Blog Post Assignment #5: Choice is at the Center of What a Writer Needs

Kittle: Chapters 9 & 10

This week's Kittle reading really got me thinking about student agency and creating an environment to find their voice as writers. To me, this stuck out as the most important concept because I often feel like my students at the tutoring center aren't given any choice in the work they do - whether it's a writing assignment or choice in literature. And every time I find a way to give them just a bit of choice, they're so much more engaged. And what Kittle said about uninterested students never revising their work really clicked with me. I have a student who is so passionate about learning and writing especially, but when I asked her to revise her SAT essay for homework, she never got around to it. Instead, she brought me a beautifully written piece about her love of making art out of her food. I hadn't asked to her to do this assignment, but she wanted to share her writing with me and hear my thoughts on how to work on that piece. This was an extra credit open ended assignment for school that she didn't even plan to hand in, she just wanted to know how I thought it could be tweaked. She wanted to revise her own work, for the sake of her own writing. It was a funny coincidence that this extra credit assignment she was working on was tied to a unit on The Scarlet Letter, which is the book that Kittle's colleague had students respond to with a personal narrative. This student's engagement with this piece speaks to everything Kittle spoke about in these chapters: whether its literary analysis or SAT essays, if the kids don't care about it, it's not going to help them as writers. Once we can get them to care, we can help them become better writers, instead of getting them to produce better essays.

I thought that the idea of blending genres was really interesting. Kittle spoke about modeling this for her students and a few other ways to prep them to start writing this way. I think what intimidates me most about Kittle is that her ideas make so much sense and clearly work for students, and even though she herself said she was not a good writer - I feel like multi-genre writing is something I would have to work through on my own before tackling with my students. Kittle even says: "My advice for understanding how to teach multi-genre writing is predictable: study what this writer has done and then craft writing on a big topic in your life." Easier said then done, Penny Kittle, easier said than done.

Throughout the chapter Kittle made note of the fact that even if the assignments are student driven, and the topics are of their choice, and the classroom environment is engaging - there will still be students who will not care about the work they are doing. So what do we do for the students who are, as Kittle puts it, just along for the ride? What can be done to engage them, or meet them in the middle somewhere? I've had students who I had a hard time connecting with, and I know there isn't a one-fits-all answer to my line of questions, but where could I start? I would love to hear what some of you guys have done in situations where students could not care less about reading or writing.


Milner & Milner: Unit Planning, and Burke: Composing a Curriculum

The excerpts from Milner and Milner and from Burke drilled in the need to plan (as did Kittle when she spoke about coordinating with other teachers in a variety of ways). Burke's chapter made a lot of sense to me, he listed pretty logical steps that made unit planning seem doable. He lists some pretty user friendly steps: What do we want students to learn and be able to do, why do we want them to learn or do this, and how can we get them there? I appreciated his break down of time to be allotted for each item, and his side note to remember to be flexible with this. As a preservice student, I also appreciated being able to review a sample unit. Though I'm not planning units now, I think I can find ways to utilize this with my tutoring students.

Because I'm not working in a school, the specifics of the Milner and Milner chapter, like the creative process model, conversation based model, content based model, etc., were a bit foreign to me. As I read through the many different approaches, I wondered if I will have the option to choose which model to base my planning around, or if this is something done on a school-wide basis? Much like the Burke chapter, I appreciated the breakdown of instructional design found on page 469. Get all of your ideas out, figure out which ones work, which ones work together, and arrange them in a way that works for your students and for you.

One of the parts of this chapter that I connected with most was the section on motivation. It relates to what Kittle speaks about, what I've learned from this class, and what I'm seeing with my own students now: "Students have greater confidence in what they are learning because they feel tangible growth. When teachers identify themselves as partners in learning, students have role models for this challenging enterprise."

Blog Post Assignment #4: A Series of Decisions I Make Each Day

I pulled some really great how-to's from this chapter that I can start applying to my teaching immediately. And in my effort to teach like Kittle, I've buckled down and started writing. Kittle writes of her struggle trying to find time to write each day and the excuses she finds to procrastinate - so relatable. But her emphasis on writing so that you can teach kids to write in a genuine way really struck a chord with me, so I've been making an effort to write consistently. I need to figure out my own writing process and flow before (and while) I can ask my students to do the same. In this chapter, Kittle mentioned that she always takes the time to teach through her thinking in whatever genre they're working on from her first thoughts, placeholders or "I don't knows," and even full drafts. While she only usually only does this for one of the five lessons in the week, I think its so important for the kids to see her process to learn how to access their own process.

I loved what Kittle wrote about tailoring her approach to the kids in front of her. I recognize the need to "tune instruction" to meet the needs and skills of the kids in my class, and I hope that through experience I'll be able to do this effectively. I can see this reflected in her handouts to the kids and parents, the emphasis on book talks, the value she puts on sustained silent reading and in giving kids a choice in what they want to read and write.

I'm not teaching in a classroom yet, but I can definitely start giving the kind of feedback that Kittle talks about (notes in the students' journals, second revision verbal feedback, etc.) I've always given feedback, but the way that Kittle does it really makes me think about better ways to work with writers. Her approach is focused on the students' needs, not what I think (or, more honestly, standardized test essay graders think) their writing should be. She writes: "I work hard to listen, encourage and direct my teaching toward something that will help this writer at this moment in time."  I need to focus more on listening to what my students need from me and how they think I can help them.

Blog Post Assignment #3: All Writing Springs From Something to Say

I just finished binge-reading the first five chapters of Penny Kittle's "Write Beside Them," and I can't believe I've waited so long to read this book (though it doesn't help that it's so hard to get your hands on - thanks, Amazon). I wish I had been given this book before I started teaching writing to my kids at the tutoring center. I feel like I have been perpetuating the problem that Kittle references when she talks about how standardized testing encourages learning writing skills, or all skills for that matter, on a superficial level. The tutoring center where I work is focused on test scores and sales, and emphasizes Kittle's thought that this kind of culture only has the product in mind, instead of getting the kids to learn to use the whole process to give form to thoughts, ideas, stories, etc.

I connected with so much of what Kittle wrote about, from her initial hesitation to sit down and write, to her ideas about being authentic with your students so that everyone is learning together. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't really consider myself a writer. But Kittle's words gave me encouragement: it's not about being a writer, it's about being a person who is trying to write. Our kids need to see the process, and see us going through the process with them, to show them how to work through it to get a narrative on paper. Our own insecurities can be used to empower our kids, and that is enough to get me to write with them. I often felt disconnected from the assignments that I was told to give my students, mostly SAT-style essays or overly-guided literary analysis, and a lot of that was not having worked through the assignment with them. Granted, it was also because I disagreed with the way I was being told to teach - but that's a thought for another blog. Kittle needed to do the writing to know what to teach, and that's definitely something I know will help me with my students.

I'm currently working with a few students on writing, and I plan to have them start writing notebooks immediately. I think that the opportunity it provides for rehearsing, a space to just think about your writing, is something that could really benefit them. And if I can get them to expect to write in this notebook each time we meet, hopefully that will get them to think about their writing ahead of time like Kittle's students. I love that Kittle included so many examples of quick writes, as I can apply those directly to my classroom. The most important concept that I've taken from the reading so far is to just start writing and keep writing.

"I think with any writing, you just have to start." 

- Penny Kittle

My biggest takeaway from the Elinor Fuchs article is that reading a play is unlike other reading. We need to look at the world of the play as something separate from our own, and consider all of the elements of that world before event starting to think about the characters. According to Fuchs, when consider the world, or planet, of a play, we have to recognize that it is not something that can fit neatly into our own experience. With this in mind, I took on the task of reading The Humans. Admittedly, I did not go into this reading with much enthusiasm. I share Jaime's thoughts on reading plays, but went into it with Fuchs' advice in mind. Maybe it's just this play, or maybe it's that I haven't read a play since high school and I'm unfairly basing my opinion off of a struggle to get through Shakespeare, but reading The Humans was not terrible. I was actually drawn in and didn't put it down. I did exactly the opposite of what Fuchs' advocated, I was drawn in by the characters and their realness. Real life is messy, and hard, and beautiful, and the conversations jumped off of the pages for me because they reflected real life.