglass; Britton, James; Rosen, Harold. Language, the Learner and the School. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969.

Britton, James. Language and Learning. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970.

Calkins, Lucy. Lessons from a Child. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983.

____________ . Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.

_____________ . Units of Study For Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

College Composition and Communication. Journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. Urbana, IL.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, l973.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.

Giacobbe, Mary Ellen. Talking, Drawing, Writing: Lessons for Our Youngest Writers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2007.

Graves, Donald H. Balancing the Basics: Let Them Write. Ford Foundation, 1978.

______________ . Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1982.

Gray, James. Teachers at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project. National Writing Project, 2000

Macrorie, Ken. Searching Writing. New Jersey: Haydon Book Company, 1980.

____________. The I-Search Paper: Revised Edition of Searching Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1988.

Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, l968.

____________. Active Voice: A Writing Program across the Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1981.

Murray, Donald. A Writer Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition. Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Rief, Linda. Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992.

Romano, Tom. Clearing the Way: Working with Teenage Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987.

* From James Moffett. Active Voice: A Writing Program Across the Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1981.

shelley's ozymandias: an appreciation

2011-11-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

Jim Burke's EC Ning ran a contest last February challenging English teachers to think of a single work of literature--a novel or poem or whatever--they would teach if they could teach only one. Entrants to the contest were asked to write 2000 word essays defending their choice of "the only [book] in the world." Since it's not clear at this point if this contest will ever reach a conclusion, I'm taken the opportunity to post my own entry, on Shelley's Ozymandias, to this quite compelling topic. Here it is:

Reading, Passion, and Decay: an appreciation of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is a singularly appropriate choice for a curriculum devoted to “the only book in the world.” It is a poem that is itself about human achievements, and what does and does not remain behind once the illuminating glow of their initial creation has long since faded away.

Since its publication in the Examiner in January of 1818, however, Shelley’s poem has become so frequently anthologized, so familiar and beloved by readers, that the startling originality of its construction and the boldness of its assertions can easily be overlooked. It will be the purpose of this essay to argue for the seminal value of this remarkable poem by demonstrating some of the ways it achieves its cumulative power and resonance. This essay will go on to suggest, however, that in demonstrating the eventual demise of our most imposing architectural works, Shelley is simultaneously casting doubt on whether our greatest literary works are capable, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet #65 would have us hope, of holding time’s “swift foot back” with the “miracle” of their “black ink.”

First, the poem, from the Oxford University edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

What strikes the reader immediately is how suddenly and abruptly he or she is introduced to this strange “traveller,” and how powerfully this traveler’s tale takes over the poem. After the first two words of the second line, everything that follows is exactly and solely what the traveler tells the narrator. The effect of this economical entry into the poem is to make it seem as if the traveler is declaiming directly not only to the narrator, but also to the reader, and the urgency of the tale he tells is greatly heightened in consequence.

And why should a reader not feel this urgency, given the arresting nature of the image from the desert with which we are presented? Two gigantic “legs of stone,” supporting nothing, rise up from otherwise barren surroundings. A shattered stone head, once part of this imposing colossus, lies “half-sunk” on the sand nearby. And those words! On the pedestal supporting those “trunkless legs,” we read the defiant challenge of the once proud king: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” And we do look, of course through the eyes of the traveler, and what we see is that “nothing beside remains.”

To pay attention, however, solely to the traveler’s vivid image of “that colossal wreck,” and of the “decay” that now surrounds it, is to miss the crucial and quite unexpected force and importance of the poem’s second quatrain. In reading this poem for the first time, one might expect the “turn” in the second quatrain to focus on Ozymandias’s cruelty and heartlessness as a ruler. In fact the statue was originally accompanied by relief sculptures that did just this, depicting “mutilated captives being led away by the king after battle,” according to Diodorus Siculus, the first century Greek traveler whose account Shelley draws on for his poem (see Kenneth Neill Cameron’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose, pg. 497). Rather than using the second quatrain to sustain and deepen our focus on the king, however, Shelley takes us in an unexpected new direction, asking us to consider the crucially important role of the sculptor. It is only because the sculptor was so skilled at “reading” the king’s “passions,” the poem indicates, that he was able to represent these passions so skillfully and forcefully in the statue’s “frown,” “wrinkled lip,” and “sneer of cold command.” Perhaps even more remarkably, the sculptor was able to depict these passions in such a lifelike way that they “survive” in the mind of the traveler, even though the king whose heart “fed” these passions, along with the monuments he hoped would preserve his name, have long since passed away. And based simply on what the poem relates, the sculptor’s skill is of such an high order that these passions are alive to the traveler even though they are represented solely by a colossal sculpted mouth, since the remaining portion of the king’s “visage” is presumably either “half sunk” or “shattered.”

This focus on the role of the sculptor in showing such preternatural skill in “mocking” the king’s passions will occupy the second half of this essay, since it is this focus that lifts the poem from a memento mori to earthly power to a more profound questioning of the lasting nature of any achievement, whether “written” in stone or words.

One of the most important effects of turning the reader’s attention from the king to the sculptor in the second quatrain is make the reader question the authorship of the words on the statue’s pedestal. Because we have just been told that the king’s passions “yet survive” for the traveler because the sculptor “read” them and depicted them so skillfully and forcefully, the reader is artfully and persuasively led to carry this sense of artistic acumen “forward” and to think of the words on the pedestal as also created by the sculptor. The likelihood that one would read the words as self-consciously created with an attention to their verbal resonance, moreover, would have been more apparent to Shelley’s contemporaries than to today’s readers. Shelley’s contemporaries would have recalled that the following words were recorded by Diodorus Siculus (or more likely translated for him by an Egyptian guide, since he would not have been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics): “King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works” (see Timothy Webb’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems for an observation on how this inscription had become familiar enough to Shelley’s contemporaries to have become “an historical commonplace,” p.194).

For those contemporaries who followed the good-natured competition between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, whose parallel sonnet on Ozymandias appeared three weeks later in the same periodical (see Treasury of English Sonnets. Ed. from the Original Sources with Notes and Illustrations, by David M. Main, 1881, as cited in the quite helpful Wikipedia article on this poem), the contrast would have been even more apparent. In Smith the inscription on the pedestal is rendered in the following lines:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone

Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:

“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone

“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand.”

It’s difficult to imagine a Londoner opening The Examiner on February 1, 1818 and reading these rather wooden lines without a smile at their unintentional humor. Conversely, however, the “stamp” that Shelley’s sculptor gave to these initially “lifeless” lines, and by association the contribution of Shelley the poet to the resonance of these lines, would become that much more apparent in the insistent cadences of:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

But the more important question to ask, of course, is why the poet should direct our attention so insistently to the “words,” and perhaps to the sculptor’s role in giving them “life,” as opposed to the architectural “works” that were intended to produce a sense of “despair” in the mighty king’s would-be rivals.

The beginning of an answer to this question, I believe, lies in another “turn” on the reader’s expectations offered earlier in the poem. The actual look on the faces of the statues of Ozymandias (Rameses II) portrayed in the popular Description of the East (1743) by Robert Pococke (see John Rodenbeck’s impressively researched but somewhat pedantic and curmudgeonly January 2004 article “Travelers from an antique land: Shelley's inspiration for ‘Ozymandias’" in http://www.thefreelibrary.com) was nothing at all like the realistic depiction so vividly described in the poem. The illustrations of the “king of kings” in Pococke’s book, portrayed in various stages of disintegration, all had the expression of serene benevolence so familiar to today’s student of nineteenth dynasty Egyptian sculpture. So why might Shelley have wished to present his readers, most of whom would have known that a colossal statue of Rameses was at that very moment on its way from Egypt to England, with such a different type of artistic achievement than the one they would soon observe in the British Museum?

One answer to this puzzle can be found in the way Shelley portrays the nature of the sculptor’s art. He “stamps” the passions of the king on the otherwise “lifeless” stone, and does so with such a careful “reading” of the king’s character, such passion on his own part, that the reality of king’s hubristic emotions “survive” the passage of over twelve hundred years. While the nature of such an artistic achievement is not at all consonant with Egyptian sculpture as it was practiced thirteen centuries before the Christian era, it is quite consonant with another sort of artistic achievement that would have been much closer to home for English readers, as well as being quite close to Shelley’s own deepest sympathies. This artistic achievement would have been the plays of William Shakespeare in general, and the histories and tragedies in particular. These are the works in which one could find the passions of monarchs “stamped” on the “lifeless things” of a book’s pages, and towards which one could turn for assurance that an individual of genius could create something of great power and significance, something that could perhaps “yet survive” the cruel ravages of time. It should perhaps come as no surprise, therefore, that Mary Shelley recounts in her journal that during the final months of 1817, when Shelley composed “Ozymandias,” he was also reading Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello (see David Lee Clark’s “Shelley and Shakespeare,” PMLA, Vol. 54, No. 1, March 1939, pp. 261-287).

In contrast to this hopeful view of the lasting nature of the literary achievement of England’s most accomplished and revered writer, however, stands Shelley’s own deep skepticism as expressed through this poem. Just as the words on the pedestal that initially sound so absolute and resonant to the reader are now swept entirely away, only knowable through the recollections of a first century Greek writer, so “Ozymandias” as a whole puts in question the subtly assertive claim of Shakespeare’s Sonnet #65 that the “wreckful siege of batt’ring days” will destroy the narrator’s love for his young man “unless this miracle have might/That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” In fact the ending lines of Shelley’s poem seem to cry out for such a direct comparison. In the choice of vocabulary for the lines “Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare” there appears to be a rather deliberate evocation of Sonnet #65’s “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea . . . Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays.” Sadly for the reader of Shelley’s poem, however, and perhaps more generally those of us who hope there might be lasting power in our most significant works of literature, there is no “unless” at the end of Shelley’s poem. No miracle. No might. What we have is only the “lone and level sands” which stretch to the limits of our despairing imaginations.

learning from ray bradbury

2011-04-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

The participants in our 2010 Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute met last Saturday for our spring semester follow-up meeting. There were a number of somber comments on the discouraging national climate regarding teachers' competence, the challenges that some in the group had faced recently from their principals, and the recent defunding of the National Writing Project. I thought it an appropriate moment to recall a blog entry I'd written back in July of 2006, when the participants in that summer institute were just about to disband. Here's what I read to the group:

Learning from Ray Bradbury

Leah and others in the summer institute are greatly amused that I wear my sunglasses around my neck each and every day of the summer institute, the earpieces hooked together with a dark green Croakies strap.

"Like, ah, at any moment the sun might burst through the fluorescent lighting of our fourth floor classroom?" Leah looks as if she wants to ask.

Little do they know that I keep my sunglasses at the ready as an homage to our friend Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury has bracketed our summer, beginning with Karen Winchester’s use of "All Summer in a Day" on day two of our participant presentations and ending with Nicola Kennedy's request that we read "The Long Rain" in anticipation of becoming Venusians on the final day of participant presentations.

This was accidental but fortuitous, since Bradbury's stories are about nothing so much as the difficulty of remembering the sun in times of deep, heavy, continuous rain.

Karen Winchester had us do an interesting exercise with "All Summer in a Day." She told us, first, to select one of the symbols we found in the opening paragraphs of the story, and to write down, quickly, the attributes of this symbol. I chose Bradbury's description of the sun as a "coin large enough to buy the world," listing its attributes "monumental," "memorable," "god-like," "overpowering" and "extraordinary." We then selected one of the characters in the story and described that character's attributes. I selected Margot, describing her as "timid," "shy," "an old photograph whitened away," and "ghost-like."

But here's where the activity got interesting. "Now, how would you link the symbol and the character you've selected," Karen asked. "What one sentence would connect the two?"

After some thought, I wrote "Margot held a secret within her: a coin large enough to buy the world." When Karen next asked us to expand our paragraphs into short essays, I wrote:

"Margot has a huge secret within her, a knowledge of a coin large enough to buy the world. This secret is too much for her increasingly frail body to contain. It separates her from her fellow classmates, makes her feel alone and even uncertain whether her knowledge is real or just imagined. Margot's recollection of the sun is like the knowledge we all carry of a world before our birth, a prelapsarian world of expansive plenitude, a world where we were part of a larger whole. It is this prelapsarian knowledge, and the confidence in this knowledge, that the other children--Margot's postlapsarian classmates--must snuff out."

While this seemed a wholly new perception to me at the time, an unexpectedly new way of looking at Margot in particular and "All Summer in as Day" in general, in hindsight it seems to have uncannily foreshadowed the great lesson that Bradbury was, as it were, trying his best to tell us all summer.

"You will have days of educational sunshine in the summer institute,” he was telling us. “You will have many of them; it will seem at times to you as if these days will never end."

"But be wary. These days will end. The joy and camaraderie and great good humor you have shared together these past four weeks will fade, leaving behind only the fleeting smile, the brief nod of the head in pleasant recollection."

"You will experience your return to school in the fall as Margot experienced her exile to Venus: incessant and unrelenting rain, the drum and gush of water, the crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they will seem to you like tidal waves."

"Your fellow teachers will belittle you when you try to tell them what it felt like to be in the sun. 'You're lying,' they will tell you. 'Such a place does not exist. You're making it up.'"

"So follow Nicola and Karen's advice, and follow it now: remember exactly what being in the sun of the summer institute felt like, what it looked like, what it sounded and tasted like. While some of you will doubt, and some will find it too painful to recall, collectively you can remember; and you will."

The challenge of thinking about worldwide poverty

2010-11-09T20:28:00.000-08:00

I'm presently living in the central highlands of Mexico and participating, for a fall semester sabbatical leave from San Jose State, in an intensive Spanish language/homestay program. Our teacher this past month (our third in the language program) asked us to write short compositions each night on topics of significance that she assigned for us. The experience was illuminating for me. I found I could write these short compositions in Spanish (see below), and that their very shortness forced me to write with a sort of vignette-like concision. Here's one I wrote during the next to final week in the program. I'll copy and paste it first in English and then in Spanish. The topic given to us serves as the title of this blog posting. Enjoy!

I'll start with a confession. The reason I did not write this composition yesterday was not just that I did not wake up in time for my alarm clock. It was also the subject itself: it made me feel very apprehensive.

While I do not fully understand why I'm so apprehensive about this issue, I'm pretty clear about some of the reasons, so I'll start with them.

Imagine a 20 year old young man who receives a summer scholarship to teach English in Hong Kong. The scholarship for the plane trip from Boston to Hong Kong includes the opportunity to visit some cities along the way. This young twenty year old decides to visit the cities of Delhi and New Delhi as part of his trip to Hong Kong.

He arrives in New Delhi in mid-June. The air is so moist and the temperature so hot that it’s difficult to breathe. He is staying at a youth hostel in New Delhi to save money, and the hostel has no air conditioning.

He remembers lying in bed at night and feeling the pressure on his chest from the heat and humidity. "Unless I consciously will myself to breathe in and out,” he remembers telling himself in the middle of the night, “I will stop breathing and I will die.”

The next day, traveling by bus and walking to see the Taj Mahal in Delhi, the young man's experience was even more memorable.

It was still hard to keep breathing in the heat and humidity, but now he saw the elderly on the side of the road that had lost the strength to keep going. These elders were lying beside the road. It was clear that they were about to die. "I am only one step away from these ancients," he remembers thinking to himself. "If I decide to give up and lie by the side of the road, I will die. I will be forgotten. I will vanish without a trace."

I was that young man. Even after all these years, I can not forget my sense of closeness to those elderly poor in India, dying by the side the road.

What is the value of my "western" sense of individual importance? Am I not, at a deep and important level, only one step away from those elderly Indian poor?

These are the questions that haunt me when I think about the problem of world-wide poverty. Maybe all we are closer than we like to think to those elderly poor in India. Perhaps our desire to eradicate poverty is just an example of western pride, unable to cope with the essential insignificance of humans as individuals.

Jonathan Lovell

October 2010

El desafío de pensar sobre la pobreza en todo el mundo

Voy a comenzar con una confesión. La razón por la que no escribí esta composición de ayer no fue simplemente que no me desperté a tiempo por mi reloj despertador. También era que el tema en sí, me hacía sentir muy aprensivo.

No entiendo completamente por qué estoy tan aprensivo acerca de este tema. Estoy bastante claro acerca de algunas de las razones, sin embargo, por lo que voy a empezar con ellas.

Imagine que un niño de veinte años recibió una beca de verano para enseñar Inglés en Hong Kong. La beca para el viaje de avión desde Boston a Hong Kong incluye la oportunidad de visitar algunas ciudades a lo largo del camino. Este joven de veinte años de edad decidió visitar las ciudades de Delhi y Nueva Delhi como parte de su viaje a Hong Kong.

Cuando llegó a Nueva Delhi a mediados de junio, el aire era tan húmedo y la temperatura tan caliente que le resultaba difícil respirar. Él se alojaba en el albergue juvenil de Nueva Delhi para ahorrar dinero, y el albergue no tenía aire acondicionado.

Recuerda acostado en su cama durante la noche y sentir en su pecho la presión a la baja del calor y la humedad. "Sin me fuerza de voluntar, de manera consciente, la respiración y aspiración, iba a dejar de respirar y podría morir", recuerda haber me dicho a mi mismo en medio de la noche.

Al día siguiente, viajar en autobús o caminando para ver el Taj Mahal en Delhi, la experiencia del joven fue aún más memorable.

Era tan difícil seguir respirando en el calor y la humedad, pero ahora veía las personas mayores por el lado de la carretera que tenía la fuerza para seguir adelante. Estos ancianos se habían acostado al lado de la carretera. Vi que estaban a punto de morir. "Yo estaba tan sólo un paso de esta gente mayor", él pensó. "Si me decidiera a dormir a un lado de la carretera, yo también moriria. Yo también quiero querría olvidado. Nadie se daría cuenta."

Yo era ese joven. Incluso después de todos estos años, no me puedo quitar de la mente mi sentido de la cercanía a los ancianos pobres de la India, muriendo al lado de la carretera. ¿Cuál es el valor de mi "occidental" sentido de mi importancia individual, si lo soy, a un nivel profundo e importante, tan sólo un paso de estos ancianos pobres?

Esta es la pregunta que me atormenta cuando pienso en el problema de la pobreza en todo el mundo. Tal vez todos estamos más cerca de lo que nos gusta pensar a los ancianos pobres de la India. Tal vez nuestro deseo de erradicar la pobreza es sólo un ejemplo del orgullo occidental, incapaz de hacer frente a la escasa importancia esencial de cualquier individuo.

Jonathan Lovell

Octubre 2010

writing and revelation

2009-08-04T15:24:00.000-07:00

My older daughter Stephanie recently moved from Long Island to Berkeley to work as a Kaiser doctor in the departments of emergency medicine in Vallejo and Vacaville. She and her husband Mike are presently staying in the ground floor apartment of my ex-wife's home in Berkeley -- an apartment I helped to build shortly after we moved to Berkeley 27 years ago, in 1982.

Mike, a carpenter and general contractor, is working on an enlargement of the apartment in exchange for the rent: a sweat equity deal of sorts that seems to be working out reasonably well. But there are issues. A big one has been what to do with the accumulated debris of 28 years of marriage and six moves. All those cardboard boxes in the basement! Some of them unopened since 1976, when my ex-wife Margaretta and I moved from East Haven to New Haven as I was completing my fourth year of graduate studies at Yale University.

A compromise had been reached, I'd learned. Steph and Mike would tackle the job bird by bird. They'd open a few boxes, examine the contents, consult with Margaretta, decide what to keep, what to discard, and what to recycle, then move on to the next few boxes.

One of these initial boxes, however, was opened, closed, and put aside. Its moving label read "Home Office. Books. His." Steph called me to ask if I might pick up the box as part of my upcoming trip to bring my "lobster pod" to Alameda Island. Why not?

After I'd dropped off my boat at Soren Hansen's Woodcraft shop, and we'd had lunch at the Little House Café around the corner from Soren's boatbuilding operation, we headed up towards the Berkeley hills to retrieve my box. Mike, mindful of my weak lower back, hefted the box into the back of my car. I'd had no occasion, therefore, to examine its contents until later that afternoon, when I arrived back in San Jose and brought the box into our living room.

The first items surprised and amused me: the subfusc gown -- a black vest really -- that I wore as a graduate student at Oxford when attending tutorials, a cute picture of me at about age five, a somewhat disorienting picture of my dad at a younger age, looking for all the world like a young girl, a college T-shirt, and my college BA diploma.

Then came the books. As soon as I saw the top one I knew exactly what they were. The red cover with the words "poems," "ballads" and "sonnets"; and as one opened the cover, the oval lithograph of the poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with his large expanse of forehead, short beard and mustache, left hand holding a felt hat tipped provocatively "open" to the viewer, right clutching his dun colored vest, and deeply inset dark eyes looking menacingly out at me.

I was back, almost instantly, to New Haven in the summer of 1979. Rossetti's "Poems, Ballads and Sonnets" were sitting on the high drafting table I used for a desk, and I was reading over a chapter of my dissertation that I'd written the previous summer. Even with my kindest critical eye, I could tell it was painfully convoluted and overwrought: a prime example of what Oxford's Dame Helen Gardner called the "lemon squeezer" school of literary interpretation.

The house was quiet. Stephanie and her mother were abroad on a research trip to Paris and Venice. My younger daughter Holly was at a summer kindergarten program just a few blocks north from our New Haven home.

My feeling in looking over my work of the previous summer, and reading over the poems that would serve as the focus of my next chapter, was of overwhelming nausea. As a poet and as a man, Rossetti was difficult to like. He was self-absorbed, obsessive, demanding of others' attention, given to long bouts of depression. His poetry seemed to me to reflect these qualities; it had a hot-house quality to it that I found particularly distasteful, requiring a degree of willingness to be drawn into the poet's lushly overwrought interiors. I did not wish to be drawn further into this world, either by Rossetti's poems or by his equally lush and overwrought paintings. So what in the world was I doing writing a dissertation on the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti?

What compounded my problems were the consequences of not finishing my dissertation. I'd just finished my second year on the faculty at Teachers College (Columbia University's graduate school of education) and I loved what I was doing in the related fields of English Education and Composition Studies. If I did not finish my dissertation this summer, or at the very least make significant progress on it, I could say goodbye to my Teachers College position, and for all I knew any future at all in higher education.

These problems were of course further complicated by my back and forth movement over the past two years between teaching English Education classes at Teachers College during the school year, then returning each summer to the very different set of questions and problems posed by my dark-eyed poet/painter. How could I possibly find something worth writing about in the works of this little known Victorian artist, when my heart was increasingly drawn to the compelling issues faced by teachers at the secondary and college levels in the field of English Education?

My day-to-day strategy for coping with my sense of distress was simple and satisfying. As soon as I completed a page of writing, I'd go out and shoot hoops in our backyard. I was getting some work done, very slowly, and my shooting percentage was certainly improving, but I could not help but feel the hoops were slowly gaining the upper hand.

I was spending one hot and muggy summer morning gazing out at my backyard, thinking that perhaps this morning the hoops should precede the writing, when I chanced to pick up a book I'd read, rather cursorily, a number of years earlier. It was a study of Shelley's mythmaking, written by one of my teachers at Yale, Harold Bloom. It had grown out of his own dissertation on this subject, also completed at Yale University. For some reason the passage that caught my eye was a discussion of Shelley's "To a Skylark." I was familiar with its opening stanzas, as it was a favorite with anthologists of my parent's generation:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

It's vitally important, Bloom argued, to pay attention to the fact that the distance between the poet-narrator and the skylark is dramatically increasing with each successive stanza. In fact the bird has already soared so high before the poem begins that the poet can no longer see it, but only hear the "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" with which it sings. With each succeeding stanza, therefore, the poet must refine his capacity to hear, must re-train his ear to detect, the ever-receding melodies of the bird's unpremeditated song. To put it simply, the ceaseless soaring of the skylark is inextricably linked, for the poet, to the appeal of its "full hearted" song.

And to put my own response to Bloom's argument equally simply: I'd never thought of looking at the role of the poet, or more generally of voice and inspiration, in quite this way. That we start by hearing an already distant air, and as we strain to hear its glad-hearted melodies, it is already growing getting more and more distant from us, soaring away from us we labor to hear its song. The speed of that skylark's flight, and the fact that it was flying upwards and away from the poet, even as the poet was attempting to capture and remember its song, presented a riveting and arresting picture for me of what Shelley was up to in many of his poems.

And then I realized, quite suddenly and with a degree of comprehension that I find difficult to account for even today, that this was what Rossetti was up to in virtually all of his.

It was a single moment, really, and of course I went on to write and re-write many subsequent pages and chapters, and to shoot many hoops, before I completed my dissertation the following summer. But it's as if I'd been given a gift, wholly unlooked for and in a sense wholly undeserved. As a result of this gift, I was able to see everything that in my previous study of my menacing-looking poet-painter had been vexing and harassing in an entirely new light. I experienced the writing of my final chapters as something pleasurable, something I looked forward to, something that I knew I could do with integrity and even with occasional insight.

So what might we make of this story of writing and revelation, of perseverance well beyond the bounds of logic or probable success? I would suggest the following moral. That what we experience when we write is quite like listening for the full-throated, glad-hearted sound of that skylark. As I've discovered from co-directing a great many summer institutes, and being a full participant in two, we start by hearing only the dimmest echoes of our colleagues' and our own voices. But with a day-by-day training of our ears, and a growing faith that each of our colleagues, as well as ourselves, does indeed have a voice to be heard, we begin to hear them. And it's this very faith that helps to transform the hesitant whispers of those initial days into the full-throated howl of the final days of a summer institute.

As Shelley reminds us in the concluding lines of his poem, what we learn over the days and weeks of the summer institute is that our colleagues, like the skylark, will "teach [us] half the gladness" that their "brain[s] must know." And that with this knowledge and heart, such "harmonious madness" from our own "lips [will] flow," the world will "listen then," just as we are "listening . . . now."

responses to TKAM workshop

2008-11-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

As those who attended the workshop I just gave with Jay Richards at the NCTE Conference will know, I'm attaching here, as promised, the responses of the K-College teachers who attended the Summer O8 Invitational Summer Institute of the San Jose Area Writing Project. The entire collection of vignettes that I use for this workshop (on Dill Harris, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson) can be found by visiting my entry entitled "TKAM at NCTE in NYC." Our Writng Project Tech Liaison also tells me that we an post Jay's PowerPoint on our SJAWP website and then I'll be able to link to it on this blog. So stay tuned. Now here are the responses:

Responses of the participants in ISI 08 to TKAM workshop

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for a very interesting lesson this morning. Trying to develop a character analysis in ten minutes was frustrating, even frantic, and I’m not surprised that high school students resent that activity. Still, after reflecting on the experience and “walking in students’ shoes,” I had perspectives on their experiences that I hadn’t expected to encounter.

For one, I felt admiration for high school students, and not necessarily honors, who tackle such tasks routinely. True, they want to succeed and pleasing a teacher is primarily how they try, but writing on command is a daunting task and still they take it on. I also felt great empathy and respect for English Language Learners who wrestle such tasks to the ground in efforts to succeed. I imagine the staggering difficulties that ELLs, especially those newly arrived, have in trying to understand the character of someone like Mayella Ewell let alone writing about it. Still, they try.

Tragically, aliteracy often begins in second-grade when young children are forced through lock-step pacing calendars, benchmark exams and stories not of their choosing or interest. Children who read successfully often choose not to because they associate reading with tests. Still, at the core, I believe that both elementary and high school students are asking the same essential question: “Why should I care about this story and/or character? (aside from trying to get the teacher off my back!) Today’s role play helped to answer that question as I asked, “Why should I care about Mayella Ewell? I don’t like what she does, and she wouldn’t be my friend!”

Strangely, shockingly during the role play I fell into her character very easily. What we shared was not entirely clear, and I certainly didn’t agree with her, but I knew her well. What a surprise that was! Still, making that connection with Mayella helped me to grow both as a reader and a person. “What is in all people is in me,” it has been said. Role play in particular enables children, young and old, to use what they know very well--social relationships-to access the characters and ideas of the stories or novels. The various combined activities give students avenues to access the ideas that will help them grow.

One last recollection. Years ago in an evening credential class, it was my task to teach Nancy Atwell’s In the Middle. To do that, I had brought in a box of books of YA literature to replicate Atwell’s “dinner party” approach to reading workshop. Suddenly, these groggy teachers came alive! Eyes gleaming as they excitedly riffled through pages of beloved books long forgotten, they furtively asked to borrow “their favorite books” to read over the week. (I’ve since come to learn that many teachers are aliterate.) Atwell addresses the issues of aliteracy as middle/high school students are consumed by innumerable issues that keep them from reading. Still, teachers had not forgotten the books that made them feel alive. This is all to say that children WANT to read. They just don’t know why. Application of lessons such as today’s help them see. Thank you for some great strategies! Constance Bruinsma-Kelly

Dear Jonathan:

Thank you for a wonderful workshop. I feel that engaging students with visual and auditory aids to enhance their reading experience, and in turn making them write well is a great idea. We always emphasize the importance of “show; don’t tell” in our classroom, and this is a perfect example. I will certainly be using this technique on a more advanced level in my English Composition courses next semester.

My character is Mayella, and since I read To Kill a Mocking Bird a long time ago, I have to rely on the excerpt and my instincts to write my initial response or character analysis. Mayella seems to be a typical teenager at first. She is poor but has an aesthetic sense that she cultivates. Caring for the geraniums shows her softer side. Mayella also comes across as a vulnerable but outspoken girl. She speaks her mind but is just an insecure little girl inside. Mayella is loyal to her father who has a hold on her. She is scared of him and to cover her fear, she is angry and furious.

This is as far as I got on the first attempt. After having worked my way through the workshop, I gained further insight into Mayella’s character. She is not just any teenager. At age nineteen, she is an extremely complex human being. She has to take care of her siblings and live in fear of her abusive, tee totaling father. Love and tenderness are sorely lacking in her life. I agree that there is a flaw in her personality. She has no integrity and she lies to frame Tom, a good and kind hearted man. Can we really understand what is going on in her mind? What are her values and morals? Is she raised with any? How can we be righteous and pass judgment on her?

Beneath the hard exterior, we see some level of tenderness in Mayella. She looks after her “red geraniums.” They are “cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson.” Mayella loves her geraniums and nurtures them because they do not want anything in return. This is one aspect of her personality. In the courtroom, we see a distraught Mayella. She is vulnerable and insecure inside. She responds to Atticus’s questions with outbursts and eventually silence. She knows the consequence of incriminating Tom, but is willing to take that chance because she is pressured by society. In the end, she saves herself. Can we blame her for that? Mayella is selfish; she sacrifices Tom to save face, but her behavior is nothing but a true reflection of human nature at its darkest. Roohi Vora

Dr. Lovell,

It’s been a number of years since I’ve read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom Robinson’s character exudes kindness, gentleness, even tenderheartedness and he’s simply a fascinating character to study. I couldn’t help compare his daily reality of victimization and marginalization to that of most Afghan women. The latter is fresh on my mind after having reread The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. Both Tom and Afghan women have limited value in the eyes of their communities and have little or no voice. To speak up would mean certain punishment and perhaps death.

I found the first reading of the TR excerpt to be similar to that of reading a poem for the first time. For me, the first reading reintroduced the character and each of the subsequent activities added a deeper level of understanding. Interestingly, the most helpful activity was listening to the audiotape as it made the sections of dialogue, in particular, more real. I can see how helpful this creative process of adding layers of understanding would be to my students. Trish Murray

Dear Jonathan,

Today's workshop had a cumulative effect on my characterization comprehension. I'm one of those students who wasn't against reading a selection and responding in paragraph form, nor was I one hundred percent for the timed writing/comprehension assignment. I certainly was willing to try the assignment, trusting that the outcome would be interesting or perhaps it would be a lesson on how I could improve. I was right on both predictions of the result.

My initial paragraph was a quick-write without much depth. It truly was a description matching the paragraph of Dill's personality. Digging deeper, to write about Dill, wasn't possible. In fact it wasn't possible until I had discussed the possibilities of the character, designed metaphor symbols, drawn them and participated in the role play. I learned that Dill was a deeply designed character, rich with metaphoric qualities. As a learner, I am primarily visual. I need to attach metaphors to most literary analyses in order to deeply understand. This approach to learning would match Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theories.

Here are my pre and post writings that reflect the above explanations:

Pre-write: Dill, a summer visitor, to Maycomb was from Mississippi. He brought with him a sensitive approach to dealing with people. His family provided the necessary things he needed, yet he felt emotionally neglected by his parents. His self image was projected as a shy, humble individual. As he had not been nurtured, he projected an overly sensitive approach to his interaction with people, even complete strangers. Generally speaking, his personality seemed puzzling to his closes friend Scout.

Post-write (continuing from the above): Dill could be metaphorically represented as a bird with a broken wing wearing a purple heart halo, crying. Symbolically Dill's broke bird wing represents his ill-equipped approach to flight through life. The purple heart shows the embattled sensitivity due to his neglectful background. The tears reflect his sensitive cry for fairness toward people. Dill is not aware of the cultural black versus white prejudices that exist during his lifetime. He seems to act, naively, as the conscience of right versus wrong. Perhaps his own lack of family nurturing created a searching, longing for a feeling of acceptance. It could be that his sensitivity radar crosses all lines of racial social etiquette at the height of black/white racism. his character represents the needed balance of characterization within the plot. Thanks for an insightful look into characterization. I truly enjoyed it! Julie Jenkins

Hi Jonathsn,

In response to the HW prompts, here are my thoughts after your workshop. In the pre-writng activity, I pegged Tom as a sitting duck, a target, a victim of circumstance due to the setting of the novel. I tried to process and write all of the information fast, as we were restricted on time. After participating in the several activities leading up to the post write, I really began to see that Tom's geneoristy, kindeness, and honesty is what ironically hurt him. How dare a black man feel sorry for a poor, white girl! It was his humanity which worked against him.

As I reflect on the sequence of events, I felt that you started with a broad topic and really narrowed in or "zoomed in", helping us to truly focus on the character. (It all comes back to zoom!) We did an initial read and then wrote about our character. It was rushed, very broad, and I really wasn't sure wanted you wanted. Do I integrate and use blended quotes? Was this a test for me to use what we had previously learned? The Cumulative Graphic Organizer, started to focus our attention on the dynamics of the courtroom scene. This also helped us to look at the other key players in the scene. The character received a face, a voice, and became human. Next, moving into our character groups, we really started to hone in on this character that we read about and watched in the film. As we discussed our central symbol and various personal symbols, I learned that this is an individual with only a kind heart who has nothing bad to say about Mayella and answers honestly while trying not to hurt her feelings or calling her a blatant liar. He has accepted his place in society. During the gallery walk, we had a further chance to get into the skin of Tom as we shared our poster and listened to the perspectives of the other Tom group. We were analyzing him from the outside in. During the role play, we literally got into the character's skin. It was a good way to test our knowledge and share with our peers. I felt more empathy for Tom as I became him. I thought like him; heck I even tried to talk like him. After listening to the vignettes, we were able to do a partial second read of Tom, where I caught things I glossed over the first time. By the post write, I felt that I truly understood this character. He was an abstract painting from afar, but as I "zoomed in", I was able to see the brush strokes, the writer's ink which created the essence of Tom. See you tomorrow. Tara Holcomb

Dear Jonathan,

Today I learned that Mayella Ewell, my character of study from To Kill a Mockingbird, was no lady. She was a victim, a fighter, a survivor, and a bully. Abused, impoverished, and trapped by her role as a woman and the oldest child in the bleakest of scenarios, she scrounges for what little power she can seize within her existence. Mayella’s world is loaded with injustice and abuse. What coping skills could she know for survival? In her loneliness and helplessness, she chooses her victim, Tom Robinson, to project onto her own inner turmoil. Living in the deep South before the Civil Rights Movement, an isolated black man is an easy target for Mayella to use psychologically for working through her own loneliness and sexuality, her feelings of helplessness in a dire situation, and her fear of an abusive father. Tom becomes her scapegoat, her relief. When he is there, she feels powerful over someone.
And why should she care what happens to him? No one seems to care what happens to her! In the trial, she screams out in desperation and anger, wanting someone to care more about her than the black man. Her ego desperately needs to pull rank. To her it doesn’t matter if it isn’t fair. Since when has she seen any justice given to her? This neglected, broken girl is starving for recognition that she matters, that she is not the same as the trash that she lives in. She is the vulnerable geranium in the garbage dump and there is hope in her if only someone, anyone would take the time to care for her. Tom is the only one who takes that time, so in her desperation, she takes advantage of his vulnerability, publicly humiliates him, falsely accuses him of her own sins, and feels justified in her anger.
During this workshop time, I learned that I can learn almost anything in almost any modality. However, if I am given the opportunity to learn in every modality, the knowledge acquired becomes engrained. I also learned that I get frustrated with a common learning attitude of “just do what’s required,” and the excuse, “I can’t do that, I wasn’t born with the talent.” It makes me want to scream, “well, you might be able to if you just took the time to practice it!” I take great pride in my work, and I rarely do anything half-ass. I wasn’t born with talent, only potential. The only time I do something half-ass is when something major interferes. I can’t even relate to keeping things casual and simple. Seems lazy, bland, and offensive to me, like the people involved aren’t worth the time or effort. I’m driven, and I care. I want the whole experience without missing a beat. The whole sha-bang. And I think that generally people don’t try hard enough. There is nothing I respect more than a learner who tries hard and has a positive attitude. I don’t know why.
Yet, I generally don’t voice that opinion, because I also think it’s rude and offensive. But that’s often the way I feel inside. That drive makes me want to take charge and do assignments individually. Realistically, most work in life requires a team. So I have a whole set of inner mantras that I tell myself during group work so that I refrain from monopolizing activities, overwhelming others, or the worst, having someone think that I am better than someone else, a show-off, or hoggish. I hate those assumptions and accusations! I’m just trying my best, and that’s all. I’m not trying to make anyone else feel bad or intimidated or competed against or overwhelmed or miffed in any way. I’m really a nice person, and as a learner, I’m an intense, passionate, voracious tiger. Just know that about me. Thanks for asking, Laura Cain

Dear Dr. Lovell,

I really love Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and I really enjoyed your workshop today. My assigned character was Dill Harris and when I started I wrote a half a page response that was very “scientific.” I took Dill and explained all the aspects of his personality and character that I gathered from the passages you assigned, but the response did not elicit much empathy for him.

I really think the activity with the posters and the role play activity is a fabulous method for students (and teachers!) to gain further insights into the characters being studied and to help us gain more empathy for the character we've been assigned. I really felt far more compassionate toward Dill after completing the sequence of activities that you had us go through. I know it’s because the activities had me metaphorically walk in Dill's shoes, as Atticus Finch tells Scout near the beginning of the novel. My second attempt at a character response was more than double the length of my first and it was far more empathetic and in depth and I am proud of it!

I know that I am a learner who appreciates both visual and audio cues and also appreciates the occasional kinesthetic activity to get me moving around, which was provided when we did the poster and gallery walk. I had seen your presentation previously when I was your student in the Methods class for the credential program, and I want you to know that I use your cumulative graphic organizer when I teach TKAM and it really helps to set up the courtroom scene for the students and I want to thank you for that excellent idea. Thank you for your presentation! It was even better the second time around :-) Sincerely, Jeanette Craff

Dear Jonathan,

My first take on Dill was extremely limited because I was putting up the metaphor posters, the non-linguistic representations, made by previous workshop participants. So I skimmed the text excerpts very rapidly. I did manage to link some attributes of Dill’s dreaminess with my own vibrant inner life as a kid. I got his sensitivity as well as his story-telling acumen.

What changed my understanding the most, however, consisted in two things. The first was the very articulate conversations my team group made over what central metaphor to create for our poster. I felt as if I were meeting a real person, unlike the bits of information that were strewn in my head from a quick-read and an attempt to summon memory from other workshop experiences. We had, alas, little visual of Dill from the movie. . I could relate to the childhood journey into fantasy when the parents and home life aren’t connected with the child.

The second piece that brought Dill more to life in my understanding was the tidbit that Jonathan explained about the author, Harper Lee, having used Truman Capote (whom she knew in childhood and as an adult author) to create the character of Dill. Such an enigmatic character – Dill the curiosity—became my acquaintance when I remembered the movie “Capote” I saw several years ago. My understanding of Dill shifted from my own southern upbringing experience of the racism to the quandary Truman presents in his autobiographical film. “Ah haa!” I thought. I’d say he’s a genuine eccentric, not just a curiosity. In any case, the boy Dill in TKAM became more accessible to me as a result.

So, do I really I learn more from movies and visual arts than reading? Maybe. Maybe it is the combination that is so effective. I observed how much more acutely-formed my own images were while listening to the reader on tape. Her phrasing and intonation was beautiful. I am reminded of the true power of a good read aloud.

Thank you for the carefully crafted, explicit roles and tasks for us. You already know how impressed I am with cumulative graphic organizers, and today, I realized I could actually do a literature experience like this with fifth graders, with the right novel. Laura Brown

Dear Jonathan,

I really enjoyed your presentation today. I think I really missed discussing a character in a classroom setting, with me as a student. It reminded me of the MA years when, pencil in hand (a habit I still have), I would read closely and carefully, trying to understand the characters in the fictional works we were assigned. Today, with your help and the help of my colleagues, I had the opportunity to discover Dill. The first things I noticed when reading the excerpt from Harper Lee's novel were his otherness, his vulnerability, his acute need for a family and for friends, and also the richness of his interior life. Working in groups and constructing the poster got us all closer to the character and made us speculate about his role. We felt quite satisfied with the results of our twenty minute contest with pens, pencils, markers and erasers, and gladly shared our finished visual symbol character poster with our other Dill group. Having us listen to a reading of the excerpt was, I think, a very useful technique. The narrator was successful in creating a certain atmosphere that may be difficult to perceive at a first glance. The stress she placed on certain words when describing Dill, the change in accent when Dill speaks with Jem and Scout, Dill's faltering voice when questioned about his father, all made the text come alive, drawing the reader into the story. I think the role play was not my forte, but it was a useful exercise in that it made me try to see the world through his eyes, and ultimately understand him better. Thank you for a really great workshop! Sincerely, Oana Melnic

Dear Jonathan,

When I read Mayella initially, my first thoughts were that she was extremely poor, defensive, and had a sense of despair. She also had a chip on her shoulder, yet as I read the excerpts I felt that this “chip” was warranted. Her family life was full of hardship. She had an alcoholic father, who probably beat her and raped her, a man that has robbed her of basic parental gifts (love, compassion, protection, guidance, etc.). She had no friends and I thought a part of her viewed Tom as a friend. She liked that someone in the world actually cared for her and subsequently took care of her, even if it was her who asked him to complete various odd jobs around her home. The slop jars holding the “brilliant red geraniums” appeared to be a symbol of hope, amongst all the garbage there was something of value. In my initial character analysis, I wrote that these were a symbol of the vulnerability in the character. After all they were the only thing of beauty in a yard full of random collectibles. These were a small positive gleam of hope and the one thing that she could truly call all her own.

The beginning activity was terrifying for me. A timed reading and writing assignment: was I back in high school taking standardized tests? Did I step into a time machine? Would I be in the blue birds or red robins? Being a product of an At Risk study done in the 1980s, I have developed serious test anxiety, which had lain dormant for the last 2 years until today.

After going through your workshop, Mayella became more alive. She was not just some poor defensive girl: she had strength and courage. While she might not have protected Tom, she continued to live in an environment that was rotting her internally and hurting her physically. It was interesting to hear my group’s perception of her because while we had all read the same material, our personal schemes affected our view of the material. The text-to-self drawings are a strategy I plan on using during the school year.

All the activities, TKAM movie, active group work with the graphic organizer, listening to the book on tape; I realized once again that I truly am a visual and auditory learner. Actually, I think all three learning styles (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) are important in my learning; hence I try to incorporate them into my lessons. The series of activities (movie, poster, role play) all served their purpose of “getting to know” the character, which assisted me in my post-analysis writing. Using a variety of mediums to engage us “the students” reminded me that I need to stay on my toes when it comes to engaging my students. After experiencing these workshops, I realize this has been the missing link in my professional development. Super Saturdays here I come! Breanne Romano

Dear Jonathan,

I have read To Kill A Mockingbird approximately 30 times. Of course we focus on Mayella and Tom, but I've never focused that much on Dill. After really discussing who this little boy is, what struck me was how much Dill is the conscience of the town, how much perspective he lends to the text, and how he is the only impartial observer in the book. I also never thought about why Dill might not be touched so much by the institutionalized racism that touches all the other Maycombians. (Even Scout, who should know better, is numb to the bad treatment of Tom by Mr. Gilmer). It came out in the role playing when I was playing Dill that one of the reasons for this is that he is so immersed in the fantasy world that he escapes to, that reality doesn't affect him like it does others.

The role playing was something that I've never really done myself, but our role playing really worked. In fact, I was actually getting uncomfortable when the person who was playing Tom was grilling Mayella and I was getting defensive when Tom was asking me what I was so upset about because I had a way better life than he or Mayella did. I guess the most important thing that I took away from that is that I need to keep an open mind about different ways that I can learn. I always look for ways to diversify for my students, but when it comes to my own learning, I tend to only stick to what I think works. I'm definitely a believer in role playing now. Dawn Nelson

Jonathan,

I think you need to know some background about me. I am embarrassed to admit it, and I am not sure if I should really tell you this information, I never read To Kill a Mockingbird. What a tragedy. I have seen the movie several times, does that count? And while I am being honest, I also think that in high school I may have been one of the aliterate students. I read the required text, but I never read more than I needed. It was not until my adult life that I realized that I loved to read. Okay, don't spread the news, I am not proud to admit it.

Though the eyes of a new reader to the book: when you began today I was completely turned off to just reading and then responding. I could do it, yet the response was labored and dry. I felt like after we saw the video clip that I was especially tuned into my character. This idea was brilliant to me. Show a bit of the movie, who would have thought. WOW! After this I really understood the character. I learned from this experience and from the collaboration of others. When we did the posters and talked about what picture we would do in the middle, the character became clearer. I reluctantly did the role play. I explained to my group that usually when role play comes it is my cue to use the bathroom. Well I will admit it, the role playing was very powerful. I dreaded the whole 5 minutes I was in the hot seat. After all the activities my second draft was 100% better than the first. I could relate to my character in a far deeper way than I could in the beginning.

I was especially impressed by the way you front loaded the book. I have always just began with a picture walk or maybe just a quick tell of what the story was about. The way that you front loaded the book was also a way to get the students excited about the book and understand the characters. I bet this strategy leads the students to want to know what happens next. It made me want to read the book. It also helps those students that have a hard time making mental images as they read. I can't wait to use these ideas in my readers workshop. I was also thinking that these same strategies can be used for my read alouds, such as James and the Giant Peach. I really think that the 2nd graders would enjoy making the posters and maybe role playing, we will see how brave I get. I also may tweak the ideas and use them for book groups and complex group instruction. Thank you for the ideas. Amy Ayalla

Jonathan,

First, I have to admit that I have not read the examples at the back of the packet. I find that often, I am an imitator, rather than an original thinker, and I would like to present you with a genuine me.

Mayella as a character has always angered me. I have always accepted that she is he unfortunate victim of an unfair dealing of life's cards. It has always seemed to me that, despite her situation, she is supposed to be the hope for her siblings. Her ability to read and write, her ability to cope, should be the way to save her family from itself. As the oldest, she should have felt the responsibility to her siblings that I feel: nothing is asking too much. Mayella seemed to me to lack what I consider a natural "mother bear" instinct toward the Ewell brood. For this, I have always privately condemned her.

After your seminar today, I am able to see Mayella in a new light. During the gallery walk, I quietly held my peace. No one likes someone who dislikes Mayella. I wasn't until the role play that I felt blind-sided by compassion. In answering questions from a very thoughtful Tom (played by Melanie) I became Mayella. I was quiet. I didn't want to answer the questions, though I knew the answers. The answers said that I was going along with my father because it was the only way to protect my siblings. Like the slop pots that hold the geraniums, I had to be degraded and dirty to allow my siblings the chance to flourish.

I will not bother typing my final draft here, but in rereading the opening for Mayella, I came upon a whole new approach to my essay. Harper Lee includes so many words that evoke a prisoner, finally presenting Mayella as the prisoner with the last words of the passage -- her care of the geraniums and her siblings. I was stunned that I have missed it for so many years, including the 2 that I taught the book!

As an individual who functions through emotion first, and rationale second, this experience with Mayella has fundamentally changed the way I will approach literature with my students. In the course of our race towards the CST, we often forget that what matters the most is the connection between readers and characters. To have empathy. To share their joys and sorrows in such a way that, while reading like Luther, alone and silent, we laugh out loud and reach for our Kleenex to stop the tears. Exercises like the ones presented today gave me new ways to connect my students to literature in the same ways that I do! Thank you for your passion, your wisdom, and your inspiration. Authentically yours, Brandy Appling-Jensen

Dear Jonathan,

I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation on To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it was the second time around. Although I had listened to and participated in this well-planned and executed workshop in your methods class, I found new insights and usable techniques in your presentation. It does grow on one. Now that I'm out of middle school and heading towards high school, I might actually get to teach TKAM (but of course the learning from your workshop can apply to introducing any literature we might assign to --what was it?-- aliterate student populations.

As evidence of my learning today, I've typed up below and am sending you my analysis (redux) of "my" character from TKAM, Tom Robinson. Despite Nancy and Laura's frequent admonishments to "save all your drafts," I did not save that first pathetic "timed" attempt from the beginning of the workshop. At any rate, reading this new and improved version should reveal much of what I learned from the workshop, and also what I hope to do to "re-mediate" students needing more effective verbal/visual introductions to required (and desirable) texts.

"Tom's Character" (post-workshop Enlightenment Version)

Tom the dignified African-American. Tom the tireless worker. Tom the dedicated husband and family man. Tom the object of a confused, oppressed white girl's desire. Tom the accused rapist. Tom the victim of prejudice and injustice. Tom the symbol of the potential-and pitfalls- of the American dream.

At this point in our exploration of the novel TKAM, Tom is all of these things, and more. We saw over ten different representations of this deceptively simple man drawn on our group posters. We also discovered that Tom the character does not exist in isolation, and chameleon-like, he changes as viewed and experienced by other people, as revealed in our role play exercise. For on thing, he represents the injustice and irrationality that makes Dill feel sick. He is also both a magnet for poor, lonely Mayella and the cause of her subsequent deceit and self-abasement. These layers upon layers of all the characters, and especially Tom, were made painfully clear in the video segment of the trial scene from the novel. The audio tape we listened revealed even more about Tom: he had run afoul of the law once before, but was punished more severely than a co-lawbreaker simply because he couldn't pay his way out of trouble. Tom is a such a paradox: both his own best friend and worst enemy. His overall goodness and honesty, his naivete about the world in which he lives, have landed him in this court of law, falsely accused, and apparently doomed.

If not for the color of his skin, and his circumstances living in a repressive small Southern town, or if he had ignored his good heart and walked on by Mayella's house that day (and the many before it), he might be a teacher sitting among us today. Tom Robinson could also be the CEO of a multi-natonal corporation. He might even be running for president of the United States. Instead, in this novel, he is trapped in a witness chair in a hostile courtroom, sweating as he tries to tell his side of the story, and listening to everyone except Atticus turn all his words against him. His fate appears sealed, and it is not a good one. He is an outsider that not even any of the town's other outsiders are capable of saving. But without all of these other insider and outsider presences in the courtroom, and their individual stories and interactions, Tom would not be a real character we can empathize with or learn from. That is what we learned from this lesson, and what will keep us reading, because we know what is going on, and we care what happens to people like Tom. Thanks again, Barbara Saxton

Jonathan -

Okay, it's 6:20 AM and I'm just beginning to write this. I'm sorry. As you remember, I've seen this presentation before, but I still had a good time walking through the steps. Since I saw it the first time in Methods, I've used the overhead/audio reading when I could borrow the audio from Sharon Leach. I find that the students, especially my slower readers, react to pre-recorded audio well because it takes the burden of making meaning of the complex sentences and all of the phrasing. Cissy Spacek'S already done the chunking for them, so there's nothing left for them to do but listen and create a visual in their heads. I'm surprised every year by how many kids can't or don't get visual images in their minds as they read, and I know that this strategy is one that allows them to do so more readily.

Although I normally feel like a hot shot whenever someone uses TKAM for their presentation (I've read it so many times, I've read so many teacher articles about it, I've seen so many lesson plans about it), I still learn things about the characters each time. I think I did have Mayella last time, and I did this time, too, but that doesn't mean I didn't deepen my understanding of her. I knew all of the things that we talked about Mayella during the presentation, but I don't remember the sheer hopelessness of things without saying it out loud.

I'm not going to share my writing with you either pre or post because, frankly, it's terrible. It's been a long time since I've written a response to lit, and that's something I've taken away from all of these presentations. Although I often write an opening paragraph or follow along with the students privately, I guess I need to carve out time to complete my own homework. Another way to build empathy. Debbie Navratil

Jonathan,

I enjoyed your workshop today (or now yesterday as I've stayed up all night indulging my perfectionist tendencies in the finalization of my workshop presentation and am just now getting to sending you this e-mail). I particularly like the term "aliterate" - it describes those uninterested students perfectly. I could definitely see how the interactive activities you presented could help engage those students. I was certainly engaged during the activities. I thought the opening exercise was a great illustration of how our students probably feel most of the time during timed writing or in-class essays. I know I felt I had some ideas by the end of the time but was just truly beginning to develop them when you said "time's up". However, I might have had an advantage since I've read and taught To Kill a Mockingbird and so knew the context of the passages. From just those passages, I concluded that Tom is not formally educated but observant and intelligent and that he is patient, kind, and modest. I particularly focused on the dialogue and Scout's phrase "soft black velvet" in my analysis.

Watching the courtroom scene and then having to create a visual representation of Tom just relying on that courtroom scene made me realize that the actor who played Tom Robinson was able to communicate Tom's character and emotions more clearly than Scout's naive narration in the text (at least in my opinion) and so the movie could truly help students come to a deep understanding of Tom's character before they picked up the book. Tom's tears and controlled, polite speech seemed particularly effective. However, I can also see that this activity could be problematic if an actor's or director's interpretation is not supported by the actual text. I suppose you could warn students about the difference and then they would be primed to look for it when reading - which could produce a different sort of motivation.

I found that then creating the visual representation for Tom was a more powerful activity than I realized. Just having to come up with and then justify a symbol made me aware of inferences I hadn't realized I'd made about Tom and helped me articulate those inferences. I chose a golden retriever as my symbol because I believe Tom is loyal, kind, eager to help others, and do the right thing, and positive and understanding in the face of misfortune (like a golden retriever). Also, like a golden retriever, Tom is viewed by others as less than human or less than other humans despite his admirable characteristics. I realized after I created the symbol that it could really become a powerful reminder of Tom's characteristics. Now, every time I think of Tom Robinson, that golden retriever picture pops up in my mind. I can see how this activity would give students something to hold onto as they read the text (at least if their brain works like mine and latches on to visuals).

I found the role-playing more uncomfortable but also helpful in forcing me to articulate my inferences about the character. In my second attempt to write about Tom Robinson, I found I had much more to say and that much of my analysis now referred to the actor's actions in the movie rather than the text I initially read. I expanded my analysis and came up with the statement "he has been literally and figuratively crippled by a racist society yet remains compassionate and kind". I found my second analysis focusing more on Tom's kindness and compassion rather than less emotional aspects such as level of education - indicating that I felt more connected to and invested in the character now. I can see how a student who felt similarly emotionally invested would now want to read the book to follow "their" character. Through this exercise I rediscovered the power visuals, and especially visual symbols, hold for me (something I knew about myself but had somewhat forgotten). I also realized that despite having read the book before, I could still become more attached to a character - a sign of great literature.

I particularly thought the reminder about the saved vs. the damned was helpful. In teaching honors English, I tend to fall into the trap of teaching my students how to be part of the saved (since after all, that's how they're probably going to be treated in college, right?) rather than consistently expanding their understanding through more kinesthetic or visual exercises such as the ones you modeled. I will definitely try to include more such visual activities in my lessons in the future as I experienced first hand how effective they are. Thank you for a great presentation. Hopefully, I can live up to the example. Best, Brook Wallace

Hi Jonathan,

So I am embarrassed to say that I forgot to respond to your presentation last week and that I am equally mortified to be turning my response in late. Perhaps I can make it up to you by sharing how much I really enjoyed your lesson. First off, I have to tell you that I love how you explain the history of so many of the terms and strategies that we have in education, I am continuously learning from you these juicy tidbits of information and hope that I can remember them. The cumulative graphic organizer was great and I love the incorporation of the video. The role playing was very valuable to me as a student and as a teacher. It really made me think through who the character was and helped me prep myself for the character sketch that followed. I know that I will use the cumulative graphic organizer and I will be using the role playing more often as well. Thank you for setting such a high standard for us (I might not have said this if I'd written this on Thursday night before I gave my own presentation! ) Your presentation was so well informed and well rounded and I thoroughly enjoyed my learning experience. Thanks again. Sarah Thistlethwaite

ncte 08 presentation

2008-11-20T20:35:00.000-08:00

Here's the material I promised to post from my Nov 21 presentation at NCTE in San Antonio:

Rethinking 'Old School' Practices: Fostering a Love of Books in an Age of Technology
Friday, Nov 21, 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
NCTE 98th Annual Convention in San Antonio, TX
"From Martin Luther to Walt Disney: engaging aliterate secondary level students with what they read"

A presentation by Jonathan H. Lovell

Professor of English & Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project
San Jose State University
San Jose, California

Agenda

3:05 - 3:05 participants read vignette focusing on Dill Harris from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and write the opening sentences of a character analysis essay
3:05 - 3:15 J Lovell reads essay on Martin Luther and Walt Disney as teachers of reading
3:15 - 3:20 J Lovell provides demonstration of "cumulative graphic organizer" [his own invention!] as a pre-reading strategy, focusing on courtroom scene from film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (henceforth TKAM)
3:20 – 3:25 participants view visual symbol posters of Dill Harris character on the overhead, then discuss with a partner what they now understand about their character
3:25 – 3:30 J Lovell discusses use of role play activity, with Dill, Mayella & Tom in mixed character groups, with one character in the "hot seat" and the other two asking questions of that character
3:30 - 3:35 participants listen to vignette of Dill from audio version of TKAM, while large print version of this vignette is displayed on the overhead projector screen
3:35 - 3:40 participants discuss what they learned about Dill Harris by experiencing this sequence of activities

Dill Harris

Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be pending every summer in Maycomb from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse sometimes," said Jem. "Ever seen anything good?"

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning of respect. "Tell it to us," he said.

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck-fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show sounded better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: "You ain't said anything about him."

"I haven't got one."

"Is he dead?"

"No . . . "

"Then if he's not dead you got one, haven't you?"

Dill blushed and Jem told me to hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and found acceptable.

Martin Luther and Walt Disney as Teachers of Reading

Because part of my job at San Jose State is to serve as a university supervisor of beginning teachers of English, I've spent a great deal of time over the past 22 years observing students in classrooms at the middle and high school levels reading and responding to what they read. Often, as I observe these classrooms, it seems to me that teachers are behaving as if the Lutheran revolution is the only game in town. You know the general story: Luther directly challenged the whole notion of the purpose of reading and who should be allowed to learn to read. Prior to the Lutheran revolution, readers of texts were largely monks and priests, while the rest of the population acted primarily as listeners to the Biblical narratives told by this priestly class. These readings were frequently supplemented by visual versions of these same tales, often depicted as frescoes on nearby church walls.

Luther changed all that. "You must be a reader yourself if you are ever to understand your true relationship to God," he proclaimed. Even more somberly for today's students, he suggested that if you could not understand what you read, you were meant to be damned. Damned eternally. Oh my.

As a student growing up in the late 50's, I was a child of Sputnik. Surprisingly, the sudden and quite unanticipated launching of this orbital satellite had the effect on American education of driving us back to the basics of the Lutheran revolution. Shortly after the Soviets launched sputnik in the fall of 1957, American students' reading comprehension began to be tested both systematically and frequently. Depending on one's comprehension level, one was placed in either higher or lower level classes: "saved" or "damned."

For me, the logical culmination of this system came in my senior year of college. I was taking a class in the modern British novel by a Professor I greatly admired. All of us "saved" students in English were sitting in the first two rows of the small lecture hall, laughing at the professor's jokes and nudging each other as we pointed to passages we'd underlined in our texts and comments we'd written in the margins. I chanced to turn around one day to look at the back of the room. There, on the far side of the back row, hunched down in his chair, was one of my classmates -- a good friend and a fellow member of my residential hall. He was looking rather desperate, peering over the top of his book, clearly hoping the professor would not notice him. I knew this particular classmate was extremely bright. In fact, he later went on to Oxford University and then Harvard Law School. What sort of system could lead to his conviction that he was not among the saved, at least as far as reading of works of modern British literature was concerned?

But that was the consequence, I later came to realize, of identifying those with different academic aptitudes early in an educational system, then nurturing these talented individuals at the expense of those not "meant" to be saved. The cluster of the saved, of course, got smaller and smaller as one rose up through the educational ranks. Eventually, in English studies, it became a matter of fewer and fewer people talking more and more loudly to one another.

In my third year of graduate school in English, as I was observing this process of increasing selectivity taking place, and wondering when I would be the next to be pushed off the plank, I was asked to take over the leadership of an undergraduate seminar made up of English majors who had a different take on the purpose and value of the study of English. These were students who were planning to enter post-BA credential programs in the state of Connecticut. Since I'd taught 10th and 12th grade at a private school in Delaware prior to beginning my graduate studies, I was asked to become the seminar leader for this group of undergraduates. And as it turned out, the questions they were asking fascinated me: how should the field of English be re-defined when it became the one field of study required of all students in each year of their public schooling? As significantly, how should this field of study be understood when one's students are there by law rather than choice?

And here's where Walt Disney came in. What if we decided to look at how kids understood "texts" when they were good at it? Wouldn't this give us a different perspective? What purpose was served, after all, by observing kids suffering through the ever-more-selective reading programs whose primary effect was to increase the disparity between "good readers" and "poor readers" in each successive year? Since I was leading this seminar as an adjunct to a Children's Literature course for which I was serving as a TA, it seemed sensible to define reading as a matter of making sense of texts that were both visual and verbal. Isn't that what any good elementary teacher taught day in day out: stories in which the illustrations gave the reader as much information as the words?

In pursuing this line of inquiry, we learned that prior to Disney's creation of the first 90 minute full length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937, it was widely assumed that "talking animated cartoons" could only sustain the attention of the average child for about ten minutes. Sound familiar? Disney and his animators challenged this conventional thinking, asking themselves what might make children want to sustain their attention for longer periods of time. Telling a good story was obviously a key ingredient (hence the choice of Snow White), but so was the appeal to our universal delight in sound, song, movement and a bit of irreverence (hence the Seven Dwarfs). By drawing on these attributes of what made kids variously talented and smart, might the supposed "shortness" of kids' attention spans be significantly stretched? As we all know today, Disney and his animators proved the skeptics wrong. Kids could pay attention to what they were viewing for a good deal longer than 10 minutes. It was all a matter of knowing in advance what might interest and engage their attention, then incorporating these elements systematically and consistently into this uniquely modern version of visual and verbal "story telling." Were it not for the launching of Sputnik, perhaps this Disney "vision" of kids as diversely talented readers and viewers might even have prevailed in American education. Sadly, however, this vision of the later 1930's gradually faded as school once again became more academic, rigorous, and relentlessly selective. And so it is today.

In today's presentation, however, I'll return you briefly to the world of Disney and introduce you to an approach to reading comprehension that draws on the many ways both kids and adults are uniquely talented. After starting with the most traditional of exercises -- reading a short passage from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird describing Dill Harris and writing about that passage -- we'll approach at this same text through a variety of different media, using a technique that John Elkins and Allan Luke have called "re/mediating adolescent literacies." I'll only be able to give the briefest of overviews of the sequence of exercises I've developed over the years to help students and teachers rethink "old school" practices in reading and responding to traditional texts. If you would like to gain a fuller understanding of the practices I will be introducing you to over the next several minutes, however, as well as to read the responses of a group of K-college Writing Project teachers who experienced this sequence of execises this summer, I invite you to visit my blog by googling "jonathan's edutalk" and reading what I've posted on my entries of 11-20-08.

Materials and Methods Used in this Workshop

Graphic organizers used to prepare students for reading or viewing a verbal or visual text

Graphic organizers are one of the most effective ways to introduce students to a verbal or visual text that they are about to read. Good books for helping teachers do this at the secondary level are Jim Burke’s Tools for Thought: Helping All Students Read, Write, Speak, and Think (Heinemann, 2002) and Fran Claggett and Joan Brown’s Drawing Your Own Conclusions: Graphic Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Thinking (Heinemann, 1997). For elementary level teachers, I’d recommend Elaine McEwan’s Teach Them ALL to Read: Catching the Kids Who Fall Through the Cracks (SAGE, 2002), Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis’s Strategies that Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding (Stenhouse, 2000), and Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Susan Zimmermann (Heinemann, 1997).

I use a 'cumulative graphic organizer' as a pre-reading strategy in this workshop, anticipating that participants will be able to make better sense of the courtroom segment in general, and Dill's role in this segment in particular, if they are ‘pre-introduced’ to this part of the TKAM narrative through the use of a graphic organizer. Student-generated graphic organizers are also terrific ways for kids of all ages to represent what they have already read or seen, and to exhibit this knowledge to their classmates. I also like the idea of using overhead transparencies to portray strong central images, or metaphors that characterize segments of a narrative, and then "embellishing" these central images with successive "layers" of meaning.

Video versions of narrative texts

I’m always on the lookout for good video versions of novels and plays, either for classroom use or for use in workshops for teachers. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, however, that I do not know how to dub selections from a DVD version of a novel onto a new DVD. I therefore just select a segment of the film I’m focusing on for my workshop, or use the "select scene" on the DVD player, to move from one segment to the next.

What I think is important about the use of visual narratives in general is to regard the video version of the work you are reading as equal in importance to the print version. In other words, regard both versions as two interestingly different renditions, two "re/mediations," to use the clever term that Professor Donna Alvermann borrows from the research of John Elkins and Allan Luke,1 of the same "deep story." Don’t treat the video version as a way to make the experience of reading the story or play more palatable, but rather as a chance to discover the compellingly different ways that great stories can be told. I also think that it’s a good idea to realize that for our students digital media provide their primary way of understanding and responding to stories, while most teachers tend to regard print narratives as the "higher" form of story telling.

Visual Symbol Posters based on characters in a story

Visual symbol posters are especially effective as a way to lead students "into" the characters of a story they are about to read, but they can also be used as either a "through" or "beyond" exercise, capturing what readers or groups of readers are learning about their characters.

What’s exciting about these visual symbol posters is how much they teach the students, as they are creating these posters and talking together, about the characters they are describing, and how stunning they can be when posted on the classroom wall for all to see. Gallery walks are especially effective as a means of exhibiting these artworks to the class as a whole.

Role Playing of Characters

Having small groups of three participants role play different characters, as with the characters of Dill Harris & Mayella Ewell & Tom Robinson, has the advantage of lowering the apprehension that participants might feel if asked to sit in a "hot seat" before the class as a whole, role playing a single character. Similar in power and effectiveness to the use of guided imagery, role playing also has a similar danger: it can become so engrossing that students forget these are fictional characters they are representing. It is therefore a good strategy, when asking your students to engage in role-playing, to set clear guidelines for your students as both role-players and question askers. It’s also important to debrief them carefully and sensitively afterwards. That being said, I know of no more powerful means of helping aliterate readers (those students who can read but chose not to) to become engaged in what they read than the "paired" exercises of creating visual symbol posters and then role playing their character.

Audio Versions of Novels

There are several excellent recorded book companies now making recorded books for both children and young adults, and I've been pleased to observe that several adopted textbook series include recorded versions of their narrative texts as well. If you do not want to spend the money to purchase a recorded version of a book, however, you can often find these versions in your local public library, often in the section for the hearing impaired.

Dubbing selections from your recorded book for use in your classroom

Prepare to take some time if you wish to follow my practice in the final segment of my workshop, but to be rewarded with a tape that you can use for many years to come. I start by listening to the recorded version of a novel or play while I’m driving, making a mental note of which selections I think will work well for “into,” “through,” and “beyond” exercises. For my Mockingbird selections, I was thinking about providing middle adolescent readers with a “window” into the three characters I’d chosen to focus on prior to their reading of this novel.

After selecting and making a mental note of my selections from the audio version of a novel or play, I then begin the process of locating and recording them in the order in which I intend to play them in the classroom. Once I’ve located each segment, I dub this selection to a fresh audiotape, so that the resulting new tape is one that I can play in a classroom. The bad news is that this process takes time: the good news is that once one has made one of these tapes, one can use it over and over again.

1 Alvermann, Donna, "Seeing Themselves as Capable and Engaged Readers: Adolescents and Re/Mediated Instruction," Learning Point Associates, Naperville, IL 2003

pre-reading R&J for ELLs

2008-02-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

Note: Using this as an "into" for the play will be especially helpful for ELLs in becoming more comfortable with the language of this play. Prepare for this oral/choral reading by having the whole class recite the "all" passages together, preferably twice, then having pairs of students, preferably mixed ability, practice their individual #1 through #18 "parts" before the oral/choral reading.

ROMEO & JULIET

Teacher: The minute this play begins, you know that there are two families in a town in northern Italy named

all: Fair Verona!

They hate each other, and this hatred is old and bitter. Folks are yelling

all: Down with the Capulets!

while other folks are yelling

all: Down with the Montagues!

There is a brawl so violent that the Prince of the town has to come out and lay down the law.

all: If ever you disturb our streets again,
Your lives will pay the forfeit of the peace!

Then we see Romeo wandering around and learn that he has been staying out all night and sleeping all day because he is

all: In Love!

with a lady named "Rosaline," who does not love him back. And we meet "the boys" -- Romeo's friends Benvolio and Mercutio -- who are headed for a party at

all: The Capulets!

It's a masked ball, so they can sneak in wearing costumes and no one at the ball will know that they are from the hated

all: Montagues!

Benvolio is excited because going to this ball will give Romeo a chance to get over his infatuation with the proud and aloof Lady Rosaline.

#1: GIVE LIBERTY TO YOUR EYES. EXAMINE OTHER BEAUTIES!

When the boys arrive in disguise, Lord Capulet does not recognize them as his enemies

all: the Montagues!

and so welcomes them.

#2: YOU ARE WELCOME, GENTLEMEN! COME, MUSICIANS, PLAY!

It is at this party that Romeo first sees young Juliet. He does not realize that she is the daughter of his hated host. He is blown away by her beauty!

#3: O SHE DOTH TEACH THE TORCHES TO BURN BRIGHT!

They dance. They kiss. Juliet says:

#4: YOU KISS BY THE BOOK

Only at the end of the party do they learn that the other is one of the "enemy."

But they don't feel like enemies. After the party, Romeo escapes from his buddies, climbs the wall into the Capulet family orchard, and delivers his famous lines:

#5: BUT SOFT, WHAT LIGHT THROUGH YONDER WINDOW BREAKS?

Juliet comes out on the balcony. Without knowing that Romeo is right below her, she says:

all: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name
And I'll no longer be a Capulet!

They talk passionately of love, but then Juliet hears her mother calling. Romeo says:

#6: WILT THOU LEAVE ME SO UNSATISFIED?

Juliet is no fool. She replies:

all: If that thy bent of love be honorable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow.

You would think that marriage between these two would be unthinkable because of the feud between their families.

all: But Love is Love!

They enlist the help of Juliet's nurse and Friar Lawrence, a local member of the clergy who hopes their union will bring an end to the feud. In secret, Friar Lawrence marries them. But the families, knowing nothing of this marriage, continue their feud. In the town square, Tybalt

all: A Capulet!

and a hot-headed cousin of Juliet's, comes looking for a fight with

all: A Montague!

Romeo's equally hot-headed friend Mercutio takes him on, saying:

#7: TYBALT, YOU RAT-CATCHER, WILL YOU WALK?

Tybalt yells back:

#8: I AM FOR YOU!

They fight. Mercutio dies and Tybalt flees. But look:

all: Here comes the furious Tybalt back again!

Romeo will not let his friend Mercutio die in vain. Even though Tybalt is Juliet's cousin, Romeo kills him, and regrets it almost immediately. In despair over his action, he laments:

#9: O, I AM FORTUNE'S FOOL!

The Prince
all: Of Fair Verona!

banishes Romeo to the nearby town on Mantua, but before Romeo leaves, he spends a night with Juliet. As he leaves, he says:

#10: THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN, AND LET LIFE OUT!

But moments after Romeo leaves, Juliet's mother enters to inform her daughter that Lord Capulet has arranged for Juliet to marry an older man named Count Paris, a local nobleman. She expects her daughter will be very happy with this news, telling her that:

all: Early next Thursday morn,
The gallant, young and noble gentleman
The County Paris, at Saint Peter's Church
Shall happ'ly make thee there a joyful bride!

But even though Juliet has been an obedient daughter in the past, she says:

#11: NOW BY SAINT PETER'S CHURCH, AND PETER TOO
HE SHALL NOT MAKE ME THERE A JOYFUL BRIDE!

Her father does not like his daughter's tone of voice one bit. He says:

#12: HANG THEE YOUNG BAGGAGE! DISOBEDIENT WRETCH!

Juliet is desperate. With the help of Friar Lawrence, she comes up with a plan to take a special drink that will make her appear to be dead. That way her parents will put her body in the family tomb, and after that Friar Lawrence will fetch her and take her to Romeo in Mantua.

As Juliet drinks the special potion, she says:

#13: ROMEO, I COME! THIS DO I DRINK TO THEE!

It works. Juliet's nurse and her mother Lady Capulet find her in the morning.

#14 & 15: ALACK THE DAY! SHE'S DEAD! SHE'S DEAD! SHE'S DEAD!

And they put her body in the family tomb, just as Juliet and Friar Lawrence had planned.

Unfortunately, one small detail has been left out. Romeo has not heard of the plan! All he hears is that Juliet is dead.

Many people head for Juliet's tomb. Romeo, who stops to buy some poison, is going there to join Juliet in death. Friar Lawrence is going there to get Juliet and take her to Romeo. Count Paris is going there to mourn for his almost-wife.

Paris gets there first. Romeo finds him there and kills him. Count Paris says:

#16: O, I AM SLAIN!

Then Romeo sees Juliet's body and takes the poison he has brought with him, saying:

#17: HERE'S TO MY LOVE! . . THUS WITH A KISS I DIE!

Friar Lawrence arrives just too late, finding Romeo dead and Juliet just waking up. As usual, he has great advice for Juliet:

all: Come, come away.
Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead
And Paris too. Come, I'll dispose of thee
Among a sisterhood of holy nuns!

This does not sound like any sort of a plan to Juliet. Friar Lawrence then flees from the tomb and Juliet decides to join Romeo in death. Since there is not enough left of Romeo's poison to kill her, she stabs herself, saying:

#18: O HAPPY DAGGER. THIS IS THY SHEATH!

Romeo and Juliet are found in the tomb by their feuding parents, who finally realize that their quarrels have gone too far. They vow to make peace, concluding sadly that:

all: Never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and Romeo

what is a cumulative graphic organizer?

2008-01-21T23:59:00.001-08:00

In my response to John's comment in my last post, where he asked what I was referring to as the "cumulative graphic organizer" I used to help set students up for their viewing of the courtroom sequence of TKAM, I provided the following explanation:

I start with a visual of courtroom as seen from the judge's perspective, showing the desk for the lawyer for the accused on the right, the desk for the lawyer for the state (or the plaintiff) on the left, and the balcony above (transparency #1)

I overlay this with simple stick figures by the desks and up in the balcony: the lawyer for the accused (AF) by the right side desk, the lawyer for the state (Mr G) by the left side desk , and, up in the balcony, Scout and Jem Finch and Dill Harris. I color code these stick figures: half red and half black for Atticus, half green and half black for Mr G, all green for Scout and Jem, and half green and half red for Dill (transparency #2).

I next overlay simple stick figures for Tom Robinson (red and black) behind the desk to the right, and Mayella Ewell and Bob Ewell (red and black) by the desk to the left (transparency #3).

I finally overlay a transparency showing a throng of stick figures in green on the ground floor and a smaller throng of stick figures in red up in the balcony.

I then have a final overlay that explains that the color coding refers to the following:

green = Maycomb's "insider" population, largely white

red = Maycomb's "outsider" population, largely black (but notice the exceptions)

black= the accused,his accusers, and their lawyers

What this cumulative graphic organizer helps to do is set students up to view the courtroom scene from the film, not only situating the main characters in relation to the "geography" of the courtroom but also anticipating something of the roles they will play in relation to one another.

I hope this is helpful to others who might have had a similar question to John's.

TKAM at NCTE in NYC

2007-11-14T22:56:00.000-08:00

I'll be giving a panel presentation tomorrow morning at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention in New York City. In this presentatiion I'll be giving a streamlined version of the workshop on To Kill a Mockingbird that I describe in my entry entitled "martin luther and walt disney as teachers of reading." Since I've never typed out the Dill Harris, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson exerpts that I use in this workshop, I thought it would be helpful to do so in this entry. Following thse excerpts, I'll reproduce my most recent version of the agenda for this workshop. Here goes:

Dill Harris

Dill was from Meridian, Mississippi, was spending the summer with his aunt, Miss Rachel, and would be pending every summer in Maycomb from now on. His family was from Maycomb County originally, his mother worked for a photographer in Meridian, had entered his picture in a Beautiful Child contest and won five dollars. She gave the money to Dill, who went to the picture show twenty times on it.

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse sometimes," said Jem. "Ever seen anything good?"

Dill had seen Dracula, a revelation that moved Jem to eye him with the beginning of respect. "Tell it to us," he said.

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck-fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

When Dill reduced Dracula to dust, and Jem said the show sounded better than the book, I asked Dill where his father was: "You ain't said anything about him."

"I haven't got one."

"Is he dead?"

"No . . . "

"Then if he's not dead you got one, haven't you?"

Dill blushed and Jem told me to hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and found acceptable.

*********************************************************

"Dill, you ain't telling me right--your folks couldn't do without you. They must be just mean to you. Tell you what to do about that--"

Dill's voice went on steadily in the darkness: "The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is--they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's "now-you've-got-it=go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it." Dill tried to deepen his voice. "You're not a boy. Boys get out and play baseball with other boys, they don't hang around the house worryin' their folks."

Dill's voice was his own again: "Oh, they ain't mean. They kiss you and hug you good night and good mornin' and good-bye and tell you they love you-- Scout, let's get us a baby."

"Where?"

There was a man Dill had heard of who had a boat that he rowed across to a foggy island where all these babies were; you could order one--

"That's a lie. Aunty said God drops 'em down the chimney. At least that what I think she said." For once, Aunty's diction had not been too clear.

"Well that ain't so. You get babies from each other. But there's this man, too---he has these babies just waitin' to wake up, he breathes life into 'em. . . . "

Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a grey house with sad brown doors.

"Dill?"

"Mm?"

"Why do you reckon Boo Radley's never run off?"

Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me.

"Maybe he doesn't have anywhere to run off to. . . ."

*********************************************************

This was as much as I heard of Mr. Gilmer's cross examination, because Jem made me take Dill out. For some reason Dill had started crying and couldn't stop; quietly at first, then his sobs were heard by several people in the balcony. Jem said if I didn't go with him he'd make me, and Reverend Sykes said I'd better go, so I went. Dill had seemed to be all right that day, nothing wrong with him, but I guessed he hadn't fully recovered from running away.

"Ain't you feeling good?" I asked, when we reached the bottom of the stairs.

Dill tried to pull himself together as we ran down the south steps. Mr. Link Deas was a lonely figure on the top step. "Anything happenin', Scout?" he asked as we went by. "No sir," I answered over my shoulder. "Dill here, he's sick."

"Come on out under the trees," I said. "Heat got you, I expect." We choose the fattest live oak and sat under it.

"It was just him I couldn't stand," Dill said.

"Who, Tom?"

"That old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him--"

"Dill, that's his job. Why, if we didn't have prosecutors--well, we couldn't have defense attorneys, I reckon."

Dill exhaled patiently. "I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it made me sick, plain sick."

"He's supposed to act that way, Dill, he was cross--"

"He didn't act that way when--"

"Dill, those were his own witnesses."

"Well, Mr. Finch didn't act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined them. The way that man called him 'boy' all the time and sneered at him, an' looked around at the jury every time he answered--"

"Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro."

"I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that--it just makes me sick."

Mayella Ewell

Maycomb's Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin. The cabin's plank walls were supplemented with sheets of corrugated iron, its roof shingled with tin cans hammered flat, so only its general shape suggested its original design: square, with four tiny rooms opening onto a shotgun hall, the cabin rested uneasily upon four irregular lumps of limestone. Its windows were merely open spaces in the walls, which in the summertime were covered with greasy strips of cheesecloth to keep out the varmints that feasted on Maycomb's refuse.

The varmints had a lean time of it, for the Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child: what passed for a fence was bits of tree-limbs, broomsticks and tool shafts, all tipped with rusty hammer-heads, snaggle-toothed rake heads, shovels, axes and grubbing hoes, held on with pieces of barbed wire. Enclosed by this barricade was a dirty yard containing the remains of a Model-T Ford (on blocks), a discarded dentist's chair, an ancient icebox, plus lesser items: old shoes, worn-out table radios, picture frames, and fruit jars, under which scrawny orange chickens pecked hopefully.

One corner of the yard, though, bewildered Maycomb. Against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson, had Miss Maudie deigned to permit a geranium on her premises. People said they were Mayella Ewell's.

*********************************************************

"Miss Mayella," he said, smiling, "I won't try to scare you for a while, not yet. Let's just get acquainted. How old are you?"

"Said I was nineteen, said it to the judge yonder." Mayella jerked her head resentfully at the bench.

"So you did, so you did ma'am. You'll have to bear with me, Miss Mayella. I'm getting along and can't remember as well as I used to. I might ask you things you've already said before, but you'll give me an answer, won't you? Good."

I could see nothing in Mayella's expression to justify Atticus's assumption that he had secured her wholehearted cooperation. She was looking at him furiously.

"Won't answer a word you say long as you keep on mockin' me," she said.

"Ma'am?" asked Atticus, startled.

"Long as you keep on makin' fun o'me."

Judge Taylor said, "Mr. Finch is not making fun of you. What's the matter with you?"

Mayella looked from under lowered eyelids at Atticus, but she said to the judge: "Long's he keeps callin' me ma'am and sayin' Miss Mayella. I don't have to take his sass, I ain't called upon to take it."

*********************************************************

"Miss Mayella," said Atticus, in spite of himself, "a nineteen-year-old girl like you must have friends. Who are your friends?"

The witness frowned as if puzzled. "Friends?"

"Yes, don’t' you know anyone near your age, or older, or younger? Boys and girls? Just ordinary friends?"

Mayella's hostility, which had subsided to grudging neutrality, flared again. "You makin' fun o'me agin, Mr. Finch?"

Atticus let her question answer his.

"Do you love your father, Miss Mayella?" was his next.

"Love him, whatcha mean?"

"I mean, is he good to you, is he easy to get along with?"

"He does tollable, 'cept when--"

"Except when?"

Mayella looked at her father, who was sitting with his chair tipped against the railing. He sat straight up and waited for her to answer.

"Except when nothin'," said Mayella. "I said he does tollable."

Mr. Ewell leaned back again.

"Except when he's drinking?" asked Atticus so gently that Mayella nodded.

"Does he ever go after you?"

"How do you mean?"

"When he's -- riled, has he ever beaten you?"

Mayella looked around, down at the court reporter, up at the judge. "Answer the question, Miss Mayella," said Judge Taylor.

"My paw's never touched a hair o' my head in his life," she declared firmly. "He never touched me."

When Atticus turned away from Mayella he looked like his stomach hurt, but Mayella's face was a mixture of terror and fury. Atticus sat down wearily and polished his glasses with his handkerchief.

Suddenl Mayella became articulate. "I got somethin' to say," she said.

Atticus raised his head. "Do you want to tell us what happened?"

But she did not hear the compassion in his invitation. "I got somethin' to say an' then I ain't gonna say no more. That nigger yonder took advantage of me, an' if you fine fancy gentlemen don't wanta do nothin' about it then you're all yellow stinkin' cowards, stinkin' cowards, the lot of you. Your fine fancy airs don't come to nothin'--your ma'amin' and Miss Mayellerin' don't come to nothin', Mr. Finch--"

Then she burst into real tears. Her shoulders shook with angry sobs. She was as good as her word. She answered no more questions.

Tom Robinson

Thomas Robinson reached around, ran his fingers under his left arm and lifted it. He guided his arm to the Bible and his rubber-like left hand sought contact with the black binding. As he raised his right hand, the useless one slipped off the Bible and hit the clerk's table. He was trying again when Judge Taylor growled, "That'll do, Tom." Tom took the oath and stepped into the witness chair. Atticus very quickly induced him to tell us:

Tom was twenty-five years of age; he was married with three children; he had been in trouble with the law before: he once received thirty days for disorderly conduct.

"It must have been disorderly," said Atticus. "What did it consist of?"

"Got in a fight with another man, he tried to cut me."

"Did he succeed?"

"Yes suh, a little, not enough to hurt. You see, I--" Tom moved his left shoulder.

"Yes," said Atticus. "You were both convicted?"

"Yes suh, I had to serve 'cause I couldn't pay the fine. "Other fellow paid his'n."

*********************************************************

"Tom, what happened to you on the evening of November twenty-first of last year?"

Below us, the spectators drew a collective breath and leaned forward. Behind us, the Negroes did the same.

Tom was a black-velvet Negro, not shiny, but soft black velvet. The whites of his eyes shone in his face, and when he spoke we saw flashes of his teeth. If he had been whole, he would have been a fine specimen of a man.

"Mr. Finch," he said, "I was goin' home as usual that evenin', an' when I passed the Ewell place Miss Mayella were on the porch, like she said she were. It seemed real quite like, an' I didn't quite know why. I was studyin' why, just passin' by, when she says for me to come up there and help her a minute. Well, I went inside the fence an' looked around for some kindlin' to work on, but I didn't see none, and she says, 'Naw, I got somethin' for you to do in the house. Th'old door's off its hinges an' fall's comin' on pretty fast.' I said you got a srewdriver, Miss Mayella? She said she sho' had. Well, I went to the front room an' looked at the door. I said Miss Mayella, this door look all right. I pulled it back'n forth and those hinges was all right. Then she shet the door in my face. Mr. Finch, I was wonderin' why it was so quiet like, an' it came to me that there weren't a chile on the place, nat a one of 'em, and I said Miss Mayella, where the chillun?"

*********************************************************
"Robinson, you're pretty good at busting up chiffarobes and kindling with one hand, aren't you?

"Yes suh, I reckon so."

"Strong enough to choke the breath out of a woman and sling her to the floor?"

"I never done that, suh."

"But you are strong enough to?"

"I reckon so, suh."

"Had your eye on her a long time, hadn't you, boy?"

"No suh, I never looked at her."

"Then you were mighty polite to do all that chopping and hauling for her, weren't you, boy?"

"I was just tryin' to help her out, suh."

"That was mighty generous of you, you had chores at home after your regular work, didn't you?"

"Yes suh."

"Why didn't you do them instead of Miss Ewell's?"

"I done 'em both, suh."

"You must have been pretty busy. Why?"

"Why what, suh?"

"Why were you so anxious to do that woman's chores?"

Tom Robinson hesitated, searching for an answer. "Looked like she didn't have nobody to help her, like I says--"

"With Mr. Ewell and seven children on the place, boy?"

"Well, I says it looked like they never help her none--"

"You did all this chopping and work from sheer goodness, boy?"

"Tried to help her, I says."

Mr. Gilmer smiled grimly at the jury. "You're a mighty good fellow, it seems--did all this for not one penny?"

"Yes suh. I felt right sorry for her, she seemed to try more'n the rest of 'em--"

"You felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?" Mr. Gilmore seemed ready to rise to the ceiling.

Agenda

Inquiry Question: How might we draw more effectively on different learning modalities to help all our students gain access to our core English curriculum texts?

4:15 - 4:20 participants read excerpts concerning Dill Harris, Mayella Ewell or Tom Robinson from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

4:20 – 4:25 participants write first paragraph of a character analysis essay on their assigned character

4:25 - 4:30 J Lovell provides overview of the sequence of activities & purpose of workshop

4:40 - 4:40 demonstration of 'cumulative graphic organizer' as a pre-reading strategy, focusing on courtroom segment of To Kill a Mockingbird (henceforth TKAM)

5:40– 5:05 watch courtroom segment from 1963 movie version of TKAM

5:05 - 5:10 gather in 'character’ groups -- Dill Harris #1 & #2, Mayella Ewell #1 & #2, Tom Robinson #1 & #2-- according to character you wrote about initially

5:10 - 5:25 create a visual symbol poster of your character and post it on the wall

5:25 – 5:40 BREAK!

5:40 – 5:55 ‘gallery walk’ of visual symbol posters in character groups; meeting in character groups to discuss questions you'd like to ask the other two characters

5:55 – 6:10 in 'mixed character’ groups of 3 or 4, students role play Dill, Mayella or Tom while the other two participants ask questions (5 minutes per character)

6:10 - 6:30 participants listen to same excerpts that they responded to in print form at the beginning of the workshop, this time from Recorded Books’ audio version of TKAM, while large print versions of these excerpts are shown on the overhead (shortened excerpts only to give the flavor of listening vs reading)

6:30 - 6:45 participants begin reflective writing on what they learned about their characters, and about themselves as learners, by experiencing this workshop.

chicken soup for the professional delelopment soul

2007-07-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

Now that you've all completed this summer's ISI, it may surprise and perhaps startle you to recall how difficult and challenging it was to persuade all of you -- twenty K-college teachers of writing -- to give up four and one half weeks of your hard-earned summer vacation to participate in this highly memorable and deeply inspiriting summer program. This difficulty in recruiting participants is true no matter what university or college a Writing Project site calls "home," or how consequential and long term its reputation as a Writing Project site. Having been the primary recruiter of new participants to the ISI's of the San Jose Area Writing Project over the past 18 years, I believe I know why.

Somewhat surprisingly, I trace my understanding of why K-college teachers need to be persuaded to participate in programs like the one you've just completed back to my mother: to behaviors in her that I both observed and to some degree inherited. She had what today would be called a "depressive personality," more usefully referred to as a "bi-polar disorder." More usefully because the visual image of bi-polarity does such a good job of conveying the most puzzling and vexing aspect of this mental condition: when you are living in one of its "polarities," say the exuberant or sunny hemisphere, you simply cannot imagine, or even recall in any concrete sense, what it feels like to inhabit the dark or depressive hemisphere. And similarly, when you're groping around in the dark, trying to remember what made you feel so buoyant yesterday and made getting up in the morning something other than a struggle, you simply cannot believe that a sunny "polarity" exists, much less that you were actually living there but "moments" ago. In its extreme form, such bi-polarity can be described, as I'm sure most of you are aware, as clinical schizophrenia: the inability of one "hemisphere" to recognize the other as part of itself.

While I would not wish this frustrating mental condition on anyone, it does have its advantages in helping me understand and to some degree anticipate the recruiting challenge I refer to above. It helps because it reminds me that, as teachers, we have all learned to cultivate what are essentially schizophrenic-like personalities. We are one sort of learner when we are in our own classrooms; we are generally an entirely different sort of learner when we are attending a professional development program. To expand a bit on this "classroom personality," it's one where we feel we have some control over the conditions and climate for learning that we create. This ability to create attractive learning conditions within the four walls of our classrooms, of course, is what brought many of us into the profession of teaching in the first place. However pessimistic our take on the possibility of rational and compassionate action in the "outside" world, we could create within our own classrooms an alternate reality of sorts, a sunny place. That's why teachers tend to find stories like Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" so deeply disturbing. Here is a teacher who had the responsibility to ensure that at least a short glimpse of the sunshine be afforded all her children, and yet she failed the one child--Margot--who needed this glimpse of sunshine the most.

In the latter--that hemisphere or state of mind I'm choosing to call the dark side of our schizophrenic-like teaching selves--we generally revert to being skeptics at best or grudging and dispirited followers of the wills of others at worst. We expect that the primary purpose of professional development programs will be tell us what to do, what "mandated curriculum" to implement, by those who claim to know more than we do about our kids, about what they need to learn, and how to reach and teach them most effectively. My favorite example of teachers in this skeptical "professional development" frame of mind comes from Among Schoolchildren--Tracy Kidder's account of the year he spent as a "big fifth grader" in the classroom of a teacher of that grade level in South Holyoke, Massachusetts. Attending an after-school "professional development program" on the textbook series the district had just adopted, he observed the commercial salesman for the series trying his best to extol its virtues to the K-6 teachers at the school. Midway through the workshop, the teacher in front of him turned to his partner, whispering rather audibly, "Yeah, right. And it also dices and slices."

The reason that the two hundred or so summer institutes of what is now the National Writing Project are generally not programs that can be ridiculed and dismissed as "dicing and slicing" in this fashion is both useful to know and somewhat surprising. When the Writing Project's founder, Jim Gray, was asked to conduct a summer seminar on the teaching of writing for high school teachers, he was asked to hold this professional development program on the UC Davis campus, using National Defense Education Act ("post-sputnik") funding for this enterprise. The federal government's expectation was that he would come up with a reasonably credible "slicer and dicer." He was the author of a short NCTE pamphlet on paragraph writing, after all, and employed by the School of Education at UC Berkeley as a university supervisor of prospective high school English teachers. Shouldn’t he be able to tell the eager applicants to his summer program what practices to follow, what theories to learn, in order to improve their students' writing abilities?

Very likely he could have done just this, but he chose not to. "You are all bright teachers," he wrote to them. "Collectively we know a good deal more about the teaching of writing than any of us, including me, know individually." So he urged them to come to the UC Davis campus that summer bringing a lesson they believed had made a difference to their students' abilities as writers. The content of their summer seminar, he told them, would be the teaching of these lessons to one another, followed by whole group discussions of what made these lessons effective. This was how the basic format of the morning sessions of the writing project's summer institutes began. The afternoon sessions evolved quite naturally when many of these same teachers became eager to try out, on their own writing, some of the practices they'd been introduced to in the morning. To quote from the title of Jim Gray's book on the birth and growth of the writing project, this quite unconventional professional development program began out of a desire to place "teachers at the center."

So keeping in mind this highly unusual and surprising history to the Writing Project, what can we say about our shared experience in this summer's Invitational Summer Institute? More particularly, borrowing a leaf from the conclusion of Ari Taub's workshop on developing more consequential curricula for our students, what practical and manageable lessons might we draw from this shared experience? And how might we apply these lessons not only to our classrooms but also to the professional development programs organized by the schools and districts in which we work? In considering this question during debriefing sessions following the third and fourth weeks of our program, Pam and I thought that one useful approach would be to deconstruct the summer institute itself, making its procedures and practices as transparent, and accessible to all of you, as possible. Just as we asked you all to reflect on both of our workshop demonstrations during the first week, asking yourself what helped make these workshops effective for you as professional development experiences, we would now like to lay bare what we consider to be the essential "inner workings" of the ISI. Here goes:

The first thing we wanted to do was to make sure that every participant in our professional development program felt recognized and respected as soon as he or she walked in the door. In the ISI this summer we began to create this climate of respect on our first day by asking participants to bring in an object, a piece of 'realia,' that indicated something significant about them. Our introductions to one another via these objects turned out to be insightful and at times startling. We learned about Juan's reverence for his mother as a cotton picker in Texas, about Becky's commitment to looking out for her own health, about Anne's being thankful for the sight she has rather then being embarrassed about the glasses she must now wear, about Mine's conversations in English with her Garfield stuffed animal, the one friend she had after recently moving from Ankara, Turkey to the San Jose area.

Beyond that, we asked you to bring in a prompt for your initial writing experience that we knew would be accessible to everyone: a family photograph. By asking you to share these photographs among yourselves in your afternoon writing groups (hereafter AWGs) prior to writing about them, we anticipated that everyone would not only have plenty to write about, but that the participants in the afternoon writing groups would begin to get to know each other. And that's the reason, of course, for using the AWGs to handle the majority of the "housekeeping" details that keep the institute well fed and functioning smoothly. By asking each of the AWGs to contribute directly to the "running" of the summer institute, bringing morning snacks and supplies and end-of-week potluck picnics, the members of the afternoon writing groups not only get to know one another in a variety of different ways, but also begin to see themselves as important and consequential parts of the institute as a whole.

This sense of the value and importance of each person's contribution to the group is directly related to the focus we place on the emergence of each participant's "voice" as a writer. This is the component of the Writing Project as a professional development program that sets it most distinctly apart from other "subject matter programs" and that gives it its greatest strength. That is, while we gradually involve participants in institute-running responsibilities that convince each person of his or her unique importance to the functioning of the program as a whole, AWGs are involved in precisely that same enterprise regarding each participant's unique and individual "voice" as a writer. For the past several summers we've enlisted the help of four former institute participants--one for each group--so that each of the AWGs can move as swiftly and effectively as possible to that quite magical moment when each member of the group not only contributes to but becomes almost viscerally embodied in the sound and the substance of the writing of each of its members. We do this in part because we believe that a writing teacher must be a practitioner of his or her craft just as surely as a violin or Scottish Country Dance instructor must be. Just as importantly, however, we focus on the development of each participant's writing because we believe that an authentic writing voice is an indispensable part of realizing the collective authority we possess as a "teacher-centered" professional development program.

Over the years, we've learned to respect and heighten the role that Scribe Notes play in the development of the individual voices of institute participants, along with their gradually increasing sense of their contribution to the group's collective authority. After having the two forms of Scribe Notes--one from notes and one from memory--modeled by the co-directors, the Scribe Notes themselves become the primary means for each participant to move from the more private writing space of the AWGs to the more public space of the institute as a whole. The responsibility of each institute participant to write one set of Scribe Notes from notes and one set from memory, and for reading his or her particular set of notes aloud to the group as a whole on their assigned morning, serves as a concrete and daily affirmation of two essential truths. This practice affirms that each of us has his or her own unique voice and way of transcribing or recalling events, and that this rich array of perspectives contributes enormously to our sense of the importance and consequence of the journey we are collectively embarked upon as we move from week to week to our final day.

Alongside the development of this belief in our individual and collective value as teachers who practice what we preach, whose voices are not only worth hearing but often highly entertaining, we focus simultaneously on the development of each participant's unique, and uniquely important, professional voice. The primary method we use to achieve this goal, of course, is to ask each participant to prepare and present a 90-minute workshop demonstration for the group as whole, generally starting after we've had several former participants model these workshops in the first two weeks of the summer institute. We added a new feature to this component of the institute this summer: a self-conscious emphasis on debriefing the elements of an effective workshop after Pam and I gave our "model workshops" on Thursday and Friday of our first week. It was especially important that we held ourselves up for critical analysis and collective scrutiny in this way, since we expected that everyone in the institute had something worthy to say, and we wanted to help each participant say it as effectively as possible. Since everyone knew that they were going to have their own "90 minutes in the sun," it was crucial to make sure that the process of planning and giving an effective workshop was clear and transparent. This would be similar to making sure that your students are given plenty of opportunities to practice and reflect on what constitutes effective performance before you evaluate them in a classroom setting. Because there is an even greater desire among summer institute participants than among students in a regular classroom to be successful in their workshop demonstrations, it was especially important to make sure everyone was set up for success.

As we were conducting these morning debriefing sessions after our workshops, we were simultaneously beginning our afternoon coaching sessions with each of our participants. Our objective here was similar to the fostering of personal voices that were promoted by the realia introductions, the writing and reading of scribe notes, the readings from Bird by Bird that began each day's session, and of course the writing and responding that were taking place in the afternoon writing groups. Our coaching sessions were devoted to listening for that teacher's voice that was both passionate and professional. Once we thought we detected this voice, our job was to reflect it back to the participant in a distilled form, filtering out the static, so that the person we were coaching could begin to hear himself or herself at a more essential and fundamental level. This part of the summer institute is always the most demanding for us, since it involves helping participants gain the confidence to amplify their own voice, rather than planning a workshop that "we," as co-directors, would like to "hear" them give. That's why it's both so hard and so necessary. While it's understandable that "good students" want to "please" their "teachers," what you need to do as a summer institute co-director is listen for the distinctive and essential voice of each teacher, the "honest" voice of the person behind the teaching, the voice that's so often buried or suppressed by state and district mandates or curriculum "guides."

But it isn't simply a matter of having your professional voice heard as a teacher that's important. It's just as important to have sympathetic but rigorous coaches help you structure the organization and delivery of this voice -- that is, your workshop demonstration -- so that it comes across as both "loud" and "persuasive." I'll use two coaching sessions with participants from this summer, to whom I'll ascribe fictional names and topics, as examples. Barbara started with a workshop idea based on the way she taught her primary students the "water cycle." By working with her, seeing the possibilities for an engaging jigsaw exercise based on teaching this particular content, we came up with a more compelling way for Barbara's "voice" to be heard. Similarly with Sharon: what started as a portfolio-keeping workshop that relied too heavily on a walk-through of the writing process became a workshop devoted to helping participants with their own portfolios. "What you want to provide participants with is a strong and compelling portfolio-keeping experience," we argued. "Until institute participants are led to experience portfolio-keeping as an engaging and compelling activity, they will not be motivated to figure out ways to provide this experience for their students."

For all our focus on the development of confident and persuasive professional voices among institute participants, however, the core of the institute emerges in its final days: participants own writing and their reflections on themselves as writers. By insisting that five pages of "finished" writing be submitted to an institute anthology just prior to the end of the institute, and that five to fifteen "portfolio pieces" be selected and described in an annotated table of contents on the next to final day of the institute, the writing project summer institute requires participants to walk the walk of practicing what we preach. But it's more than simply "going public" with one's writing and reflecting on one's sense of self as a writer that's at stake here. What participants' individual writing portfolios and end-of-institute anthology pieces declare most importantly is that we all have both professional and personal voices, that these voices have grown and matured during the summer institute with a lot of help from some very good friends, and that these voices will not be silenced. As we hear from the "one-pager" reflections that preface each portfolio on the second to last day of the institute, and as we listen in wonder, and not infrequently in tears, to the pieces of writing that have emerged from the supportive environment of the afternoon writing groups, what we experience is an almost magical transformation. A group that began four and one-half weeks ago as a collection of quite ordinary-seeming K-college teachers of writing has become something quite extraordinary: a chorus of twenty two voices, distinct yet interdependent, proclaiming both their marked individuality and their achievement of a collective voice and collective vision. This voice and vision give new life, I would suggest, to the promise and possibility of authentic and memorable professional development programs.

And to honor Ari's challenge of making such a transformation both manageable and practical, here are five things that each of us can do, this coming academic year, to change the way professional development is understood and practiced at our school site or district office:

• Before school begins, ask your principal or department head if you can begin your first faculty meeting with introductions of one another through personally meaningful realia
• At the beginning of the school year, show your colleagues your anthology and portfolio pieces; describe the institute experiences that led to these "documents'; explain their influences on how you plan to go about teaching writing in the coming year
• Initiate a faculty forum on writing by bringing drinks and snacks for colleagues interested in discussing this topic; begin by discussing what you learned from your ISI professional book; suggest forming a book club to meet regularly, with snack responsibilities rotating around the group, to discuss this book or related professional books
• Form a writing group with three or four teachers, selecting topics for writing in as open-ended a manner as possible; midway through the year, discuss what you are learning about writing and what implications this learning might have for your teaching of writing
• Discuss your practices in the teaching of writing with a teacher who teaches at a different grade level or subject area; figure out where you are similar and different in your practices and why; discuss your conclusions with your fellow teachers during lunch

Hope that's sufficient to munch on and mull over. Pam and I wish you the very best for an engaging, invigorating and perhaps even a transformational year with your departmental, school and district colleagues.

the notion of exceptionality: pros and cons

2007-03-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

The penultimate lines of Robert Frost's "Directive" read as follows:

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.

Frost is referring here to a curious passage in the Gospel according to Mark that reads:

Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: "Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times."

Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding'; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!"

(Mark 4: 1-12, text from the New International Version)

Scholars in the Jesus Seminar think the parable is probably genuine, although the interpretation Jesus gives to this parable shortly afterwards (the birds are Satan, the thorns are "the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things") probably not.

The focus in this gospel on what most readers would acknowledge to be a bizarre interpretation of this unusual four-episode parable, and the insistence this places on the effect of Jesus's speaking in parables so that "the wrong ones . . . can't get saved," embodies one of the most resonant and memorable examples I know of the notion of exceptionality.

The Jesus Seminar scholars believe the interpretation segment of the gospel was probable written in about 80 AD, when the early Christian church was facing severe persecution by the Romans, and believers who openly prefessed their belief were putting their lives at peril. This makes sense to me. One way to keep the faithful true to their faith is to convince them that they can hear what others were not meant to hear, see what others were not meant to see.

And of course there is tremendous power in this notion of exceptionality. It fairly leaps off the screen in the altogether arresting portrayal of Erin Gruwell by Hilary Swank in the movie "Freedom Writers." For exceptional teachers like 23 year old Erin Gruwell to overcome the barriers that administrators and long-practiced school routines place before them, they are almost required to believe in their own exceptionality: able to "hear" what others cannot hear, "see" what others cannot see. Where else could they derive the strength and peserverance to continue their uphill climb against odds that have crushed so many other initially idealistic and hopeful young teachers?

And yet there is a downside to this understandable and perhaps necessary notion of exceptionality. It's become apparent to me in the last few weeks because of the difficulties our Writing Project has experienced forming a long-term partnership with a charter high school in our area.

The mission of this high school is extremely ambitious: to take students, mostly Latina or Latino, who are scoring in the bottom third of their 8th grade classes and to prepare them, by the time they reach the 12th grade, for entrance into one or another of the campuses of California's "top tier" public universities. To bring them, in other words, from the bottom 33% to the top 10% in four years.

It's no wonder, given such an ambitious and altogether laudable a mission, that this school tends to attract young teachers who are a lot like Erin Gruwell--convinced of their exceptionality, convinced that their personal mission is to do what older and more "veteran" teachers have long given up on, or perhaps never thought possible at any time in their teaching lives.

But such singularity of purpose comes at a price, it seems to me. When we've tried to encourage this young group of teachers to join with us "wisened veterans" in working collaboratively to improve our students' academic writing abilities, they've looked on us with a more-than-skeptical eye. "What would you know," they seem to be saying, "about taking ninth grade students with 2nd to 5th grade reading abilities and whipping them into shape over a four year period for entrance into UC campuses."

And I have to all but bite my tongue to avoid responding that in fact we know very little individually, but quite a bit collectively.

"And you?" I'm tempted to respond. "What about you?"

dirty dog david: reflections on "whole class intelligence"

2007-03-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

Lewis Thomas has a rather remarkable essay, I believe in Lives of a Cell, that he calls simply "Living Language." He starts the essay, quite improbably, by recounting some recently conducted research on the nest building abilities of termites.

It seems that termites have the most advanced building abiliities in the animal kingdom. Outside of humans, of course. Termite nests in South America can run up to ten feet in diameter and several feet deep. That's about the size, Thomas notes, of New York City, relatively speaking, to the size of an individual termite. And these dwellings are not simple structures. They have sleeping rooms, food storage rooms, a room for the queen and her retainers, and so forth. Yet individual termites have a miniscule brain--the original pinheads. So how do they know how to build these elaborate underground structures?

To answer this question, a researcher studied smaller and larger collections of termites under laboratory conditions. Turns out that when a few termites were placed in a small dish with soil and pellets, they would rush around moving their pellets randomly from place to place. More termites, more random moving about of pellets. But when 25 or so termites were placed in the dish, they'd start building columns of pellets, and when these columns were built close enough to one another, the termites would connect them with a neatly finished off arch. And that arch, of course, was the basic "building block" of their elaborate underground edifices.

Termites could not build these edifices individually, the researher concluded. There had to be certain number of termites before they could "discover" their collective intelligence. It's like the English language, Thomas muses in his essay. There is no one author of this magnificent "acheivement"--it's the product of many many individual intelligences working collectively, feeding intellectually off one another.

I think the same thing is true of classrooms of students. Certainly we all have had classes where one or two students stood out as particularly gifted or talented in one way or another--most often linguistically in English classes. But what's far more impressive to me is how intelligent classes can become when they are encouraged to perceive themselves collectively rather than as a random collection of individuals.

I play a "name game" with my students at the beginning of each semester. Every student must not only tell the class his or her name, but must repeat all the names of all those who have already said their names. To enable students to do this, I tell them to the class their first name, then follow this with something they like or dislike that begins with the sound of their first name's letter or letters. So Diana dislikes dinasours, Lizzie likes lizards, and so forth. The next week I have them do the same thing, but now with an alliterative phase or pair of words that begins with the sound of the letter or letters of their first name.

In week two of the methods class I'm presently teaching, Diana began the Name Game by telling us she disliked dirty dogs. They are smelly, she explained, and they make a mess of your carpet. The class nodded, and proceeded. We came round to the final student--an older student named David who had informed us a week earlier that he enjoyed hiking in Denali National Park.

"I'm David," he told the group, "and I AM a dirty dog."

Classroom intelligence/

martin luther and walt disney as teachers of reading

2007-01-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

Because part of my job here at San Jose State is to serve as a university supervisor of beginning teachers of English, I've spent a great deal of time over the past 19 years observing students in classrooms at the middle and high school levels reading and responding to what they read. Often, as I observe these classrooms, it seems to me that teachers are behaving as if the Lutheran revolution is the only game in town. You know the general story: Luther directly challenged the whole notion of what reading was for and who should be allowed to learn to read. Prior to the Lutheran revolution, readers of texts were largely monks and priests, while the rest of the population acted primarily as listeners to the Biblical narratives told by this priestly class. These readings were frequently supplemented by visual versions of these same tales, often depicted as frescoes on the walls of the church.

Luther changed all that. "You must be a reader yourself if you are ever to understand your true relationship to God," he proclaimed. Even more somberly for today's students, he suggested that if you could not understand what you read, you were meant to damned. Damned eternally. Oh my.

As a student growing up in the late 50's, I was a child of Sputnik. Surprisingly, the sudden and quite unanticipated launching of this orbital satellite by the Russian government had the effect on American education of driving us back to the basics of the Lutheran revolution. Shortly after the launching of Sputnik in the fall of 1957, American students' reading comprehension began to be tested both systematically and frequently. Depending on our comprehension level, we were 'placed' the following year in either 'higher' or 'lower' classes: saved or damned.

The logical culmination of this system, at least for me, came in my senior year of college. I was taking a class in the modern British novel by a Professor of English that I greatly admired. All the group of us 'saved' students in English were sitting in the first two rows of the small lecture hall, laughing at the professor's jokes and nudging each other as we pointed to passages we'd underlined in our texts and comments we'd written about these passages. I chanced to turn around one morning to look at the back of the lecture hall. There on the far side of the back row, hunched down in his chair, was one of my classmates, a good friend and a fellow member of my residential hall. He was looking rather desperate, peering over the top of his book and clearly hoping that the professor would not notice him. I knew this particular classmate was extremely bright. In fact, he later went on to attend Oxford and then Harvard Law School. What sort of system could lead to the conviction on the part of such a student that he was not among the saved, at least as far as the reading of works of modern British literature was concerned?

But that was the consequence, I later came to realize, of identifying specialized talents in diverse fields of study early in a system of schooling, then nurturing these talented individuals at the expense of those who were not 'meant' to be saved. The field of talented individuals, of course, got smaller and smaller as one rose up through the educational ranks. Eventually, in English studies, it became a matter of fewer and fewer people talking more and more loudly to one another.

In my third year of graduate school in English, as I was observing this process of increasing selectivity taking place, and wondering when I would be the next to be pushed off the gang plank, so to speak, I was asked to take over the leadership of an undergraduate seminar made up of English majors who had a different take on the purpose and value of the study of English. These were quite bright students who were not planning to pursue studies in English at the graduate level, but rather to enter post-BA credential programs in the state of Connecticut, where they were studying. Since I'd been a 10th and 12th grade private school teacher for three years prior to beginning my graduate studies, I was considered an appropriate instructor for this group of undergraduates. The questions they were asking in this seminar fascinated me: how should the field of 'English' be understood when it became the one field of study required of all secondary level students in each year of their public schooling? Even more importantly, how should one re-envision this field of study when the students one is teaching are there by law rather than choice?

And here's where Walt Disney came in. What if we decided to look at how kids 'read' when they are good at it? Wouldn't this give us a different perspective? What purpose was served, after all, by observing kids suffering through reading programs whose effect, if not intention, was to increase the disparity between "good readers" and "poor readers" in each successive year? Since I was leading this seminar as an adjunct course to a class in Children's Literature that these same students were taking, it was a relatively straightforward matter to turn from understanding 'reading' primarily in terms of decoding print text to understanding 'reading' as a matter of making sense of 'texts' that were both visual and verbal. Isn't that what any good elementary teacher taught: stories in which the illustrations gave the reader as much information as the words?

In pursuing this line of inquiry, we learned that prior to the creation of the first full length Disney animated film (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), it was widely assumed that "talking animated cartoons" could only sustain the attention of the average viewer for about ten minutes. Sound familiar? Disney and his animators challenged this conventional thinking, asking themselves what made viewers want to sustain their attention for longer periods of time. Telling a good story was obviously a key ingredient (hence the choice of Snow White), but equally imporant for sustaining the attention of the "reader" was the appeal to our universal delight in sound, song, movement and a bit of irreverence (hence the Seven Dwarfs). By drawing on these attributes of what made kids variously talented and smart, might the supposed "shortness" of kids' "attention spans" be significantly augmented? As we all know today, Disney and his animators proved the skeptics wrong. Kids could pay attention to what they were being 'taught' for a good deal longer than 10 minutes. It was all a matter of knowing in advance what might interest and engage their attention, then incorporating these elements systematically and consistently into this uniquely modern version of visual and verbal story telling. Were it not for the launching of Sputnik, perhaps this Disney "vision" of kids as diversely talented readers and viewers might even have prevailed in American education. Sadly, however, this vision of the later 1930's gradually faded as school once again became more 'academic,' more 'rigorous,' more relentlessly 'selective.' And so it is today.

In a workshop I've given for a number of years on the teaching of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, I return workshop participants to the world of the early Disney and introduce then to an approach to reading comprehension that draws on the many ways both kids and adults are uniquely talented. We start with the most traditional of exercises -- reading short passages that provide vignettes of the characters of Dill Harris, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson, then writing about what we understand about the characters based on these what these passages convey.

But we move from this quite traditional exercise in reading to a range of alternative ways of responding to these same passages. We start, in acknowledgment of Walt Disney, by viewing a segment of the 1963 film version of Harper Lee's novel. I introduce workshop participants to a way a pre-reading a visual text by "scaffolding" what one is about to see with a "cumulative graphic organizer" designed to help the viewer understand the roles played by the different characters they wrote about in relation to the larger society of Maycomb County, Alabama of which they were a part.

Then I have participants work in small character groups, creating visual symbol posters of the particular characters they have written about at the beginning of the workshop. We then do a "gallery walk" of these visual symbol posters, and I then gather participants together in mixed character groups of three, where each participant role-plays their assigned character as the other two members of their group asks them questions.

Finally, we re-experience the same excerpts that we read in 'Lutheran' fashion at the beginning of the workshop (i.e. silently at one's desk), but this time in pre-Lutheran mode, listening to them as excerpts from the Recorded Books version of this novel. I follow this final experience of listening by having participants write on their assigned character a second time, reflecting on what they learned by comparing their initial 'character study writing' with this final piece of writing.

By and large, participants enjoy these exercises and find them interesting and insightful. Not only in terms of their own sense of themselves as readers, but also as teachers of reading and writing who work with students with many different talents. The point I wish to make in this workshop is that we can all deliberately and systematically draw on the various ways we know our kids are smart. That is, we can draw on their various talents as readers, listeners, responders to and shapers of their world. In doing so, we can significantly enhance the experience of reading and writing for all our students, countering the drive towards year by year "progressive differentiation" that is, perhaps unconsciously, built into the systematically structured reading programs that are presently required in the great majority of California classrooms today.

the ash street inn revisited

2006-07-31T18:50:00.000-07:00

Ellen and I are back at the Ash Street Inn in Manchester NH for an afternoon and evening before flying west to Buffalo NY and driving from there to Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Canadian segment of our vacation.

It seems a good moment to reflect further on what thoughtful service providers do to provide a welcoming environment for their clients, and what we might learn from such attitudes and actions as we prepare for the beginning of the coming school year.

What strikes me this time around is how thoroughly our innkeepers, Darlene and Eric, have not only anticipated our conscious needs but even some we weren't aware we had. There's the coffee & tea, cookies & fruit on the dining room counter, as I've indicated. But once we reach our second floor room, there's also a comfortable small work table with a soft but bright energy-saving fluorescent light, a collection of "Ash Street Inn" ball point pens in a small round wire-mesh container, an outlet right by the desk so that I can easily plug in my computer and get right to work.

Now it happens that today is the deadline for my 'authorization' of the writing project data we've entered this quarter about our programs and participants. It's no small matter, therefore, that this comfortable and quiet little 'business center' has been set up in this room for use by guests, and no small matter either that the Ash Street Inn is a wireless environment that makes access to the internet both speedy and uncomplicated. It's small touches like these that allow me to enter the needed information, and check the data that's already been entered, with time to spare before the early evening deadline, when this particular online information system closes down for keeps.

That's what I mean by anticipating the unanticipated needs of one's guests. My guess here is that Eric and Darlene have had a number of business travelers who've entered this B&B facing similar deadlines, coming with a deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes, wondering how they could possibly meet these deadlines. They prepared their room 'accommodations,' that is, with these guests in mind. The result is one feels a sense of support, and welcome and encouragement, just as if one has been given an unexpected 'leg up' on an arduous climb.

Now wouldn't it be startling if this was the environment and this was the attitude that greeted us as we walked into our first day of school? You have critical deadlines to meet, right? How can we help you meet those deadlines? You're worried about teaching that 9th grade SDAIE class you've never taught before, yes? What can we do to make you feel supported, encouraged to face this class with a sense of eager anticipation? You've been assigned a disproportionate share of special needs students, students who failed this class last year, or just all-around trouble makers, perhaps because you have a reputation for being an effective teacher for such students. How can we help you manage these students, how can we help alleviate your sense that not everyone is pulling on their oars with the same effort that's expected of you?

As my last two examples might suggest, I think that fellow teachers, and especially veteran teachers, can do a lot to promote such a welcoming and supportive environment. Certainly it would take some special effort and some special school site based before-the-school-year investigations. Which of the relatively new teachers has been given particularly challenging teaching assignments? What students have you had that your colleagues will now have, and what can you tell them about teaching these students effectively? What resources for English Learners have you discovered at the school and district level -- both people and curriculum resources -- that one of your colleagues will benefit from learning about? Might you tell your colleague that that especially difficult class at that particularly difficult time of day is one that you have also taught, and that you have survived?

I remember discussing approaches and attitudes such as these when I was co-teaching a series of workshops for the Northern Nevada Writing Project, for which I served as university-based Director from 1983 to 1987. The question we kept asking ourselves is how much time we could afford to 'sacrifice' from the content of our grade level specific workshops in the teaching of writing at the elementary, middle and high school levels for such 'community-building' or 'maintenance' activities. The conclusion we reached, after several years of offering these five-session-only workshop series, was that we never allocated sufficient time for setting the 'climate' for the under-appreciated, wary and skeptical teachers who attended these workshops. My conclusion now is that we could have and should have devoted one quarter of our time -- all of the first three hour session and the beginning of second -- to the sole purpose of making sure these teachers felt welcome, to making sure they knew we understood and appreciated the work they were doing, to providing them with a quiet and comfortable desk, easy access to the internet, and a wire-mesh basket of pens reading "Northern Nevada Writing Project -- a small gift to you for the great job you're doing."

Honestly, would creating such a welcoming environment at your school be all that difficult? Wouldn't the pay-off in teacher productivity and collegiality more than compensate for the time and effort spent on helping to bring such a opening climate of enhanced expectations into being?

anticipation and the ash street inn

2006-07-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

When Ellen and I arrived at our B&B on Ash Street in Manchester New Hampshire yesterday afternoon, the innkeepers were not in. There was an envelope on the desk in the vestibule, however, reading "Ellen & Jonathan." Inside was a note, reading as follows:

"Good Afternoon Ellen & Jonathan: Welcome to the Ash Street Inn. Sorry we missed your arrival. We have gone to the coast [of Maine] to run some errands.

"Enclosed is your key, which will open the door in front of you, with the stained glass, as well as your room. Your room, #207, is on the second floor, top of the stairs to the right.

"At the end of the hall on the first floor is the dining room. There is bottled water in the refrigerator as well as snacks on the counter should you be hungry. Please make yourself at home. We should be returning by 4 PM, and will look forward to meeting you then. Darlene & Eric"

What struck me about this note, and the welcoming disposition it represents, is how frequently we encounter this attitude and this approach among teachers (more often those teaching at the elementary than at the secondary level, I will grant) as they prepare their classrooms for the coming school year.

What also struck me is how rarely we encounter such attitudes, such welcoming dispositions, among either teachers or school administrators with regard to their own colleagues or teaching staff. When was the last time you walked into a pre-school year inservice day and found a note from a school administrator reading "Dear [your first name]: Welcome back to school. There is bottled water in the refrigerator as well as snacks on the counter should you be hungry. Please make yourself at home."

We don't receive such notes, nor do we think of composing them for our teaching colleagues, because we do not see ourselves as "clients" for whom the school is providing a "service." We are the ones being paid, after all. We should be the ones providing services, we reason, rather than the ones receiving them. And so we prepare our rooms, we think about what we learned last year or over the summer that might be used to modify the learning opportunities our students will encounter in the coming year, and we prepare our school year curricula.

What would happen if we applied this same "disposition of heightened expectations" to one another? What would happen if school administrators brought the same anticipation of the year to come to their teachers as these same teachers routinely bring to the students they will be teaching?

Isn't the analogy pretty compelling? Prior to the beginning of the school year, we prepare our classrooms and our curriculum materials in the way we do because we anticipate that our students will be more successful as learners because of the modifications and alterations we make in their "learning environments." Why shouldn't the same be true of ourselves as learners? Wouldn't we also be more disposed to see the coming school year as an opportunity for learning something new, for change and growth, if we were regarded just as we regard the students we teach?

What might we do, among ourselves, to bring such beginning-of-the-school-year dispositions into effect? As a start, how about following the lead of Darlene & Eric and writing short notes to our colleagues, welcoming them back? How about talking with your school administrators about the activities they are planning for those inservice days prior to the beginning of the school year? Might everyone on the staff bring in a family photo and write about the event commemorated by this photo; might everyone bring in "something round, something funny, and something they have read" that has special significance to them, and create a short 'speech' about this artifact; might everyone bring in an object from their family's past that has been brought from some prior country and/or culture to their present place of residence, and write about the 'journey' this object has taken?

Why don't we routinely think of such 'community building' exercises as what we expect at the beginning of the school year? Can't we learn to regard our colleagues with the same affection, the same sense of heightened expectation, as we do our very own students?

practicing what I'm preaching: the power of modeling

2006-07-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

In response to my 7/24/06 post called " taking a shot at connecting the dots" (here's the link) Anonymous BR (Blog Reader) wrote:

"I find your idea of school-site-based blogs intriguing (especially the notion of "noticing and describing"), but difficult to enact. Here are a few thoughts:

"1) School's "egg crate" design make it next to impossible for me to see (and so notice and describe) what my colleagues are doing with kids that contribute to their achievement; I can only describe what I hear them say they are doing. I think that blogging on their self-reported actions might be more of a PR job than an inquiry that is really thoughtful and helpful.

"2) And you compare teachers at a site with teachers in an invitational summer institute. But this comparison has lots of differences. "Invitational" already alerts us to the fact that these teachers have a certain perspective and motivation that other teachers at their site don't have; ISIs involve a trust element that school-sites often don't have; ISIs are not all teachers from one site, which diffuses their common power; communicating with all teachers at your site insinuates a kind of power move which, in my experience, would not be welcomed by administrators.

"Edublogs are often anonymous, because of the problems with a teacher speaking out publicly. Do you have examples of school-site-based blogs where teachers are doing what you propose?

"I appreciate your interesting ideas and will continue to check back."

So having read Anon BR's comment above, I slapped my hand to my forehead. Of course! How does a any teacher go about enabling a student to accomplish a complicated and challenging task? She or he models that task for that student, of course. So given that the enterprise of creating school-based blog sites to strengthen teachers' capacities as advocates for educational change (read 'school reform') is a "complicated and challenging task," how would I go about modeling its accomplishment?

Here's what I propose. I've been working over the past academic year at Silver Creek High School in the East Side Union High School District in San Jose. I've been visiting this high school about every two weeks for the purpose of supervising one of the Intern Teachers in English who has been and will be teaching there. A big part of my role as a university supervisor of beginning teachers is to do just what I've suggested that the postings on a school-based blog site might do--notice and describe what a teacher does that promotes her or his students' learning, and figuring out how that might happen more often for more students. Within the classroom, that is, the beginning teacher and I are working together to promote 'educational reform' at the 'local level.' in fact at the classroom level.

So what I propose is that I continue to do just that in the coming year, but that I enlist the support of other English teachers at that school with whom I've worked over the years -- Todd Seal, Laurie Weckesser, Debra Navratil -- visiting their classrooms every two weeks or so to do just the sort of 'noticing and describing' that I've been doing with the Intern teacher described above. And of course posting these observations, with the permission of the teachers I've observed, on our newly created school-based blog site.

It would be a start, would it not? I'm not sure at this point how such 'noticings' would be similar to or different from my "observational notes" of student teachers -- notes I've been writing and 'publishing,' by making photocopies for the department chair(s) and building principal every time I visit, for the past twenty-seven years. My guess is that they'd pay more attention to how the learning environment in a given classroom was either enhanced or impeded by various external conditions: such things as testing schedules, availability of textbooks and/or computer stations, consistency or lack of consistency of students' attendance.

And in discussing such 'external' conditions there would of course the risk, as Anon BR points out, that administrators will become uneasy at this voice for teachers speaking 'out of turn' in this rather public arena. But I suspect the risk is quite minimal -- not much greater than the risk I've been running for years when I've discussed such 'external' conditions in my photocopied "observational notes" on student teachers.

Compared to this risk, it seems to me that the potential gains are enormous. What administrator, and what teacher for that matter, would not want a more open and consequential discussion of what conditions promote and impede the learning of students in a given school setting? Even if the question were posed solely in terms of students' performance on statewide tests, wouldn't most teachers and administrators wish to consider what factors favored and which impeded higher performance on these tests? Not that I'm an advocate of using such tests as the primary measure of 'more effective' and 'less effective' learning environments, but it does seem likely to me that one consequence of improved learning environments generally is going to be higher performance on statewide tests. And I'm certainly not above using such arguments if the goal is a greater voice for teachers, a more considered and consequential voice, in those aspects of their classroom and school learning environments that most effect their teaching.

Shall we, perhaps, to begin?

is there a hawthorne effect on the 'noticer'?

2006-07-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

Having gone on and on a few blogs ago about how important it is for bloggers to cite their sources if they wish their arguments to be taken seriously, I'm now going to do just the opposite: rely on your faith in my recollection and basic integrity as a blogger.

Here goes.

A number of years ago Peter Elbow described an interesting experiment conducted by one of his colleagues in the composition program at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was then serving as Composition Program Director.

Seems this colleague wanted to know whether positive comments only, positive and negative comments, or negative comments only led to the greatest improvement in her students' papers.

This was classroom-based research at its very best, in my opinion: an interesting question, pretty clear ways to measure the results to the satisfaction of the researcher, and immediate consequences in terms of changed behavior, should the results conclusively indicate the value of one way of proceeding over another.

So she started by writing positive comments only on the papers of one of her freshmen composition classes, and a mixture of positive and negative comments on the papers of another of her classes.

The results: both groups of students improved about equally in their writing, and both seemed to value the types of comments that were written on their papers about equally. The difference was not in the performance of the students, but in the attitude of the composition instructor herself. "Writing positive comments only on one set of papers was the best form of professional self-renewal I've ever experienced," she claimed. I'd look forward to reading that set of papers as a challenge--even as a contest between me and the students in that class. Could any of them write one paper that was so bad I'd find nothing positive to comment on, at least with a genuinely positive comment?

"Each time I'd sit down with those 'positive comments only' papers I've have a sense of thrill, a sense of expectation. What would I encounter with this set; how successfully would my students try my capacity for discerning and writing about something genuinely positive in each of their papers?

This not-so-surprising version of a "hawthorne" effect (see July 9 post) on the teacher who is 'observing' her students has interesting implications, it seems to me, for the sorts of 'appreciative noticings' I've suggested might initiate a school-site based blog site. It suggests that there might be a value to doing this 'electronic noticing' even if you sent out invitations to this particular party and none of your school colleagues deigned to 'appear' at your electronic party.

More practically, this informal research finding on the ameliorating effects of making positive comments on the person making these comments suggests that there is a strong reason for doing so, whether or not one envisions or believes in the larger vision of educational change that I've argued for in previous posts. You should do so because you'll feel better about your job and your working environment if you do. And does anyone really doubt that a more positive attitude on the part of a teacher has anything but a salutary effect on her or his students' learning?

I'll end this blog entry with a post I just received from EdWeek, since it relates in such an interesting way to what I've been talking about above, and because it involves one of the teachers who has been doing, for many years, just what I have been suggesting with his classes. Noticing what goes right when things go right, and talking about it electronically (as well as, quite voluminously, in more traditional print forms). The teacher is Jim Burke, an high school English teacher at Burlingame HS in Burlingame CA (just south of the SF airport), and the site he uses to discuss his educational suggestions is (check it out!)

Dear Jonathan Lovell,

LIVE ONLINE CHAT:

Getting Ready for the New School Year: Advice for Teachers

When: Wednesday, July 26, 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., Eastern time
Where: http://www.edweek-chat.org

Submit questions in advance:
http://www.edweek-chat.org/question.php3#question

Join us for a special live Web chat for teachers on preparing for the new school year. Our special teacher-guests will take your questions on what to expect in the early weeks of school, what teachers need to before school starts, classroom-management and instructional strategies, and much more. This is your chance to get a jump on planning and get feedback on your ideas and potential problem areas.

Guests:

* Jim Burke, an English teacher an Burlingame High School in California, is the author of "Letters to a New Teacher: A Month-by-Month Guide to the Year Ahead" (Heinemann). He is also the recipient of the 2000 Exemplary English Leadership Award from the National Council of Teachers of English.

* Hanne Denney, a career changer starting her third year as a special education and social studies teacher at Arundel High School in Maryland, writes TEACHER MAGAZINE'S blog "Ready or Not." She recently received a master's degree in leadership in teaching. Read her blog here:
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/hdenney/

Please join us for this special discussion:
http://www.edweek-chat.org

Submit questions in advance:
http://www.edweek-chat.org/question.php3#question

taking a shot at connecting the dots

2006-07-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

OK, I know, I know. I wrote initially on this blog that school site 'hosted' blog sites might be used for those 'electronic indications of appreciation'--simple observations or 'noticings' by teachers of contributions to the improvement of the learning environment at the school--that contribute to everyone's sense of well-being, and in fact contribute directly to the improvement of the 'productivity' of both teachers and their students (see 'the hawthorne effect').

And then, before you know it, I'm arguing that teachers should be mounting the barricades, blogsites in hand as it were, to argue for school change at both the local and regional level. Teachers unite! You have nothing to lose but your learned helplessness! All power to those who are actually doing the work, teaching in the trenches!

Yeh, yeh, it's hyperbolic I know; not a little reminiscent of that stale sounding 60's rhetoric many of us have rightly learned to listen to with a wary ear. We've been there before, as I pointed out in my 'blogging and the isi' post, and we're not likely find invitations to return anything less than off-putting.

But might there be a connection between the low level 'electronic noticings' I spoke about earlier and the higher level advocacy role I've been suggesting for school-site based blogs in my more recent postings?

I'd like to propose the following: that as teachers get better at first noticing and then describing, in the semi-public forum of a school-site based blog, what genuinely contributes to enhancing the learning environments in which teachers teach and learners learn, they will be taking the first initial steps towards becoming effective advocates for local and regional educational reform.

I do realize, of course, that the first and most difficult step to take in that first one--committing yourself to making that first observation, that first act of 'electronic appreciation.' You don't want to look foolish, after all. And you don't want to end up sending out invitations to an electronic party, only to discover you're the only one in the virtual room. Right?

But here's where the ISI experience, or any other profound experience of heightened professional colleagiality with one's fellow teachers, can play a vital role. You know what it feels like to be in such an environment, yes? And you know how much this 'feeling' contributes to your desire to become an even more effective teacher than you already are. Right? And you even know something about how to describe what you're doing so that others will understand why you use the particular teaching strategy you do, yes?

So why not take the chance? Why not try setting up that school-site hosted blogspot? Why not try committing yourself to one of those 'electronic indications of appreciation' of one of your fellow teachers, and see what happens?

I like links

2006-07-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

My Netscape browser has issues with me when it comes to translating the writing I do in the preview boxes provided by blogger.com into the smart looking published entries you see on my blog page. I click on the "publish post" button, and up pops that cute little multi-colored pinwheel thing and it starts circling. And circling. And circling.

Much as I enjoy watching the gyrations of this little pinwheel-like thingy, I eventually ask my PowerBook G4 to perform a "force quit" from Netscape, and I'm off to join forces with my friend Sam Safari. He's not as capacious in his abilities as Nick Netscape, but I find his simplicity reassuring, matching as it does my own.

One of the most important things Sam Safari does not know how to do is "code" my links on my blog posts. For that service I have my mentor Todd (see my previous post) and my own patience. I get to the point in my writing where I want you to be able to link to another text, just like in the sentence you read above, and do the following: I type a sideways carrot facing left, then a space, then an 'a,' than a space, then the word 'href,' then an equals sign, and finally a double quote mark. Now I'm ready to go search for the 'authenticating' text. When I find the text I'm looking for, I copy its url, bringing this information with me as I return to my 'create post' window. I paste the url in the space right after the double quote mark I described above, follow the url with another double quote mark, and end this part of the operation with a sideways carrot facing right. I then add the highlightable words you see on the blog--the ones that link you to the text I've selected--and I end with a sideways carrot facing left, a forward slash, an 'a,' a sideways carrot facing right.

What sort of pay-off could possible be worth all this bother? In my mind, the answer relates to what I wrote about in my previous blog (you guessed it) where I argued that the public accessibility of blog postings serve as an helpful form of discipline, reminding us of the unrealized potential for public advocacy at the local level inherent in the practice of blogging.

But this potential for advocacy, particularly in the area of arguing for the reforming of specific public school environments, will simply not be realized unless bloggers act with the same sense of public accountability as mainstream journalists.

I take that back. The potential of bloggers and blog sites to successfully advocate for fundamental change in specific school settings must rest on an higher and more informed sense of public accountability than we presently see, or are likely to see, in mainstream journalism. Newspaper and television news journalists are required by the extended nature of their audiences and the economic dictates of their bottom lines to paint with a very broad brush. Journalists in these media have neither have the time nor the incentive to pinpoint and promote changes at the local school site level.

Teachers do. And they must. But they will only be taken seriously if they are guided by the same accountability practices as their colleagues in the mainstream media, citing their sources and carefully allowing their readers to check out the credibility of their observations and arguments. This is done in the wired world by making it as easy as possible for one to 'follow' a reference made by an author to the source of that reference.

I like links.

connectivity and the oh-no second

2006-07-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

You're probably heard the joke as often as I have.

"What's the complement to the nanosecond it takes for your email message to make it from your keyboard to the screen of your intended recipient?"

"The oh-no second. That's the moment you realize you should never have sent that damn electronic message. What could you have been thinking?"

I've been considering this current anecdote lately because I've recently received a number of emails in which the sender wishes to comment on one or another of the blog entries I've written, but does not want his or her responses made 'public' by posting them as a 'comment' on a given blog entry. So instead they send their responses as emails to me.

Now this is fine with me. I'm just like anyone else in this. I like to get email from friends, especially emails that respond favorably to something I've written. I enjoy reading these responses and I try to be as conscientious as possible in responding, recipient to sender, to each and every one of them.

But it's made me realize a bit more sharply just how potentially radical a departure blogging represents, how interestingly different from more 'traditional' forms of electronic communication.

Now all this is quite surprising, given that electronic communication in any form at all is still so new, still so inchoate as a means through which we're all beginning to discover our 'expressive potential,' as the personal growth people like to put it. Why might it be that this new mode of communicating with each other has already developed such an interesting and distinct sub-group, with one camp of internet users using the internet for email only and the other using the world wide web not only for for email but also for 'hosting' and reading blogs (see "first some facts" in my blog post of two days ago)?

I think the answer lies partly in individual temperament, since blog readers and blog writers span such a wide range in age and cultural backgrounds. Blog writers in particular also seem to be balanced about equally between males and females.

But might the answer also lie in what we envision as the significance and 'place' of our writing in relation to our larger world? Teachers in particular have become accustomed to doing their jobs within what many have defined as a "worker-supervisor" environment. The idea behind such an arrangement is that the higher paid supervisors are supposed to be held accountable for the productivity of the lower paid workers. It's an idea that originated in this country between the two world wars, when it was believed that the only people who would be willing to teach the 'unwashed masses,' most from southern Europe and most poorly educated, would themselves be upwardly mobile young woman from those same immigrant classes (see A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century [1986] for one of the better accunts of this history; this report, prepared by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, led directly to the creation of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, still very much alive and kicking today. (see ERIC report)

This was why teacher training institutions like San Jose State Normal School were created, of course, and this was also why it was so important for those supervisor level administrators and teacher trainers to establish 'norms' for what students at different ages and in different subject areas would be expected to know and be able to do. Without these norms, how would these poorly educated but upwardly mobile young woman who were teaching these unwashed masses know what to teach?

Of course the idea was preposterous from the beginning. What young immigrant, male or female, would choose to enter the field of teaching when they would 'soon' be able, historically speaking, to enter the field of investment banking? Teachers tend to be drawn from a highly self-selecting sub-group of the population, and the economic backgrounds from which they come, in my experience, vary across the entire income landscape. What they share, not surprisingly, is a conviction that one's income level is not the most important determiner of the value of one's labor.

But there has been one unfortunate consequence of this historical legacy of being employed within a "field" that was defined by this worker-supervisor model. Teachers have grown accustomed to not being heard, not being listened to in matters of both their own working conditions and even, more surprisingly, in matters concerning what makes their classrooms condusive environments for learning. Teachers have become very good at griping and grumbling, at teaching effectively behind closed doors, at coping. They have not become good at formulating clear and convincing arguments for creating more conducive learning environments for their students. In a word, teachers have grown resigned to a sort of learned helplessness--they do not believe they can be convincing advocates for their teaching practices or their working environments at either a local or district level.

Now I'm going to suggest, of course, that blogging has the potential of changing all that. It gives us as teachers a little bully pulpit, a chance to try out our wings in the arena of public advocacy without having to be on a first name basis with the chair of our local school board. It allows us to hone our advocacy talents in a relatively safe environment, with just enough 'edge' to make us realize the potential consequence of what we write but none of the inconvenience of having to figure out just what length and tone of letter is likely to make it into the "letters to the editor" column of our local newspaper.

And what I say is, let's begin.

insider and outsider blog readers

2006-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

In response to "blogging and the isi," Carol Jago writes that the "question that no one can answer [right now] is the extent to which this community of writers will stay engaged in the blog."

Kids like to blog because it give them a "chance to say what's on their minds in a private/ public space" Carol continues, but of course the experience of blogging is likely to be quite different for a "community of writers" that's made up of adult teachers.

And yes, I agree that using blogs in the way I've been suggesting in my past few emails is quite different from the norm. The blog would be a group blog rather than an individually hosted site, for one thing, and the purpose would not be for teachers to "say what's on their minds" but rather to provide a public space for those 'good noticings,' those 'electronic expressions of appreciation' that we so rarely receive as teachers, and that we so rarely provide to our colleagues.

So why do this electronically rather than simply stopping a colleague in the hall and giving him or her a compliment? Here I'd appeal to my own recent experience as a blogger. The fact that it's more public than a spoken comment would be, and the curious fact that it could be read by others not connected to or knowledgeable about the school serving as the blogsite host, brings an heightened consciousness to what one writes. Carol's response to ""blogging and the isi" is a case in point. The primary audience for this posting was the 20 teachers who made up this summer's 2006 invitational Summer Institute (ISI 06). This group would read this blog as a way of re-capturing the felt sense of that penultimate day of the summer program, a felt sense that JoAnn Freda's scribe notes are particularly effective in capturing.

But there is that larger audience, including Carol Jago, reading this blog entry from France, that will naturally read this blog for other purposes, making sense of it in relation to their own interests and concerns.

I would argue that it 'does a writer good' to know that both these different audiences are 'out there' capable of reading what's been written, if it's expressed as well as JoAnn's scribe notes are expressed, and capable of perhaps responding to what's been said. I think this double audience of 'insider' and 'outsider' readers has the capacity to nudge us toward making our particular 'local' observations more global, towards seeing and perhaps commenting on what might be generalizable to other school settings. Might this creative tension between writing for both insider and outsider audiences will make us, as teachers, feel we are participating in that sort of speculation/reflection that leads to genuine and lasting educational change?

"All politics is local," the expression has it. Might the same be true for genuine educational change, and isn't it about time we got this conversation going?

blogging and the isi

2006-07-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

This from our writing project tech liaison Todd Seal, the person who, half my age, has served as my mentor in the art and practice of blogging:

"Blogging daily not only makes me a better teacher; it makes me a better person."

Whoa. Hold on there. A little extreme perhaps? Yet another promise that we're just on the cusp of a brighter and more generous-hearted future? As us older and not necessarily wiser 60's types might say, "Haven't we been there before? Haven't we learned to be a tad more wary of the essential magnanimity of the heart, once the 'barriers' to its 'essential nature' have been 'removed'?"

Perhaps. But perhaps it might also be true that it's time to 'unlearn' those dispiriting post-60's lessons--the disappointments and difficulties that served as our primary 'teachers'--and to pay a little more attention to what those in their late 20's and early 30's have to tell us about blogging.

First some facts: 147 million Americans use the internet; about 1/3rd of these users read blogs; about 1/5th of these blog savvy internet users--12 million--maintain a blog (see today's front page article in the San Jose Mercury News for these figures and the following quotes). The largest percentage of these bloggers write about their "life experiences" and say the major reason they blog is to "express themselves creatively." And the great majority of bloggers focus their blogs on events and experiences at the "hyper-local level" rather than using their blogs to attempt to influence national policy.

What's surprising to me about these facts is that they bear such eloquent testimony to our individual and collective need to express ourselves, and perhaps the need we all have to maintain the enabling illusion that others 'out there' are reading what we write. "It's good to get feedback from people you don't know," writes blogger Christina Palsky, 'but even if I didn't get feedback, I'd still do it."

Why? My own answer is that blogging makes you a 'good noticer,' to use the term JoAnn Freda recently employed to describe my co-director Laura Brown and me in her account of the final on-site session of our summer institute. What she wrote is both compelling in itself and a good example of the 'heightened noticing' that daily writing in general, and perhaps daily blog writing in particular, can enhance significantly. I can think of no more convincing way to make the case for the potentially ameliorative effects of 'electronic acts of appreciation' than to quote her scribe notes in full. Here they are:

Scribe Notes from Memory, Tues July 18, by JoAnn Freda

"I have to be honest. I signed up for the very last slot on the scribe notes board with the hope that Jonathan and Laura wouldn’t notice we didn’t need a scribe for the last day because we wouldn’t be meeting after that. I really underestimated them. They noticed (good 'noticers') the mistake almost immediately and skooched everyone back a space to fix the 'problem' and restore me to my duties. So that plan really backfired and now I have the challenge of trying to come up with something fresh after our clever scribes have explored genres and exploited genres, created genres and corrupted genres and one member even tried to use every genre in one set of scribe notes. I thought about writing the notes as a love story (you were there today, it could be a love story) but it just wasn’t working for me:

"What can you say about an exceptional group of people
that are parting ways. That they were beautiful and brilliant?
That they loved Lamott and Spinelli , Cisneros and each other?

"The mood in the room is tense and excited and expectant. We’re not quite sure what to expect but we’re eager to get started. Our Bird by Bird reader is stuck on 880 and so Craig fills in. He reads the last page of the book. Lamott says we write because:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen our sense of life . . . When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or our life, our buoyancy is restored.

"Over the next few hours, this group of writers will prove the truth of these statements. But before we can get started we need to take care of business. Lina and Donna read their notes recounting Jay Richards’ completely engaging presentation. Next, in the most stunning display of patience I have ever seen, Laura endeavors to explain to the group how to use our new community blogsight. Using as many modes as she can, she walks us through the steps several times, never once letting even the slightest hint of irritation slip into her voice. She does everything but promise to make house calls to help us with this and still one gets the feeling that she’d have better luck teaching this procedure to her cat. It’s not you Laura, it’s just that many of us were working late into the night and we may have hit a wall. This whole exercise reminds me of the MTV show called “Boiling Point” where they put an unsuspecting contestant through some very trying and frustrating experience to see how long they can take it before they blow up and start swearing. Laura never reaches the boiling point.

"Undaunted, Laura tries another activity with us. She gets us to brainstorm ideas for our two Saturday sessions that will complete our obligation to ISI. I am in a dangerous situation. Given the state of euphoria and goodwill that I’m in, I would agree to do anything this group wants. Fortunately, Nicola interjects a bit of practicality and suggests we link our get togethers to the Super Saturdays.

"The moment has arrived. Jonathan explains how we are going to present our portfolios. He says that everyone will take a turn reading their one page reflection and we will take turns in a counter clockwise direction. Someone makes the obligatory “turn to the person on your left remark” (are you wondering when the statute of limitations will run out on this one Mary?) and then he tells us that we will just listen, no applause (to save time). Patrick is the first to read. Of course we can’t restrain ourselves and we burst into applause. We are admonished. We move on to Craig who reads his letter and we make a feeble attempt to curb our enthusiasm. Then Karen reads Sandy’s letter and even though Sandy isn’t here, we still feel like applauding her. Karen reads her letter and by now there is a palpable feeling of mutiny in the room. A discussion breaks out about the viability of the “no applause” rule but Jonathan is congenially adamant. Next is Erika’s turn and she points out that the “no applause” discussion is actually taking longer than applauding would. Erika reads her letter which is a beautiful explanation of her attitude toward “crummy” first drafts and how she had to reach back to her experience as a young musician to gain an understanding of the importance of being willing to do something imperfectly. We can’t stand it any longer. We are bursting with appreciation. We have to do something and so in a show of defiant obedience, EN MASSE we throw our hands into the air hokey pokey style and wave them wildly - even Jonathan. There’s no stopping us now, we wave wildly after each reading. Jonathan’s time-saving rule has set us back several minutes now and while we are in the middle of one our crazed hokey pokey waves, SJSU Provost Carmen Sigler walks in. This will surely make Jonathan think twice about ever making another unilateral executive decision. Jonathan explains the situation and asks the Provost how much time she can afford to be with us this morning. She says she would like to stay and listen to the four remaining participants who have not read their reflections. Catherine’s reflection compares her writing process to giving birth to an alien and we are all midwives. Tori does a great job of comparing learning to write to learning to surf. She goes on to tell us how difficult and overwhelming it has been for her to participate in the institute because of the recent death of her father. She isn’t the only one who cries during her letter. A pile of napkins is passed across the back row and several of us take one to wipe our tears. Nicola’s reflection tells us about the intense feelings about her son that surfaced during the poetry writing. Martha takes over the reading of Nicola’s letter and I am deeply moved by what she has to say. It is like Anne Lamott says when she compares writing to singing on a boat in a terrible storm. “You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

"Laura is the last to read her reflection. We are about an hour behind schedule. The provost presents us with our certificates, graduation style. Having had to show such great restraint during the reading portion of the morning, we go nuts applauding and whistling and high-fiving for our fellow writers as they receive their certificates. When Grant receives his certificate he takes a victory lap, Rocky style. The only thing missing is the beach ball.

"For the next 2 hours we read the portfolios in quiet reverence. The silence is punctuated by an occasional battle to get to a portfolio before Patrick can. We don’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. The room has been broken down, all that remains is Jonathan’s little island with his laptop and printer. Finally Patrick moves in . . . "

the promise and curse of connectivity

2006-07-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

Nelson G. writes the following in response to my "leading vs. listening" entry of two days ago:

"It strikes me that this was, in some ways, an especially apppropriate blog posting for invited responses. In a way, it's all about listening. I'll admit that when I received an email telling me that you had started a blog, I thought, 'Cool. I'll peek in at it some day,' and promptly put it out of my mind. The email was there in my inbox, but I had little inclination to follow the link because there are so many sources of news and reflection on the Web, I find it all a bit overwhelming."

Who hasn't experienced Nelson's feeling of being annoyingly over-supplied with an excess of 'wired' information? What's so oppressive is not simply the easy and abundant availability of electronic information, it's how tenaciously and maddeningly we are sucked into its electronic maw. When the Provost of our university came today to present completion of program certificates to our summer institute participants, she and I performed what must now be considered the academic ritual of bemoaning our email dominated world. "The trouble is the cc function," she complained. "Anyone can cc you on anything, and include attachments. Attachments they expect you to read. It's simply overwhelming."

The "o" word again. Overwhelming. Teachers in general and academics in particular feel they are drowning in electronic connectivity, and most are mad as hell about it.

So what does that mean for the use of electronic communication in the building of a stronger and more supportive sense of school community that I suggested at the conclusion of my entry of two day ago? I think it means that we have to be pretty patient at first, and pretty understanding of the many claims that are made on the time and attention of any reasonably conscientious public school teacher. We can no more expect electronic connectivity to 'transform' a school culture than we could have expected Margot's classmates in "All Summer in a Day" to believe her accounts of seeing and feeling the sun (see my earlier blog entry). What we can expect, however, is that thoughtful and attentive 'electronic' observations on the contributions our fellow teachers are making to enriching the life of the students they teach and the schools in which they work will gradually build an ever-enlarging audience of both 'authors' and 'readers.'

And is that really all that much to ask: one postive comment per day, posted electronically on blogsite 'hosted' by the whole school faculty, available to all teachers to both post 'electronic appreciations' of one another and to respond to or comment on those that have been posted? Might be worth a try, might it not? And who is going to try, if not you?

jay richards

2006-07-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was talking with Ellen yesterday about which writing project teacher consultant we thought best represented that difficult balance between leading and listening that I touched on in my last entry. Our conclusion was quick and unanimous: "Jay Richards," we both said at once.

Jay begins his Guest Teacher Consultant workshop presentation today, the last workshop day of the institute, by telling us that, as an 8th grade language arts teacher, he does not really know "how to read a book" (the title of his presentation), but that he has some questions he thinks will help us consider our own thinking of this fundamentally important issue. But first a little personal background, he continues, flashing photos of his wife and three daughters up on the screen. "My wife Marianne is a kindergarten teacher; we're a couple that loves reading so much we named our first daughter Paige." A ripple of laughter. "Then we had two more girls and decided to call them 'Chapter' and 'Footnotes.'" Roars of laughter.

Jay has a way of talking the most vexing part of our English Language Arts curriculum head on--how we teach and measure reading--and making this aspect of our teaching life engaging and thought-provoking. He does this by presenting participants in the institute with activities that help them clarify their thinking about these questions, then listening very, very attentively as participant after participant holds forth on their often highly emotional experiences with school-based reading assessment. He reminds me a lot of my now deceased father. When you introduce an opinion or observation before the sometimes intimidating audience of your fellow institute participants, there is no question that Jay is treating your opinion or observation absolutely seriously. He tilts his head forward, hair falling slightly over his brow, and sits very quietly while you speak. "You are important," his body language tells you. "Your opinion matters."

As a workshop presenter of many years in settings identical with or similar to this one, I am in awe of Jay's ability in this area. And I'm not quite sure how he does it, quite frankly, since this seemingly open-ended approach to 'questions from the floor' would throw me hopelessly off my carefully worked out 'clock-time agenda.' This never seems to happen with Jay. He brings us back to our 'central questions' easily and effortlessly, and we return to these questions with an enhanced respect for the diversity of the experiences and opinions our fellow institute members bring to our collective understanding of these issues.

leading vs listening in a wired world

2006-07-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

True Story: I was out walking our dogs early this morning, and decided on a whim to follow the urging of our older dog--an elderly, mostly deaf german shepherd--and head downhill rather then uphill for my customary dog-walk around the golf course.

Part way round, this same elderly, sweet tempered dog urged me off to the right, on a road providing access to the golf course for a group of residential dwellings just south of the course. Quite uncharacteristically, I followed her lead.

Now you have to realize that my wife Ellen and I live in an age-restricted, golf-course centered condo-community of about 350 acres located about 20 miles south of downtown San Jose. We've lived here about eight years at this point, occupying a pleasant but small condo quite close to the entrance of this "gated'' community. We like the quietness of our surroundings, the well maintained and quite spacious grounds, the predictability of the place.

So it came as quite a surprise to me this morning when I followed my older dog's lead, heading southwards from our usual round-the-golf-course route. I'm a person of fairly fixed habits in such matters, and truth to tell I was mostly thinking about this blog entry--what to use as its title and what to include as examples. I was in that semi-distracted early morning state of mind that I am often in at this hour, that is, while performing this particular dog-walking task.

And it therefore came as something of a shock when I looked up, as it were, from my distracted state of mind and realized I was walking on a path I'd never walked on before. A stream was flowing to my left, the grass was sloping gently towards me on my right, the morning birds were chirping in the trees above me, and the sun was just beginning to brighten the landscape. It was exactly as if I'd borrowed Philip Pullman's "subtle knife" and cut my way through into a parallel universe (see book review).

Now of course what made this discovery especially dramatic, in addition to illustrating just how thoroughly distracted I can become, was that this lovely path along the stream had been there all along, just minutes from where I'd been living for the past eight years. It was not a parallel universe, but rather a very distinct and tangible part of the very universe I inhabited. I just had not paid enough attention to notice this 'part' of my reality before taking my walk this morning with my dogs. It had taken my elderly german shepherd to gently steer me in the direction of a reality I simply had not known existed: a reality right in front of me, wholly coeval with the predictable, 'ordinary' landscape I thought I knew.

Might this same 'alternative path' be there, in a similar way, in the school settings most of us will be returning to this fall? We'll be expecting to take our regular and predictable "morning walks," of course, politely paying our respects to the loquacious social studies teacher, nodding perfunctorily at the permanently pinched mouth of the next-door math teacher, avoiding the principal's office for fear of being asked to take on yet another we-can't-function-without-it responsibility. But what if, rather than gritting our teeth and setting our minds to simply 'surviving' another year, we take a leaf from Pam Cheng's book (see comment by 'spam') and remind ourselves that "it's often our [fellow teachers] that give us the confidence to believe in [our own] worth. This is the 'sun' [we can] take back to our classrooms and schools to share with our students and colleagues. Perhaps if we can reflect the best in those around us, they will be inspired to find it in themselves."

And might blogsites such as this one become wonderful vehicles for enhancing such acts of appreciation among our 'ever-so-predictable' fellow teachers? What if we all committed ourselves to making one act of public recognition per day, via a blogsite for all to see, of the contribution that another teacher had made to our understanding of ourselves, our students, or our teaching. What if we simply set that as our collective task, our collective responsibility, our collective commitment as a whole school faculty? Might we begin to see that that lovely stream-side path, with overhanging boughs, twittering birds and brightly lit sloping lawn, had been there all along, just waiting for us to open our eyes and realize that it was part of our seemingly 'predictable,' seemingly 'ordinary' workaday world?

learning as remembering

2006-07-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

Let's assume that the Grand Master of Ceremonies announced to me one day that he'd decided to make me a better dancer, but that for each ability in this area he granted he'd subtract one from my writing abilities.

I'd sign the agreement in a heartbeat. In blood, if necessary.

I started Scottish Country Dancing eight years ago, responding to a flyer from the local community center announcing that classes in this idiosyncratic version of eighteenth century ballroom dancing, with lots more hopping up and down, would be offered each Tues for the next ten weeks.

As a beginner, I was awful. I gave new meaning to the expression "dancing with two left feet." The fact that I was taking these classes with a friend who'd danced as a Martha Graham dancer since about the age of three months made my clumsiness all the more painful and obvious.

Why did I stick with it? Sheer doggedness for one, but also something less easy to describe.

The music reminded me of something. Something I'd once known but since almost forgotten. Each time the music for these Scottish Country dances played I was transported. There were certain tunes, like the one that Robert Burns set for his poem The Lea-Rig, that had so powerful an effect on me I simply could not move my feet. The disparity between what I heard and what my dancing body was then able to do was just too immense.

My sense of dogged persistence all changed, however, when I went to my first "monthly party," held quite conveniently for me in a Masonic hall just a few blocks from where I was then living. The moment I entered the hall, the excitement and energy were palpable. The music was live, and there seemed to be an almost magical connection between the musicians, the music they played, and the dancers who were dancing to this music. It just did not matter that I was still mostly dancing with two left feet. I could not stay on the sidelines while such music was being played, such dancing going on.

I kept at it pretty steadily over the next several years, dancing twice, thrice, and sometimes five times a week with different classes in different locations, and attending those magical and transporting dancing parties each month. I became good enough to join one the performance groups in the area, and as long as I didn't look at myself too hard in those long mirrors that line the sides of all dancing studios, I could convince myself that I was not entirely out of place. At this point, eight years later, I'm reasonably satisfied with where I am as a dancer, and, assuming the Grand M of C does not make me the offer I described above, I will most likely remain at this level to the end of my dancing days. The important thing is that I still hear that distant music. I still remember. And I'm still half transported each and every time I dance. And besides, everyone who's dancing is having SUCH a good time, it's hard not to smile oneself, hard not to simply take pleasure in being in the company of such joyful fellow dancers.

I think something very similar happens with the writing of the participants who enter the summer institute. Many enter the institute just as I entered Scottish Country Dancing, with two left feet, metaphorically speaking. They are frightened and timid and just hope that their 'deficiencies' will not be too painfully exposed. They are convinced that their writing abilities are 'fixed,' not susceptible to change, and they simply hope that this rather glaring weakness in a "Writing Project Teacher Consultant" will somehow go unnoticed.

And then they hear Patrick and Craig read their scribe notes. "I don't care how lousy I think my own writing is," they say to themselves, "I simply want to be in the presence of people who write LIKE THAT." Or if you are Mara, you learn to say "That's SOOO Partick" when you are in the presence of such moments of startling connection between voice and self. And so it goes, and so most participants' writing improves, and so we gradually all jolly one another into taking greater risks, having more fun, feeding off each other's successes and embarrassments. Laughing. Laughing a lot.

Some of us, like Catherine, hear the music of our own voices early in the institute and emerge as much better writers at its close. Others simply hear whispers and echoes of the writer they aspire to become, catch glimpses of this writer before he or she flits round the corner and vanishes from sight.

But the point is that it does not matter. What matters is that we share a common conviction and a common aspiration: the conviction that with patient listening we can begin to hear, despite years of doubt and the harsh judgments of others, the rhythms and cadences of a voice that is uniquely our own; the aspiration to remember those moments when we hear that 'click' between ourselves and the sound of our own voices--those "That's SOOO Partick" moments--and to nurture them, cultivate them, listen for them with an heightened sense of expectation.

learning from ray bradbury

2006-07-14T22:05:00.000-07:00

Leah and others in the institute are greatly amused that I wear my sunglasses around my neck, hooked behind with a dark green Croakies strap, each and every day of the summer program.

"Like, ah, at any moment the sun might burst through the fluorescent lighting of our fourth floor classroom?"

Little do they know that I keep my sunglasses at the ready as an homage to our friend Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury has bracketed our summer program, beginning with "All Summer in a Day" on day #2 of our participants' presentations and ending, as you know, with Nicola's request that we read "The Long Rain" in anticipation of becoming Venusians on the final day of participant presentations.

This was accidental but fortuitous, since Bradbury's stories are about nothing so much as the difficulty of remembering the sun in times of deep, heavy, continuous rain.

Karen had us do a very interesting exercise with "All Summer in a Day." She told us, first, to select one of the symbols or similes we found in the opening paragraphs of the story, and to write down, quickly, the attributes of this symbol or simile. I chose Bradbury's description of the sun as a "coin large enough to buy the world," naming its attibutes "monumental," "memorable," "god-like," "overpowering" and "extra-ordinary." We then selected one of the characters in the story and described that character's attributes. I selected Margot, describing her as "timid," "shy," "an old photograph whitened away," and "ghost-like."

But here's where the activity got interesting. "Now, how would you link the symbol and the character you've selected," Karen asked. "What one sentence would connect the two?"

After some thought, I wrote "Margot held a secret within her: a coin large enough to buy the world." When Karen next asked us to expand our paragraphs into short essays, I wrote:

"Margot has a huge secret within her, a knowledge of a coin large enough to buy the world. This secret is too much for her increasingly frail body to contain. It separates her from her fellow classmates, makes her feel alone and even uncertain whether her knowledge is real or just imagined. Margot's recollection of the sun is like the knowledge we all carry of a world before our birth, a prelapsarian world of expansive plenitude, a world where we were part of a larger whole. It is this prelapsarian knowledge, and the confidence in this knowledge, that the other children--Margot's postlapsarian classmates--must snuff out."

While this seemed a wholly new perception to me at the time, an unexpectedly new way of looking at Margot in particular and "All Summer in as Day" in general, in hindsight it seems to have uncannily foreshadowed the great lesson that Bradbury was, as it were, trying his best to tell us all summer.

"You will have days of educational sunshine, many of them," he was telling us, "and it will seem at times to you as if these days will never end."

"But be wary. These days will end. The joy and camaraderie and great good humor you have experienced together these past four weeks will fade, leaving behind only the fleeting smile, the brief shake of the head in pleasant recollection."

"You will experience your return in the fall as Margot experienced her 'exile' to Venus: incessant and unrelenting rain, the drum and gush of water, the crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they will seem to you like tidal waves."

"Your 'classmates'--fellow teachers--will mock you and berate you when you try to tell them what it felt like to be in the sun. 'You're lying,' they will tell you. 'Such a place does not exist. You're making it up.'"

"So follow Nicola and Catherine's advice (see comment #2 sent 9:28 PM) , and follow it now: remember exactly what being in the sun of the summer institute felt like, what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it sounded and tasted like. Some of you will forget, and some of you will doubt. But collectively, you can remember. And you will."

showing, not telling: the isi in action

2006-07-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's the final day of the institute for participant presentations. Patrick is reading from Bird by Bird. Everyone is here--all 20 participants as well as two guests: Mariana Figueroa and her colleague Vivian, both from Christopher ES. Mara begins by reading her multi-genre scribe notes entitled "Notes that put the 'No' in Notes." All the participants follow along as Mara reads, smiling at the in jokes and laughing at what Mara has written and at her wholly animated manner of reading. As she reads "it is the waning of our companion days that make us sad," there is a quietness that settles over the group.

Sandy, who began the institute as an "elective non-writer," reads her scribe notes from memory. She reads "Upon climbing the staircase, we hear the happy sounds of talking in a classroom where people enjoy learning and all the grades are A's. There is no homework. Salivary glands moisten and we are fed rich fruittata, fruit, and pastry. All the food given to us has no calories and we can eat as much as we like. There are no negative consequences. It is a happy place: the table and this room comprise my happy place." Elective non-writer?

After a mandatory break for grazing at the snack table, Nicola begins her presentation on "Strengthening the Trait of Ideas." She comments on how another attendee's comment to her in the parking garage after our session yesterday was especially thoughtful. She's asked us to read Bradbury's "The Long Rain" for homework, and although we frown on such 'added evening assignments' in the summer institute, since they interfere with participants' writing time, it appears from the discussion that follows that almost everyone in the group has completed this one. Nicola was not able to begin her own attendance at the institute until week #2, since she was conducting a field trip to Montreal with her 8th graders during week #1. I can't help but feel that the group's conscientiousness about doing this homework assignment is a form of thank you to Nicola for her contributions to the group--a way of making her feel more welcome.

Karen and I brainstorm on the two topics Nicola has provided: "What does the planet [Venus] look like," and "According to the earthlings, what are some of the things we know about the Venusians?" Karen remarks on how carefully Nicola has set us up for this 'pair-share' by gathering our collective thoughts on the overhead before we begin this brainstorming activity.

Nicola then has us gather together in groups of four, asking us to get out of our chairs in order to do so. "How would the Venusians behave towards their earthling invaders," she asks. "I'd like you to act out your sense of these encounters in the from of a group charade." In our group, Karen notes how strongly she's reminded by the Bradbury story of Grendel rising out of the lake and attacking the 'earthlings' who lie asleep in the Mead Hall. This gives our group the perfect metaphor for our group charade. As I mime the Venusian in attack mode, smelling out his victim, Mariana mimes my earthling victim, and Karen and Vivian mime the arching roof of the Sun Dome. Lots of laughter as the five different groups act out their Venusian-earthling encounters. "I never allow my eighth graders to sit in their seats for long," Nicola explains. "We always have a lot of fun in my classes."

"So what do Venusians look like?" Nicola next asks the group, once again using the overhead to gather our collective thoughts on this quite intriguing subject.

"When my former brother-in-law was attending Union Theological Seminary a number of years ago, he had a professor he claimed looked just like God, only smaller," I observe. "So I think the Venusians look just like me, only bigger."

"I'll let that pass," says Nicola, continuing her instruction. "Think of all the senses," she tells us while giving out sheets of drawing paper. "Think of how the Venusians smell, how they eat, how they wreck the havoc they do on the earthling's Sun Dome. Draw and label at least 10 attributes of your Venusian." It's amazing how well Nicola's 8th grade teacher voice works with all of us. Everyone's busily drawing and labeling their Venusian, just as if we were in Nicola's 8th grade class. I turn from these notes to my own drawing, anxious to finish before Nicola rings her bell to signal the end of this activity.

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Having completed my exceptionally clunky drawing, conscientiously labeling all 10 of the attributes of my Venusian, Nicola asks volunteers to 'share out.' Children's-book-author-illustrator-by-night/first-grade-teacher by day Leah is the first to share. "My Venusian has several tentacles which also serve as his feet: two of his tentacle-feet have Scottish ghillies on them," she explains as she holds up her drawing. "But he also has shoes for moving fast, a Stewart Dress Plaid tie to trick us into thinking he's professional, many arms for multi-tasking, a laptop that he uses as an earthling tracking device, an 'attack bell' for calling us to attention, special vision goggles, super water-resistant hair, and he's 20 feet tall!" Lots of laughter as Leah holds up her strikingly professional drawing and explains the attributes of this unusual vision of a Venusian.

Because Nicola gave a short workshop just yesterday to the participants in our open summer program on vocabulary, and because I asked if she might give a short precis or this workshop today, she spends the final 30 minutes of her allotted 90 minute time slot introducing us to the "vocabulary games" she uses with her 7th-8th graders in her French classes. True to form, the participants launch into playing Nicola's "Fact Review/M&M Game," her "Vocabulary Square Race" and her 'Solitaire Flashcards" without skipping a beat. After we write our evaluations--appreciations really-- of Nicola's back-to-back workshops, a number of participants cluster around Nicola, thanking her and asking her to augment the brief descriptions she provided of her vocabulary games.

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Next up, Grant, a participant who is just beginning a second career as a composition instructor at the college level, has us debrief and synthesize what we've learned over the past four weeks. We start by getting in grade level groups and writing down the one teaching practice we want to 'take with us' from the summer as we head back to our school year classrooms, writing these ideas on sheets of easel paper with sticky backs.

We them perform a 'carousel' activity, moving from one easel sheet to the next, providing comments, queries and augmentations on what each of the other groups has written on their particular sheet. When we return to our initial places in the classroom, Grant gives us our instructions.

"Discuss your different 'must do' teaching ideas with others in your group," he tells us. "Then, on a clean sheet of easel paper, come up with a way of representing your particular 'must do' teaching practice with a visual symbol. Finally, after discussing your different visual symbols with one another, come up with a central visual symbol that represents what your three or four different 'teaching strategy symbols' have in common."

After the initial required period of confusion, questions, and puzzled looks, each of the groups bends to the task Grant has set for us. Twenty or so minutes later, six visual posters are on display on the chalkboard: a game maze, a flower, a closed fist, a heart, a 'safe box,' and a multi-feathered poultry animal mark the central visual symbols on each these posters. When Grant asks what unifies these posters, Karen responds "We're all committed to multi-modal instruction and we should start our own k-college charter school together!"

John speaks of institute participants' "collective refusal to accept the constraints we face in our schools today,'' while Sandy talks about the poster activity itself as an example of the power of supported learning in a safe environment. "This is the sort of activity we just could not have completed, either individually or collectively, at the beginning of the institute." she muses. "It's yet another example of why this model of learning--working together on activities that are various, challenging, and fun--is such an important aspect of what we've learned this summer."

"Aren't we all artists of instruction?" Marie asks.

"We have to be," Nicola concludes.

collegiality and the summer institute

2006-07-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

When you visit a school and spend any amount of time observing the interactions of the teachers there, you notice that some of their behaviors resemble nothing so much as disfunctional marriages. You all know what I'm talking about, yes? The brittle sensitivities, the fear of saying that one wrong word, the long silences.

There are lots of reasons schools not only exhibit but even promote such relationships between teachers. A dearth of opportunities for sustained, honest communication between teachers and a history of isolation of teachers form one another, the denial to teachers of knowledge about or imput into how their classroom performance is being evaluated, and stressful and exceptionally demanding jobs in what are often an appallingly inadequate working environment are but three of these reasons.

So if the teachers attending the summer institute 'arrive' at the opening days of the ISI fresh from these non-collegial environments, why do these attitudes and behaviors so seldom carry over to the relationships between teachers in the institute itself?

I put this question to Laura Brown, co-director of ISI 06, and to Kathleen Cohen, SJAWP TC and coordinator of our current one week long summer "open" program. Here's what we three came up with as possible answers:

--there is no "pecking order" allowed in the institute: each participant receives the same stipend regardless of years of teaching experience or grade level taught, and each is expected to prepare and present a 75 minute workshop demonstration to the others in the institute

--in the institute's cross-grade-level environment, teachers command more attention when they give their presentations because only a few other teachers, at best, are teaching at their same grade level; participants command greater respect in the institute than they generally do in their schools because what they have to say about what they do is often entirely new to the majority of the other participants

--this same cross-grade-level environment, unique to the Writing Project and unique to participants' professional development experience, helps teachers 'place' their instruction in a continuum of learning from kindergarten to college

--being in the company of the sorts of teachers that are attracted to the institute experience makes all participants want to be not only better teachers but a better people

--the TIME FOR REFLECTION marks the most salient difference between writing project programs an most school inservice programs: in the morning sessions, time for reflection is built into most workshop demonstrations; in the afternoon writing groups participants are actively encouraged to reflect on what they've learned in that morning session, as well as what they are learning about themselves as an evolving writers

This is a start. A pretty good start. But I've got the nagging feeling that the three of us are missing something essential. Perhaps several essential things. Perhaps even something we can all bring back with us to those disfunctional school year environments I spoke about at the top of this piece.

I invite you to submit your own thoughts and responses on what promotes that unique sense of collegiality that so often pervades the places and spaces that provide settings for writing project invitational summer institutes.

the writing component of the summer institute

2006-07-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

Given that the summer institute tends to attract participants who are at roughly the same level of confidence in themselves as teachers, but all over the map in their confidence or lack of confidence in themselves as writers, it's surprising that the institute places such a strong emphasis on participants' own writing. Doesn't this emphasis tend to create the same sort of division, distrust and dismay that I was complaining about in my last blog entry?

The answer is that far from increasing the distance between more and less confident, more and less able writers among the participants, the "afternoon writing group" component of the summer institute is consistently cited by past participants, at least in my experience, as the most memorable and important part of the program.

It certainly was for me, when I became a "full participant" in the summer program in the mid-90's, preparing and giving a 75 minute workshop demonstration during one of the morning sessions and writing and responding the writing of my writing group buddies in the afternoon.

Certainly the size of these afternoon groups -- generally from four to six participants -- helps to establish the unique feeling of almost visceral connection that so often evolves among the members of these groups. Their relative intimacy is heightened, of course, by the daily contrast that participants have of moving from the large group in the morning to the small group in the afternoon. I remember that on some days towards the end of my mid-90's institute experience I was actually irritated at the "slowness" of the morning session. I wanting it to be over as quickly as possible so that I could read the latest version of my "Floating" piece to the others in my small response group, and listen to where they had traveled in their own pieces.

Grant has introduced the radical idea that in fact the participants in a summer institute, or at least in this particular 2006 summer institute, are all closet artists more or less masquerading as teachers (see Grant's comment) and I must admit that he has some interesting observations and reflections to support this bold claim. As more of a dyed-in-the-wool-and-proud-of-it pedagogue than Grant, I'd make a more modest claim. I think the writing component of the summer institute helps us discover the artist we all long to be: that elevated being we occasionally catch glimpses of, or perhaps hear whispers from, as we respond to prompts, listen to other's writing, and experience the magic unfolding of pieces of writing we can hardly believe our modest selves were capable of ushering into being.

is the summer institute exceptional?

2006-07-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

I did learn from Todd this afternoon how to include citations in a blog entry. Sort of. While it's more complicated than I'd anticipated, it's a coding system I expect I'll learn as I use it more frequently.

In order to put into practice what I've learned about how to use this code, I'll use this entry to consider the summer institute's "exceptionality," especially in relation to Laura's comment on my initial blog entry. While my reference to Laura's comment will simply appear as "Laura's comment" in this blog entry (linked to a page that includes both the original blog and the comments on it), it will appear in the "edit" version of this blog entry in all it's complicated glory. That way I can go back to the edit version of this third entry to check to see how to perform this rather convoluted operation.

So here's the entry:

Thanks to Laura's comment on my initial blog entry, I was reminded that teachers already experience something akin to the summer institute, at least occasionally, in their places of work. We all have memories of times in our teaching lives when "creativity, conversations with colleagues, room to experiment, community with a purpose, [and] trust that best practices are better than teaching to the test" were the norm rather than the exception. My sense is that these school environments are becoming more and more infrequent, however, as the "mania for testing" gradually invades almost every aspect of our teaching lives.

My attention in the next few blog entries, therefore, will be to isolate and describe those components of the summer institute that can be replicated most realistically in a traditional elementary or secondary school setting. I'm not suggesting these components are always absent from our school year teaching lives, but I am suggesting that we've forgotten their collective power and essential nature. These blog entries can be viewed a counter argument, that is, to the pernicious influence of "accountability" measures in education today, especially in the way these measures have had the effect of creating divisive and distrustful school environments.

I'll begin, in my next blog, with the writing component of the summer institute.

the hawthorne effect

2006-07-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

One of the most startling if predictable features of a Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute is how consistently it demonstrates the educational efficacy of the Hawthorne Effect. Here's a short description of the study from which this name derives:

That individual behaviors may be altered because they know they are being studied was demonstrated in a research project (1927 - 1932) of the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois. This series of research studies, first led by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo along with associates F.J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson started out by examining the physical and environmental influences of the workplace (e.g. brightness of lights, humidity) and later, moved into the psychological aspects (e.g. breaks, group pressure, working hours, managerial leadership). The ideas that this team developed about the social dynamics of groups in the work setting had lasting influence - the collection of data, labor-management relations, and informal interaction among factory employees.

The major finding of the study was that almost regardless of the experimental manipulation employed, the production of the workers seemed to improve. One reasonable conclusion was that the workers were pleased to receive attention from the researchers who expressed an interest in them. (see research summary)

I've noticed over the years that participants in the writing project's invitational summer institutes tend to exhibit talents as teachers and writers in pretty direct proportion to how genuinely they are regarded as talented in these areas. It was no surprise to me, in fact, when Harvey Daniels and Steve Zemelman admitted in 1985 that they had no criteria at all for selecting the participants in their 'invitational' summer institutes. You were accepted by the simple fact that you were willing to spend five weeks of your hard-earned summer vacation 'talking shop' with your K-college colleagues (A Writing Project: Training Teachers of Composition from Kindergarten to College, Heinemann, 1985).

But the key word here is "genuine." Teachers in general and English Language Arts teaches in particular are a wary and skeptical lot, conditioned by the nature of their work to distrust hollow assertions and false promises. You can't simply tell teachers they are exceptional and expect them to believe it. You have to show them.

My next blog will be devoted to some of the ways we've learned to do this in the San Jose Area Writing Project's Invitational Summer Institute. And hopefully by that time I'll have learned from our SJAWP Tech Liaison Todd Seal how to manage links to these blog entries, so it won't take me all morning to type just a few lines, including citations!

why can't a school be more like the writing project?

2006-07-08T23:54:00.000-07:00

Well this is my first atempt at a true blog entry so I'm a little uncerain who I'm addressing and how to go about talking to this somewhat inchoate audience. So I guess I'll sort of talk to myself and see if anyone ends up listening.

It always surprises me how much I look forward to returning to each session of the writing project's invitational summer institute. The groups of teachers who are attracted to this sort of opportunity (a four and 1/2 week workshop-based program focusing on participants' practices in the teaching of writing in the mornings and on the participants' own writing in the afternoons) seem to have a ready sympathy with one another, and to 'gel' surprisingly quickly. I think most experience what I experience--the longer the institute goes on the more we look forward to one another's company.

Now of course in most cases public elementary and secondary schools aren't like that. You come to school and you do your job. You enjoy some of your classses (if you're teaching at the secondary level) and you don't enjoy others. If your lucky you have a few rather close friends among the other teachers at your school, but in fact you rarely talk about your teaching with even these quite close friends.

The writing project summer institute is exactly the opposite. We start by talking bout teaching, both our own and that of others, and it's this talk that leads to the more personal, relationship building talk that quite frequently builds lasting friendships among isi (invitational summer institute) participants.

Sure we're a highly self-selected group. There are only so many teachers, after all, that would voluntarily choose to 'talk shop' for four and 1/2 weeks of their summer would-be vacations. And the configuation of teachers, representing those teaching at a variety of gade levels from kindergaten to college, is similarly unique in most teachers' experience. These two factors contribute a lot to the excitement of the summer institute, the eagerness with which participants look forward the getting together each day, sharing in each other's company and learning from one another.

But having co-directed this sort of extended summer institute for just about 21 consecutive summers at this point, I think it's time for me to step back and see if there aren't some "lessons learned" from these summers that could be usefully applied to the life most teachers live during the school year. A good friend once told me "the summer institute is an oasis in what is otherwise the desert of my school year teaching life." I don't think it has to be that way. In my next blog I'll begin to articulate some of the things we do, often quite simple things, that could reasonably be replicated in a school setting during the regular academic year.