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Student Writing Success: Winning One Child at a Time By Ann Carolan, Writing Consultant

The Prologue............

Prompted by an invitation from Toby Kahn-Loftus, director of the Northern Michigan satellite of the Red Cedar Writing Project (RCWP), I embarked on a maiden voyage this summer as a teacher/consultant in a writing camp for 4th-6th graders. This is one of the many camps held throughout the country by NWP centers.

My 2008 school year had ended with earth-shaking, major life-challenges: retirement, knee replacement surgery, and a cancer diagnosis that shattered my sense of well-being. Reeling from these harsh realities, I hesitated in my commitment, not knowing what the future held, but the "still small voice" inside urged me to explore this new uncharted sea as a writing consultant.

I left the safety net of public school endowments for more reasons than health and age. A new paradigm lured me to this place, erupting from last summer's RCWP experience.  I had a passion to pursue RCWP "best practices" and catch a few stray fish who had slipped through the public school nets in their journey towards becoming writers and readers. I wanted to engage students in real world, authentic learning. I felt compelled to expose students to excellent mentor texts, to share their writing with one another, to publish, and to experience the pure joy of polished, inspired writing.

Like many teachers I longed for an ideal, supported teaching environment - an environment which had escaped me in over-crowded classrooms of 30-plus adolescents, using out-dated, didactic, pedagogical tools and methods of a century gone by. The Spartan Writing Camp was everything I had longed for as a teacher and the experience left me with renewed hope for the future.  I couldn't stop now; I had come too far, and wanted to leave the teaching life on a positive note, so I summoned up all the energy I had and went to camp.

Highlights: Winning One Child at a time.

The kids arrived slowly, one by one, accompanied by their parents in the lobby of the beautiful new North Central Michigan University’s Student Services building. After attending to permission slips and housekeeping details, 18 students and 2 team teachers walked across campus to a classroom in a nearby building. We passed out writer's notebooks and soon began filling our empty "canvas" with responses to wonderful mentor texts.

Unlike traditional school rooms, the 4 classroom walls soon became a mere launching pad to explore the rest of NCMC campus, its neighborhood, and our world. Even downtown Petoskey morphed into a classroom as students embarked on a tour d'force marathon writing experience as our young protégés interviewed local store personnel. In accordance with authentic learning experience, we later published and distributed our newsletters to downtown businesses. Digital photography (based on the picture book mentor text, Zoom, by Istvan Banyai) was also incorporated into our publishing efforts as well. ...But I digress......(The "One child at a time" story really begins here...)

One of our first writing experiences was to consider images from Chris Van Allsburg's inspirational book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and write a story telling what might possibly happen before and after the corresponding image. The first child to finish the prompt eagerly raised her hand and requested to read aloud. She read with little hesitation, straightforward, and with unadorned clarity. Tall and confident, she appeared mature beyond her 10 years and, I assumed, she was a highly successful 5th or even 6th grade student. I applauded her accomplishment incorporating all the basic elements of story: a clear narrator's voice ... character development ... plot ... setting ... description ... an engaging beginning ... a suspenseful middle and a thematic ending. In short, "She has it all", I told the class.

On the 2nd day of the camp, her mother warned me that her daughter, this very same girl who had written and read with such complete assurance and confidence, was a "non-writer and a non-reader". She further informed me, matter of factly, "She hates reading and writing." Mother explained that she had tried every means to motivate her daughter including enrolling her in the Michigan Dyslexia Center ("she didn't like the teacher"), the Sylvan Institute, and had even asked the girl's 4th grade teacher to have her tested for a learning disability. She also said that her teacher tried unsuccessfully to get grant money to help her. I couldn't believe that we were talking about the same child, so I asked her twice to tell me her name. It was indeed the same child who had stood before the class with such confidence. As tactfully as I could, I described how well her daughter had done the day before and assured her I would do everything I could to help.

Finally, Friday arrived, the day of celebration. All the student’s work lay on the desks ready for parents to arrive and celebrate their children's success. We had put together a small book of the students' writing and pictures and her daughter's original story was included. Following the presentations of awards, certificates, etc., I noticed the girl's mother nervously scanning the room. I approached her and invited her to look at her daughter's work. She was reluctant to focus on it and repeated the scripted assertion that “____ hates writing and reading." Picking up the book, I opened to her daughter's story and began reading several lines.  "This story could not have been written by a non-reader!" I implored, begging her to look and see for herself. "Your daughter is an excellent writer. I believe this is not a case of inability but lack of will."

The girl's mother turned to her daughter and asked, "I thought you hated reading and writing?"

She feebly responded, "Well, sometimes, I don't like to read."

I inserted, "It is more about whether you want to; not whether you can or cannot, isn't it?"

"Now that you mention it, her teacher said something like that, too," responded her mother.

This mom was so pleased with this revelation that she asked if it was possible to bring this program to her daughter's school and train all the teachers.

I hope to expand my experience in doing just that - as a writing consultant in her school and others next year. I am excited and grateful to be a part of this new paradigm in the art of of teaching writing through the NWP. When teachers are given ideal writing environments with workable small class sizes; when they are provided with excellent mentor texts, supported by technology; trained in research-based proven methodology; encouraged by positive parent and administrative involvement; and when they are given opportunities to grow as writers themselves - they learn to succeed in and love the art of teaching and writing. That love for writing is what I hope to impart to my students - one student at a time.

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TECH CORNER
	isteNETS Project-What Is It? By Mark Benn Middle School Teacher

Quoting from their web site The primary goal of the ISTE NETS Project is to enable stakeholders in PreK-12 education to develop national standards for educational uses of technology that facilitate school improvement in the United States. The NETS Project will work to define standards for students, integrating curriculum technology, technology support, and standards for student assessment and evaluation of technology use.

The NETS project has developed national technology standards for education in three areas students, teachers, and administrators. Counting the District of Columbia as a state, 49 out of 51 states have either adopted, adapted, aligned, or referenced some or all of these standards into their own state standards.

The  technology foundation standards for students are divided into six broad categories. They are

1.    Basic operations and concepts

2.    Social, ethical, and human issues

3.    Technology productivity tools

4.    Technology communications tools

5.    Technology research tools

6.    Technology problem-solving and decision-making tools

Under each category are several standards for students to achieve. All of this is broken down by grade level to make it easier for teachers to develop and use within their classrooms.

These standards have served us well as we transitioned from the 20th to the 21st century. But things are changing quickly in the workforce and new skills are being demanded by employers including problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and decision-making. None of these skills can be mastered in the 20th century teaching style classrooms where students sit in rows and listen to the teacher.

Technology integration provides the way to change, but we, as teachers, need to change with it. With this need the isteNETs project has responded with a draft of new standards to meet the needs of teachers in the 21st century. Like the old standards, they are divided into six broad categories with multiple standards for each. They are as follows:      

       1. Creativity and Innovation

       2. Communication and Collaboration

       3. Research and Information Retrieval

       4. Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Decision-Making

       5. Digital Citizenship

       6. Technology Operations and Concepts

These standards certainly answer the call of skills being demanded in the workforce of the 21st century. The final standards will be published in June at the National Convention  in Atlanta, Georgia. We, as teachers, need to begin to look at what we are doing and ask ourselves the question Am I preparing my students for the 20th or the 21st century?

For more information go to www.cnets.iste.org

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Grade retention is the practice of having a student (usually a general education student, rather than a special education student) repeat a grade level of schooling. A retained student is sometimes referred to as having been "held back." In Canada and the United States, this practice is only used in the elementary, middle and high school level. 

Advocates of grade retention argue that this is done so as to help the student learn and sharpen skills such as organization, management, study skills, literacy and academic which are very important before entering middle school, high school, college and the workforce. However, extensive research has found short term gains but little to no long-term improvement from grade retention, and significant harmful effects. 

The alternative to grade retention is a policy of social promotion, where students are promoted to the next grade despite their poor grades in order to keep them with social peers. The aim of promotion is not to harm the students' self-esteem, to keep students together by age (together with their age cohort), and to allow teachers to get rid of problem students.

The following are common arguments regarding this practice.

Arguments against grade retention

Opponents of "no social promotion" policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention, and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.

Harm from retention cited by these critics include:

Increased drop-out rates of retained students over time

No evidence of long-term academic benefit for retained students

Increased rates of dangerous behaviors such as drinking, drug-use, crime, and teenage pregnancy among retained students as compared with similarly performing promoted students.

Critics of retention also note that retention has hard dollar costs for school systems: requiring a student to repeat a grade is essentially to add one student for a year to the school system, assuming that the student does in fact stay in the system until graduating from high school.

Arguments for grade retention

Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education. As a result, when the child gets to high school they will probably be forced to be retained or attend summer school. Studies have shown that the high school student that is being retained would be inexcusably painful for a student emotionally because high school students are more vulnerable to change; they are experiencing a lot of pressure because of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Opponents of social promotion argue that it has the following negative impacts:

Students who are promoted cannot do the work

Students will have many failures in the high school years which will most likely lead to dropping out

It sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard

It forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared

It gives parents a false sense of their children's progress

Some hold that most students at the elementary school level don't take their education seriously and therefore retention is most likely not to be effective. Since most middle school students value their education more, retention should be used if they are judged not to have adequate skills before entering high school.

Part 2 of this series will detail the history of retention as well as potential outcomes.

 

 

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Click Here For The Year of the Dogman Website	Click Here For The Haunting of Sigma Website		Click Here For The Western Odyssey Website
The Dogman, a creature of MythMichigan, is an excellent example of modern-day folklore to study in your classes.    http://www.dogman07.com		The Longquist Adventures, written for elementary students, is excellent for teaching mythology and classic stories to young children.   Western Odyssey, the first novel in the series, is now available!
Teachers: We now have special offers on Classroom Sets of our Novel.  Click here for more information: ORDER A CLASS SET

New Teachers' Niche:  A Place for New Teachers, Student Teachers, and Interns
	Learning Pods and Classroom Setup

When I decided to change my teaching style from a teacher-centered, lecture format to a student-centered, project format, I had to seriously contemplate how my room and its instructional resources were arranged.

I knew I wanted to set up student 'pods' of four to five students.  Four makes a great sized group, but five is starting to push it. These sizes also fit with the number of computers I had available. Each pod needed one computer for the group to use, as well as workspace, achieved by placing desks next to each other forming a table.

I placed the pods at the outside walls for a few important reasons.  First was to get some elbow space between students and groups. I wanted to eliminate interaction between groups so students could concentrate on their own group's activities. Secondly, this arrangement allowed me to monitor the computers at all times. Third, this setup created better traffic flow through the room, since students would often need to move back and forth to the central resource center.

I've set up the resource and presentation center in the center of the classroom. This is where I keep student file cabinets (the short types), dictionaries & thesauri, school supplies, and art-type supplies. I've combined this storage area with my podium, overhead projector, and the other tech equipment like vcr or dvd players, digital projectors, and the like. This allows for easy student access to all resources, and I can effectively use all of my wall space when I need to present material.

The 'traditional' classroom and the 'student-centered' classroom are very different both in philosophy and in the application. The basics of setting up your classroom to reflect the learning environment you've envisioned must be thought through carefully before jumping right into the pods.

Having previously taught in the traditional manner, I've found the pod setup, or student-centered class, to be both a challenge and a benefit to student learning. Now that I've had a chance to compare them, my students and I prefer the pods.

Interested in FREE writing activities you can print out and use immediately in your classroom? Simply click the following link to our writing page: http://www.starteaching.com/writing.htm

Be sure to check out our website for the FREE teacher Who-I-Want-To- Be plan and other great Freebies for new teachers. Simply click the following link: http://www.starteaching.com/free.htm

Be sure to check out our website for more great information, tips, and techniques for new teachers, student-teachers, and interns in teacher prep programs. Also be sure to check out our Who-I-Want-To-Be teacher plan for preparing yourself to enter the educational profession.  Simply click the following link: http://www.starteaching.com/free.htm Want to check out the articles in our Student-Teaching series?  Check out our special Student-Teaching page through the following link:  http://www.starteaching.com/studentteachers.htm

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"Making Sand Castles" Author Unknown Themes on Life

In This Week's Issue 
(Click the Quick Links below):

Student Writing Success:
Winning One Child At A Time

Tech Corner: 
isteNETS Project: What Is It?

New Teacher's Niche:
Learning Pods and Classroom Setup

Themes on Life:  
"Making Sand Castles"

Grade Retention (part 1)

10 Days of Writing Prompts

10 Days of Math Problems

Summer Book Sale for Teachers

Book of the Month Club

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