Reflecting on Mentoring Young Writers

Next week I will again be in the classroom every day of the week, for five weeks. I will also begin working as a tutor of students attending Queen Elizabeth Public School. With the opportunity to be doing so much teaching on the near horizon, it is important that today I take a step back to reflect on lessons I have learned from mentoring at Hawthorne Public School.

In many ways, the mentoring experience at Hawthorne was unlike most experiences I expect to have in classrooms in the future. Working with a student only once a week for less than an hour, and only for four weeks in total, is likely to be one of the most short-term teaching commitments I will have engaged in. Further still, its focus on a single student, with interactions entirely based around a single, bi-directional relationship, while ideal in many ways, is far from the reality of teaching in public schools today.

This being said, while it may be unlike how I will be able to spend most of my time in schools, it was very much akin to the work I am about to do as a tutor. Working one-on-one with students is liberating in many ways. It allows for an easy, organic development of the relationship between student and teacher. With one relationship, it is also much easier to informally assess for a student's growth as a learner.

I was really glad I took the time in my first meeting with my student writer to share and learn about one another on more personal terms. Having done this, I felt the learning process was facilitated for weeks into the future. As I move into working as a tutor, I am excited to form new relationships with students, to share and learn with/from them in our first meetings and going forward, and to help them grow as learner through this positive, student-centred relationship.

Wrapping up

This was the last week of mentoring for me and my student. Working with him through to improve his writing process these last few weeks has been an instructive process and has given me a great deal of insight into the challenges and benefits of working with middle school students. With my student having been sick last week, I was expecting him to have made some solid progress on some of his written pieces. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and instead I was given a crash course in some of the challenges posed by technology in today's classroom.

My student's paper was almost unmodified from the last time we worked on it, which posed an obvious problem for where we were to go from there. What was more challenging, however, was his motivation in class, which today I could not find a way to productively engage in the process of thinking about his writing. He wanted to use a laptop he had procured in order to go through another of his papers electronically, even though the piece of writing which he had printed for me was right at hand. We had a lot of room for improvement, and countless lessons on style and argumentation with that one and a half page in hand, and yet he could not focus his attention on the task at hand but instead dedicated 80% of his attention to getting his laptop power and figuring out a keyboard issue on it (that wouldn't be resolved all period long).

With this being our last class together, I found myself frustrated to not be able to shift his attention away from the problem we could not fix (the computer) and toward the problem that we had easily addressable and at hand. Having worked with another student last week, I also knew the distance between my regular student and last week's in terms of their ability and proficiency as writers. I knew that my regular student had so much work to do to refine his thinking and practice as a writer, and had this one last class (of 4) with him to produce change.

Of course, with so little time, and so few classes, is hardly possible to produce tangible change in a student's writing. Trying my best to engage with his writing with him in a productive, constructive process that was both critical and supportive was likely the best I could hope for. That he trusted me enough to show me three of four of his pieces over the weeks, and that we got to debate the best star trek captains as well, is enough for me to leave this experience glad to have been a part of it. From speaking with ATs and others, and increasingly from my own experience, I am beginning to understand just how much teaching is about the journey and not necessarily the end results.

Relationships and Mentoring

This week was a bit tricky in terms of my mentoring process, but nonetheless remained instructive. We often talk about the importance of positive, trusting supportive relationships being formed between students and teachers forming the backbone of the learning process; so too do we often emphasize the necessity of careful planning. In this vein, I have worked hard to cultivate my relationship with the student I am mentoring, and look forward all the more eagerly to working with him through his writing process every Monday because of it. However, this week I arrived to find my regular student missing (sick) and the resources I had prepared for him therefore lost much of their utility. I was instead tasked with meeting, learning, and engaging with a new student, whose writing project was totally different, just as was his style of learning.

Engaging with this student reminded me of what one of my AT's calls the "constancy of interruptions" in the teaching process. Indeed, a teacher who is not ready for wrenches to be thrown into their well-laid plans, who is not in fact anticipating these wrenches and ready to use them to their advantage, is hardly ready to teach. Mentoring this new student through his very different writing process was a huge shift, as his learning style was strikingly different. Whereas my former student produced all his work in singular bursts of typed writing, this student was far more iterative in his approach, not even needing to be guided to the beneficial strategies of writing in pencil with an eraser at the ready, writing multiple drafts, and writing with a mind to growth rather than to finality. Whereas the former student was very much interested in the over-all flow of his writing, this one found motivation in refining the details and seeking improvements in his writing.

Had I stubbornly presented the materials I had brought with me for the former student to the new one, I no doubt would have been met with confusion or even alienation. Instead, I spent a productive work period with this student as he waded through four drafts each (?!) of two different paragraphs summarizing the first two scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. As important as preparation is in teaching, I have come to learn that mental preparedness for the unexpected represents an even more important component of successful practice. In this particular scenario, my mental preparedness to adapt my well-laid plans was further augmented by my readiness to create a new, positive, and trusting relationship between student and mentor/teacher.

Teaching students about writing argumentative papers

Some more resources that I have found after last week's session and look forward to sharing with my mentoring student this coming Monday, this time focusing specifically on argumentative essays (which one of his papers seemed to be roughly emulating):

• Argumentative Essay Slide-Guide
• Purdue's Online Writing Lab

With developing writers, I am increasingly getting the sense that one of the key lessons that needs to be taught is that they must consciously decide which type of writing they are performing. Part of this decision should be explicitly aided by the teacher's instruction, for instance through explicit instructions and mentor texts prior to the going out and writing a given assignment. Another part of this is to give them the tools to know how different forms of writing are differently capable of presenting the thesis or information they are trying to communicate. 

While some of the writing samples my student has created are better geared toward a simple report format, with presentation of a series of interesting facts being the goal of his writing product, other samples are clearly reaching toward the presentation of a contentious argument. Young writers do not necessarily differentiate between different forms of non-fiction writing, but helping them to realize that different objectives require disparate writing forms is a key to helping them to learn to write with more precision, control, and intent. 

Quick links/resources on mentoring student writers

The following is a short list of resources I found that have helped me to consider how best to mentor student writers:

• Using Mentor Texts to Motivate and Support Student Writers
• Undergraduates mentor high school writing students
• Mentor Texts - Good Essay Writing
• Writers in Schools: A Program of Literary Arts

The Essay and writing Convincingly

I think that teaching students the essay is still highly relevant. Contrary to what seems to be an increasingly popular belief, I know that the essay is a powerful, convincing, and entertaining literary medium. I think that students should learn it because I think learning it empowers them to communicate and think more effectively, not only as scholars or professionals but as citizens and neighbours.

The way I consider it, the essay is defined more by structure than by anything else; it is its structure more than anything else that makes it a distinct form of writing. The structure of essays is predicated on an organization around the natural flow of a clear, convincing argument, with an introduction, the arguments, and a conclusion. Showing students that introducing, arguing, and concluding an argument may seem repetitive, but in fact works, might be the best way to get them "on board" with learning what at times can feel like Latin. It is important to show them how this structure mirrors many other literary forms they may be more familiar with, like a movie, and also show how when deployed well (i.e. a good clip of a lawyer closing a case from a movie) this form can be helpful to them in far more than just their summative writing exercise.

The essay may be defined by structure, but I think that other key elements of the essay are important for students to learn. Teaching them about choosing and preserving an appropriate voice is really important. Voice in essays should cultivate and convey a clear sense of the author, one that derives directly from their chosen relationship to the audience. Voice is itself defined largely by dichotomies: formal/informal, academic/personal, past/present, historical/literary, emotional/detached, etc. When teaching voice, a clip like this one from Taylor Mali (http://youtu.be/OEBZkWkkdZA) can help introduce the importance of this idea. Teaching students to be aware of their voice when writing and speaking has ramifications well beyond the essay.

Teaching the essay is by no means easy. It brings together much of what is taught in English classes from k-12 into a single written exercise that begins with a blank page and demands that students produce a product that reflects structured, well thought-out (in advance) work. Introducing them to it slowly via scaffolding, and more importantly showing them why it is important to learn to write an essay are key components of successful essay-teaching.

Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education" and Narrating Educational Oppression

Shelley Peterson's work demands teachers devote greater attention to the power of narrative as a means of having students engage with writing to learn. Taking her cue, I returned to a short story of Alexie's called "Indian Education," in which he provides halting narrative accounts of the memories that remain of his public education, from grade one through to grade twelve. I think such an account is provocative because of its working from the baseline story of a student working through each grade level, but then incorporates into this near-universally experienced timeline the deeply incongruous and often distressing variations in the "common" story that have been experienced (/endured) by Native American peoples in the United States.

Educators have become increasingly aware in recent years of the urgent need to incorporate greater attention to the lived experiences, past and present, of Native Peoples in Canada, especially the trauma's suffered in residential schools across this country. Yet, in spite of this growing sensitivity, it seems that many have struggled to integrate these stories into their jobs as curriculum-providers. Narratives like those provided by Alexie can bridge this gap between what we know we need to teach and the curriculum, all while benefiting from the multiple boons associated with teaching writing and history through narrative.

In fact, using Alexie's text as a model could prove even more useful. Once students have seen the way the basic structure of exploring each grade, 1-12, can be channeled to tell such a personal and provocative tale, they could be set to the task of similarly building a narrative one grade at a time, from either personal memory or fictional accounts, toward the construction of a unified story with some semblance of thematic unity. Working with students who are still somewhere along the 1-12 timeline provides the added opportunity of allowing them to carry their story forward, in a sense using their personal educational narrative as a basis for thinking about how their own story can grow or change in the coming years.

Quick Thoughts on Bronwen Low's essay, "Slammin' School"

Low's examination of the use of slam and spoken word poetry struck me as an instructive instance of the "essence" of what a teacher is trying to teach being captured and translated into the parlance of the students they are trying to teach. Trying to teach William Blake or memorize Flanders Fields certainly no longer seem like the best entry-points for students in most educational settings in Canada, but particularly in urban educational contexts. Knowledge of one's students must be the starting point for any educational project, and it seems self-evident that the teacher, "Tim," worked backwards from this precept to arrive at the conclusion of slam poetry as the best way to make the liberating form, exploratory freedom, and communicative power of poetry accessible, relevant, and enticing for his students.

Looking to Tim's excellent work, alongside poet-in-residence Rashidah, I cannot help but think the lesson here is not that slam poetry itself is the ideal access-point for every Canadian classroom, but rather that attentiveness to students' interests and passions is the key for connecting them with the curriculum and other educational goals you maintain.

On Teaching Poetry

Something a little different this week. I thought rather than my typical rant-like monologue I'd attempt to meld practice and reflection. Here I will deploy one of the techniques for teaching poetry, on my basic notes from this week's Peterson and Low reading. In each case, you can view the original, basic notes (I am not usually a note taker when reading), by selecting/highlighting the text of this "black-out poetry" version of my notes. Black-out poetry is a method similar to the method suggested by Peterson as "distilling poems from paragraphs," but further augmented by the fun/powerful-feeling addition of the censor's black marker (an exercise learned in last term's intermediate history class).

Peterson

• Idea that poetry challenges students to think concisely and trim back the vague fat of longer forms of writing. 
• That free verse, without the compunction to produce rhythm or rhyme, may be best for students just becoming accustomed to poetic writing. Robert Frost: "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." 
• Creating images, writing titles, two-voice poems, distilling poems from paragraphs (blank-out poetry!), 
• That stories help us to understand, to structure our experiences. 

Peterson

• Idea that poetry challenges students to think concisely and trim back the vague fat of longer forms of writing. 
• That free verse, without the compunction to produce rhythm or rhyme, may be best for students just becoming accustomed to poetic writing. Robert Frost: "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." 
• Creating images, writing titles, two-voice poems, distilling poems from paragraphs (blank-out poetry!), 
• That stories help us to understand, to structure our experiences. 

Low

• Poetry is often associated with 1960s and old school of writing and teaching. Can be challenging to get students to embrace it today, especially in urban educational contexts.
• You can make poetry "cool" by linking it to popular music swapping in the hipper and more modern form of spoken word, or slam poetry, seems to get students hooked
• promising results across racial and gender divisions
• produces honest reflection and provides forum that allows students to discuss challenging, controversial topics
• question: does this case study in success really apply across the board? Would be interesting to apply in a less privileged environment, as the "poet in residence" and the fact of its being a dedicated arts high school seems to belie the accuracy of the descriptor of this as a truly "urban high school" – is this closer to Canterbury or Rideau? Or something in between? 

In each case the poem does differ somewhat from the original notes. In some cases, this method of producing poetry from paragraphs can produce a meaning that is inverse or totally alien to the original text. In any event, it quickly gets students into writing poetry, even if they did not write the original text in question. It overcomes the terror of the blank page, and turns the writing process into an exercise in censorship and art.

Non-Narrative Non-Fiction and Learning to Learn

This post is working a bit in reverse. I am writing about the source I chose for the class of the 19th (last week), just as I am caught up about thinking about learning I have done about learning in another classroom.

The source text that I chose was a series of educational mixed-media videos called Crash Course (specifically its "World History" series). I like the way that these videos present history often as a series of debates between people(s) with differing ideas of and uses for history. I also enjoy its seamless integration of animations and textual quotations into what is otherwise predominantly a lecture format. What I did not realize before learning a little bit about the ways we learn in Learning Process in the Educational Setting, is that the ways this source teaches history have very clearly been guided by the psychology of memory. Its use of illustrating quotations, photographs, maps and cartoons each serve to punctually wrestle hold of learners' attention while also emphatically binding material to be learned (the dry stuff of the history textbook's paragraphs) to a variety of forms of information, visual, auditory, and textual, so that learners can better remember information. So too does the "lecture's" content serve to deepen memory-retention, which often ends in challenging (often "unanswerable") prompting questions, just as it is often punctuated by them. This source is an ideal one for adding to my toolkit as a History (and English) teacher in training, because it often models the way that I should aspire to teach.

Thinking about this series, and ways that I could further tailor it to my teaching, I also happened to come across a tool called "Zaption," which allows for editing of any posted online video by teachers (or students!) so that the video can be paused by prompting questions, graphics, or comments. This tool can be used in the above-mentioned educational video, or could be added to TED talks, documentaries, movies, or even news clips, to prompt students in the class to answer questions (either vocally, silently in writing, or on their phones to be displayed real-time in front of the class. Integrating such a tool (in concert with others like PollEverywhere) is useful, and really exciting for me for two reasons. On the one hand, it chunks up, or scaffolds, the learning that students do throughout the video. It forces them to stop and rehearse, then consider, then somehow engage with and create linkages to the material they have just absorbed in their short-term memory. On the other hand, it grants students the opportunity to transform what was once a one-way, monologuous information-drop into a two-way, producer-consumer conversation about a topic. Such a conversation is critical not only for improving student engagement and providing a sense of agency to the student-learner, but also because it serves to reinforce their memory of the information being learned, both deepening and broadening the neural linkages they would otherwise be making in a flat and sponge-like way.

Learning is about more than listening, it is about listening that gives birth to questioning, considering, and debating. I think that many of the audio-video tools of the internet era that are available to teachers only manage to act as mono-dimensional educational tools in many cases. Students are not sheep or sponges, and do not learn by mere absorption, regardless of how arresting or relevant the source may be. By linking audio-video sources to Zaption, I think that I can work to add an important layer to the way students interact with their learning materials.

Reflecting on Nancy Atwell's Reflections

           The honesty of Nancy Atwell’s introduction to In the Middle managed to capture my attention as a teacher-in-training. She writes of her experiences as a teacher of writing (as well as literature and history) as if she has managed to become an outside observer of her own teaching habits of years past. This came clearly into focus as she describes her teaching style as having been “creationist” and moving toward teaching as an “evolutionist,” able to let “go of my creations when I see that they get in the way of students acting – and growing – as readers and writers” (Atwell 4). I think the impulse for many teaching candidates, especially given the emphasis made by many instructors and associate teachers on preparedness, is understandably to lean toward learning to teach according to the “creationist” style. Work, work, work to create lessons planned to perfection and then cross your fingers that the students buy into them. This is by no means the intent of professors or ATs, but I think it is the inevitable consequence of a stress on preparedness coupling with the natural stress of teaching for the first time.

The transition that Atwell details in her teaching must have been a difficult one, requiring as it did a surrender of some significant measure of her power by her jettisoning the theory she clearly had become quite attached to. In this context, the passage she provided from Graves’ 1975 report struck me as particularly evocative of just what motivated her to make such a profound and difficult alteration to her teaching style: “It is entirely possible to read about children, review research and textbooks about writing, ‘teach’ them, yet still be completely unaware of their processes of learning and writing. Unless we actually structure our environments to free ourselves for effective observation and participation in all phases of the writing process, we are doomed to repeat the same teaching mistakes again and again.” (Graves 29/Atwell 9)

It seems a truism of the current teaching dogma that teachers should emphasize observation of their students’ individual paths toward learning, and differentiate their teaching to each students needs. So too is the idea that teachers must provide their students with a sense of control and empowerment surrounding their work. Each of these ideas I agree with, but have often found silently at odds with the goals of providing structure and actual opportunities for new growth in student learning. When given the tools and the power to set their own goals, I agree that often students will surprise in positive ways with the breadth and depth of their curiosity, but so too have I seen students led nowhere new by this over-reliance on freedom from structure or direction. 

In this respect too, I found Atwell’s writing compellingly balanced these competing interests when she wrote of how, “Freedom of choice does not undercut structure. Instead, students become accountable for learning about and using the structures available to writers to serve their purposes” (Atwell 15). Her stress on pursuing a balance between the goals of structure and freedom is certainly what most imprinted itself on my mind from this excerpt. As she concluded that she has reached the point of, “striving for the fluid, subtle, exhilarating balance that allows me to function in my classroom as a listener and a teller, an observer and an actor, a collaborator and a critic and a cheerleader,” I found in Atwell a model for what I think I would like my own teaching style to look like, but also a model for how I should hope to reflect on my teaching as the years pass and my students’ needs change (Atwell 21).

What is writing?

What comes to mind when "writing" is mentioned? Writing is the process by which thoughts are recorded and communicated by an individual or group for transmission either to other people or groups, or across time and space. Writing carries with it an aura of authenticity, credibility, and authority. Writing has often been variously pointed to as one of the defining elements of: civilization, Empire, and culture. Invariably, it can even arise as one of the first responses to the question of what separates humans from other species on earth. 

Writing is important if only for these claims made on its behalf. Writing is nothing if not immodest. Writing has disproportionately been the tool of the empowered, the male, and the religious and military. Writing has often served as a tool of hegemony; it serves to consolidate conformity and displace dissent across groups united by language  – language that is often itself defined and policed through the act of writing. 

Writing is said to improve the memory of civilizations, transmit the memory of families and groups, and convey the memory of individuals – real and imagined – to others. At once, we know that the memories of individuals belonging to oral societies are strikingly more reliable and capacious than are our modern, writing-supported recollections. Writing is proclaimed as a tool of the historian and a method of teaching and inspiring empathy, of Herodotus and Anne Frank. At once, we know of its history as a tool of colonizing missionaries and of residential schooling.

As with many tools, it seems that writing is capable of profound dualities. An awareness and sensitivity to these dualities should form a central component of any effort to teach writing.