Teacher Stories
Submitted by Timothy Boyle on October 13, 2011
It took four years, but I finally got the hang of teaching students elementary science. It took hours of professional development, meeting some great teachers, and actually teaching, to figure it out. District finances and a leadership change left me uncertain as to what I would be teaching when I came back to school in September.
When I stopped into my home school this summer, I found out I that would indeed have a new position, test-prep teacher. As such my main area of focus would be on teaching the writing skills necessary to complete the open-ended sections of the PSSA. To get my head around this change I decided to return to what had worked for me in the past. I logged on to the PD planner. I found that the week before school started “Step Up To Writing” professional developments were being conducted. I signed up for them.
Learning from those who developed the curriculum that I would be teaching seemed like an idea that made sense to me. Right before I went to this professional development, I made the mistake of reading a blog that popped up on my Twitter feed entitled Blood Money. This piece presented a discouraging picture of the type of professional development that I was about to attend. I felt like the Step Up to Writing PD wasn’t much different, minus the compensation, from the professional development described in the post. Read the Blood Money blog for yourself and decide how you feel about it.
Step Up to Writing is a program that was created by Sopris, which is part of Cambium. You might have heard of them through some of their other products like Voyager and V-math. These programs were used in the district’s summer program.
Though Cambium and Pearson are different companies, they each have similarly Leviathan line items in school district budgets. Oddly enough, Pearson has the good sense not to include a daily stock price quote on their home page. Moneyed interest aside, the PD was uninspiring. The Cambium representative was enthusiastic about the program, but the program itself was not what I was hoping for. When I cut through the company’s sales pitch,I realized that it is simply a series of writing skill practice worksheets. It certainly isn’t a curriculum, nor is it a starting point from which I want to teach writing.
Last week after reading this commentary, Let’s Stop Teaching Writing, I found my own starting point. This piece from Education Week hit me in the face on my subway ride to school. It was somewhere between Girard and Erie when the idea came to me about how I should structure my lessons. I decided that I would have the students respond in writing to the questions I asked. After reading their answers I would then asked them more questions about their responses. I realized that my students’ learning isn’t totally determined by what I do. What they do in the classroom is a factor that is even more important in determining what they learn. I thought that my kids are going to develop their writing “skills” by actually regularly writing.
Introducing one predetermined skill per class for 27 different sections of students in a week is a plan that doesn’t work for me. And I am equally certain that it won’t work for my students. The last thing I want for them is for the time we share together to be focused on practicing in isolation the skills that will be tested on the PSSA.
As I have moved ahead with my plan I am learning some important lessons about how my children learn. What I am finding that works especially well with the younger grades is to have them do narrative writing. When I conference with them I focus on building on their work, rather than tearing it down. In doing so I have to often remind my students that they are in writing class, not an erasing class. I stress to them that it is most important to first document their ideas when they write. I tell them repeatedly that we’ll make time for editing after they compose their ideas.
Today 3rd grade students were writing the lead to a personal narrative of their choosing. Other than correcting the lonely lower case “i”, (some grammatical things I just can’t let pass) we all just tried to come up with an interesting way to start a story. It was really fun to discuss with students why zombies are interesting and why a cat having brown eyes isn’t.
“Don’t be boring” is a great expectation, but it sure does need some scaffolding. It was really hard to get students to keep writing for the sake of getting more ideas on a page. At eight and nine years old, they are already too eager to get the right answer.
As the year goes on I hope that this instructional approach pans out. I think about the analogue between aiming for the citizens we need we will get the workers we need. I am hoping that by aiming for the writers we need we will get students who are the smart test-takers we want.