teaching

Writing and grammar: The work continues in college

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon I’m not teaching this year, but several of my students, now in college, have contacted me for help on their writing.

Interesting Point #1: The students seeking my help are those who struggled the most last year in my class. It makes me happy that they view me as a resource.

Interesting Point #2: We do our work on Google Drive. In fact, the students are using the same accounts they received as high school freshmen.

Interesting Point #3: Issues with grammar and mechanics do not go away. Just because you’re enrolled in college doesn’t mean that your longstanding problems with run-on sentences magically disappear.

Out of those three points, I’ve thought the most about the last one. After looking at New Dorp High School’s success with teaching writing, which emphasizes a bottom-up approach of teaching writing as complex thinking, I began to wonder: Was my approach on conventions the wrong way to go?

In other words, is there something wrong with having students write, showing them an error, explaining why it’s wrong, giving them ways to correct it, and encouraging them to be more conscious in the future?

There must be. After all, most of my students with significant grammar and mechanics problems still struggle with them. And they’ve probably wrestled with these concerns since fourth grade.

The students can fix the problem if I identify it, and they can identify it if we read their essay together, but on their own, they have trouble proofreading and revising their own work. They don’t see by themselves what they can see with others.

That’s the hard part for me as a writing teacher. Writing — especially the grammar part — is such a mystery. Why do some students just automatically know how to construct complex sentences? (It’s not just the amount of reading they do.) And then why are others able to improve rapidly, while some grapple with the same grammar obstacle year after year?

A question for loyal Iserotope readers: Let’s say a student habitually writes run-on sentences in the following two ways: (1) sentence and sentence, (2) sentence, conjunction sentence. What ways would you approach this student so that she can, for once, feel confident that she “gets it” and can move on? favicon

reading

Dezmond enjoys his New York Times!

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon A few months ago, I challenged loyal Iserotope readers to donate subscriptions to The New York Times to two lucky graduating seniors.

Within 24 hours, my wish was granted.

The subscriptions began on Oct. 1, and I am pleased to report that Dezmond, now a college student in Seattle,  is the first student to share his gratitude.

He is loving the newspaper. Here he is below on the left. And take a look at his papers on the right!

   

(I must say how much I like these photographs. Dezmond knows what he’s doing. I particularly appreciate how he’s reading the print version of the paper while his laptop sits nearby, beckoning.)

Today we texted a little back and forth, and I learned that Dezmond has read each of the nine newspapers he has received so far. (That’s better than my average!) He also reports that the Times helps him “get [his] reading in” and improves his vocabulary. (I’ve always liked the paper’s verbs.)

This is a great story, don’t you think? I’m happy, Dezmond’s happy, everybody’s happy.

It gets me thinking: What if schools gave all of its graduates a subscription to The New York Times? favicon

reading/teaching

A thoughtful critique of David Coleman

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Several posts ago, I encouraged English teachers to follow David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core State Standards, because of his power to change the way we teach reading.

Colette Marie Bennett, an English teacher in Connecticut, is on the case.

In “David Coleman: The Cheshire Cat of Education,” Ms. Bennett is as leery of Mr. Coleman as I am. Her thesis: “Coleman has materialized, like Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic Cheshire Cat, as the cool outsider who surveys education as a Wonderland ruled by nonsense.”

Ms. Bennett offers several excellent reasons for her leeriness. She contrasts her 21 years in the classroom with Mr. Coleman’s zero. She “remains unconvinced” (as I do) that a greater emphasis on close reading (the New Criticism approach) would significantly improve reading skills. (It might bore students.) And she prefers a balanced approach to reading instruction, one that blends close reading with Reader Response and independent reading.

I agree with Ms. Bennett. To teach reading well, we can’t approach it in just one way. Even if Mr. Coleman is right, his unmitigated push toward one teaching method is too absolute and will not engage all students to enhance their reading skills.

The biggest criticism that Ms. Bennett advances is that Mr. Coleman is an outsider, and she’s tired of non-educators telling teachers what to do. She concludes:

Carroll’s Cheshire Cat character is a tease, an enigmatic riddler who offers judgments and cryptic clues but no  solution to the frustrated Alice. Coleman is education’s Cheshire Cat, offering positions in education but with no evidence to prove his solutions will work.

Unfortunately, even though Mr. Coleman does not have evidence to support his conclusions, neither do most English teachers. The fact is, by high school, our students enter our classrooms as poor and reluctant readers, and it’s not clear right now what the best approach is to accelerate their skills.

My work this year — engaging teachers to put reading at the front of their practice — hopes to deliver some data for this inquiry. And I’m pretty sure that this hybrid approach that Ms. Bennett and Kelly Gallagher and I embrace is the right one, but in order to counteract Mr. Coleman and other strong political forces, we’ll have to have more numbers. favicon

teaching

Teaching writing directly is teaching complex thinking

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon In a response to Peg Tyre’s article, “The Writing Revolution,” in this month’s Atlantic (more here), Jody Peltason makes a good point about the explicit teaching of writing.

Teaching students how to use words like “although” not only improves their writing and their reading; it improves their thinking. The linguistic structures that Hochman and the faculty at New Dorp are teaching their students are also heuristics, cognitive moves that help students to think about the world — the poems they read, the molecules they study, and yes, their personal experiences — in new and more powerful ways. If you’re going to pick one thing and stick with it, this form of writing instruction is not a bad place to start.

via m.theatlantic.com favicon

teaching

Yet another debate: How to teach writing

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon This year, I’m focusing mostly on reading, but I’ve long been interested in writing and how best to teach it.

That’s why I enjoyed reading “The Writing Revolution” in this month’s Atlantic (and in Iserotope Extras!). Author Peg Tyre tells the story of how one school — New Dorp High School on Staten Island — dramatically improved students’ writing skills.

The article is about many things and has already sparked a vigorous debate. But mostly, it’s about how the school marshaled its resources to do one thing well. Instead of spreading itself too thin on a number of projects, and rather than changing the school’s focus from year to year, New Dorp worked painstakingly over time and across disciplines on meticulous writing instruction.

My favorite parts were the stories about teaching. Teachers at the school moved away from the “catch method” — sometimes incorrectly called the “workshop model” — in which students improve their skills by writing whatever they want (usually creative fiction) and sharing their work with others. The idea is that students learn best by “catching” skills and knowledge through a constructivist approach.

This method, New Dorp teachers found, did not work for the school’s students, most of whom come from poor and working-class backgrounds. Instead, a more explicit approach was necessary. (College Board President David Coleman, architect of the Common Core State Standards, would agree with this view.)

Influenced by Judith Hochman (right), New Dorp teachers explicitly taught and modeled a detailed writing “recipe” (don’t say “formula,” Hochman says!) that students could follow. In addition to the basic essay structure, students learned how to make their sentences more complex using subordinating clauses like although, unless, and if. One student said:

There are phrases–specifically, for instance, for example–that help you add detail to a paragraph….Who would have known that?

Yes, there are worksheets and fill-in-the-blank exercises, but New Dorp’s approach doesn’t sound like the old-school grammar drill-and-kill. Rather, it seems similar to a recent instructional trend to encourage students to emulate mentor texts rather than focusing on mechanical and grammar errors. (The logic here is: We’re teachers, not copyreaders.)

Where does this all leave me? Well, it gets me thinking again about what I could have done differently last year to help my students pass the AP English examination. But it turns out that they did fairly well on the writing portion, which suggests that my strategy of frequent practice (an essay every week or so) plus intense, consistent coaching (online writing mentors over Google Docs) was somewhat effective.

But this article made me consider that perhaps I needed to be even more purposeful about the specific writing skills that successful beginning college students demonstrate. What exactly is good writing, what does it look like, and what are the nitty-gritty steps to get there?

As always, please let me know what you think! favicon