Writing Control

One of the most empowering things we can do for students is to allow them to make decisions about the course of their own learning. It instills a sense of ownership, increases engagement, and amplifies learning.
 

We know this.

Then why has so much of writing instruction been about removing decisions from students? We've told them in a variety of ways that they are incapable of making sound and effective decisions about their own writing, and then we chastise them for writing poorly and for not understanding the huge implications in their future academic and actual careers for not being able to write effectively.

Is there a solution to this? Yes, and it is something we're already experts at. When we teach kids to ride a bike, drive a car, dance, play an instrument, or dribble a basketball we're trying, ultimately, to teach them to control what they're doing. So, let's teach them to control what they're doing on the written page.

What "Real" Writers Do

If you look at what writers do, there are three areas they have to control if they're going to effectively communicate their ideas to their readers.

Whether it's a novel, a play, a poem, a scholarly article, an email, an essay, a letter, or a blog, these three areas need to be effectively controlled: Ideas. Structure. Style.
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First and foremost, is control of ideas. It has to be, for without an idea, there is no reason to write. And this is how students naturally come to writing because they have ideas bursting forth. They are enthusiastic writers of fantastic things, and we reward them for this. But too soon, we alter their conceptions of their approach to writing by proposing to them that they need to consider structure first and foremost.

As a classic example, consider how we teach them to write essays (three- or five-paragraph). We begin by handing them an outline of the structure and ask them to fill it in section by section--or even line-by-line. The hollow equivalent of a paint-by-numbers picture that looks pretty from a distance, but that possesses no originality or evidence of transferable skill.

Structure is important, but only in service to an idea worth writing about.

All three areas are vitally, vitally important. Without an effective structure, meaning begins to unravel. Without style, the writing will be lifeless and unread. But without an idea, there is no impetus to write.

But they have to earn a grade, isn't that impetus enough? Yes, for some. And these few will write dutifully, and without any real commitment--and most significantly, without any sense of control or authority.

Author-ity

The word "author" has its roots in the word "authority." In all writing endeavors, we must instill this in our students. We must allow them to make decisions about their writing so that they can begin to assert themselves, begin to sense and develop a sense of control over their writing.

So they can become authorities and authors.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

Upcoming articles will detail the pedagogical implications for the three areas of writing control, beginning (of course!) with Control of Ideas.

Please leave a comment or ask a question. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

This Reminds Me of An Old Truck I Used To Have...

[Author's Note: This post was originally written for our school's technology newsletter, where as a technology pilot teacher, I was asked to comment on our very rocky shift to one-to-one devices that were more like one-and-done (as in one use and defective and unusable) devices. The most unfortunate thing is that our district administration and IT department had pursued every implementation aspect so professionally and thoughtfully, but this has been somewhat forgotten due to the horrible devices we received.]

I once had an old pickup that seemed to need something on it repaired every month. The thing used to eat fuel pumps like crazy, and for some reason kept throwing U-joints. During college, I used to drive from Cascade Park to downtown Portland where I was a graveyard shift guard at the Portland Building. That old truck of mine broke down on I-205 and I-84 more times than I’d like to remember. And since my shift started at 11pm, it was always dark--and usually raining--as I started walking the rest of the way. It got so bad that my dad bought me a AAA membership one year for Christmas. And while I might’ve considered pushing that truck off the 205 bridge more than once, I knew that with a little bit of wrenching I’d be back on the road (for at least a few weeks, anyway).

So much of our transition to these new devices felt like my college days, where I didn’t know if the old thing would start half the time. There was always that anxious few seconds where I inserted the key, started cranking the engine and feathering the gas pedal just so, hoping to hear those cylinders come to life. From, one period to another, we never knew if our new devices were going to lock up, glitch out, not connect to the wifi, start initiating some function test that would last half the period, randomly start updating, etc., etc.

Many times when the devices were malfunctioning, students would say, “Can’t we just use paper and pen?” I had to remind them that it was our job to get in and get our hands dirty, to run these things down the highway a bit and see what they were capable of doing--or of not doing--to try things out, to run into problems and figure out how to deal with them so other people didn’t have to. While there may be a few students who still cringe at the word “device,” by and large, the students were so flexible and understanding of their role in this early roll-out phase.

Though they might’ve been more reliable choices, I didn’t trade in my truck for a horse, or a sweet 1970s moped (you know, the kind with pedals like my crazy aunt had!). And while paper and pencil are certainly reliable technologies, they’re technologies that are falling into disuse in the world outside our schools. No matter how frustrated I got with that truck, and no matter how frustrated we got with the devices, it makes no sense to retreat to antiquated technologies.

I eventually traded up and got a new(er) truck, and it too had a few mechanical problems over the years. There is no perfect technological device (except the 1970s moped!), so we will keep facing problems, need tech support, get frustrated. But the alternative--no devices at all--would put us back to the decade before the typewriter was invented. And they didn’t have Starbucks back then, so that would be totally unacceptable.

Steve

Why High School Teachers Need to Go Back to Kindergarten

One of the most fundamental and compelling--as well as one of the most nebulous and challenging--shifts in education is the burgeoning approach referred to as personalized learning. Fundamental because this approach has been around for eons (think apprenticeships). Compelling because tapping into personal interests increases motivation through ownership.

But the personalized learning movement--at first glance--can appear quite daunting. It seems somewhat ill-defined at this point, and accompanied by the widespread adoption of one-to-one devices might be interpreted as an online free-for-all with little academic grounding. Add to that the expectations to now differentiate for each individual student, and climbing Mt. Everest backwards and blindfolded seems somehow more achievable.

What is often left out of any discussion of this movement are honest conversations about responsibility. One of the greatest ironies of education is that we have said, probably as long as such things as students and teachers have existed, "I wish insert-student-name-here would take more responsibility for his/her learning."

But, you see, it's not that they won't, more often the truth is that they can't. Why? Because we have not allowed them the gift of taking genuine responsibility for their learning. We haven't asked them what they wanted to learn; we have, instead, told them what they were going to learn. We have for a multitude of reasons spawned by a multitude of pressures, opted for conformity and uniformity and hoped that our students would somehow find enough motivation to elevate themselves to our preconceived notions of acceptable performance.

If we did grant them some freedoms in pursuit of assignment completion, they weren't choices that amounted to much responsibility.

Even if we did open the barn doors wide, we kept them corralled in a pen.

Write a paper of this length due by this date. But you can choose your own thesis.

Perform this experiment using this equipment. You can choose your partner.

Give a report on a famous figure of your own choosing. Presentations must contain 10 slides--one for each category--and cannot exceed 4 minutes.

Again, there are a numerous reasons (many quite legitimate) that this has been the case for far too long. But besides the work being more uniformly easier to grade, we have perhaps made our jobs more uniformly destructive for ourselves and for our students.

We get burnt out on work that the students don't seem to want to do and that we don't really want to grade. Students don't take ownership, nor do we, really. We shift the blame, point fingers at checked-out parents, the ills of too much screen time, and we may even resort to complaining about the lower grades not getting the kids ready.

Sure, those may all be true or not true at all. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is that if we want to do right by our students--and by ourselves--we focus on the following:

Trust--the students are going to trust that they won't be penalized for taking risks and for failing. Long-lasting, genuine, meaningful, powerful learning--heck, all significant advances--are built on taking risks, learning from failures, and having the gumption to try again. And we have to trust that this new paradigm is worth the release of our strict control. Compliance begets mediocrity, if that.

Responsibility--meaningful decisions should be shared between each student and the teacher for the trajectory of their learning. Our job is to provide our students a forum for growth--a sandbox, of sorts--where they are free to take charge of their learning, to discover, to dream, to experiment, to fail, to own their learning, and to thrive.

Sounds a lot like kindergarten, doesn't it? Those of us at the secondary level might want to do what we can to rekindle some of this magic.

Perhaps the biggest challenge won't be convincing ourselves or our students of the necessity of this paradigm shift, it'll be trying to convince our colleagues and our administrators. The answer and perhaps the antidote to this will not only be student performance that not only meets, but will most likely exceed standard, your classroom will be a place where you and your students are genuinely excited.

And if nothing else I've written is true, there is no denying the infectiousness of excitement.

How would your high school experience have been better if it were more like kindergarten? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

On the Shoulders of Giants

When I began my career over twenty years ago, there were names that permeated the landscape--my landscape, at least--of the teaching of English:

Atwell.
Rief.
Ramano.
Fletcher.

It was a time in which Mrs. Atwell urged us to place ourselves literally In the Middle of our students. But she did more than that. Through her intimate journey into her classroom, she forced us to start asking many hard questions of ourselves. 

Ultimately these questions led us to one fundamental answer: student empowerment.

Which is sort of ironic because at its very core, isn't education innately about just that? None of us invite in our students and aim to lessen them by the time they leave our classrooms. None of us. It's not who we are.

But--and please believe I still find myself doing this very thing more often than I would care to admit--I make far too many choices for my students when they could be asserting their own desires. And I think for too long our profession has embraced this because it is how we were taught. We stepped into our classrooms that were mirror images of all the classrooms we'd ever stepped foot in. We embraced the status quo.

Atwell and others, though, provided another way to think about strengthening our students by giving them agency. By having them, through meaningful choices, find their voices.

And those of you brave enough to combat the pushback from what was once considered fairly radical recognize how empowering, rewarding, meaningful this paradigm shift has been. Once students trust that we are sincere in our approach--that we want them taking risks, we want them to defy our expectations, we want them all pursuing that which inspires and intrigues them--they begin to own what we had once owned for them.

*   *   *

My career's success--whatever it is--is not only due to those mentioned who are widely-famous, but to those who are more locally-famous to me. Those teachers who were still smiling and learning and loving what they did thirty or even forty years in. They inspired me when I first started out, and I find myself trying to emulate them virtually every day.

If I can see a slightly different landscape, it is only because I am still firmly seated on their shoulders.

Steve
December 1, 2016