EKU Writing Project

I spent Tuesday with English teachers in Laurel County schools, leading a workshop with middle school teachers in the morning and with high school folks in the afternoon. While I hope they gained some knowledge and seized the opportunity to think about their classroom, I know I figured some things out, as I do every time I spend time in schools. Here’s what Laurel County showed me:

1. Leadership matters. Monica Smith, the district’s Director of Secondary Education, and a former Guidance Counselor and math teacher, invited me to lead the PD. In between the two workshops Ms. Smith and I had lunch together, and I talked with her about her role in the district and the district’s structure. She impressed me with her perspective. She has been in her current position for a good handful of years and has self-consciously incorporated her guidance counselor experience into her district leadership. She says she recognized tension between the district’s two high schools when she assumed her current position and prioritized overcoming that tension in her first years. Now, after her efforts, the two schools plan together and share resources. They collaborate because they recognize that the district’s students benefit from their work. Ms. Smith says there are many students each year who move between the two schools. Consistent with the district’s desire to ever-improve its graduation rate, students’ needs are met when teachers across the district are on the same page. Now, Laurel County’s teachers speak the same language, and they talk to each other. Because of that growth, Ms. Smith has identified her next priorities and continues to help shape the county’s educational future. That's what leaders do. They don't automatically thrust their own agendas on everyone else. Instead, they survey their surroundings and initiate plans for growth; even when the first steps are small, they're still bold.

2. Teachers rely on each other. School started in Laurel County on Wednesday. I worked with these two groups of teachers on Tuesday. Their first day back was Monday, when they had day-long faculty meetings and evening Open Houses. They had had very little dedicated time for preparing to face the students that walked through their doors only a day later and very little time to reconnect with each other. Teachers need both. I like to think the practice and philosophy I introduced and developed during the workshop is valuable, but I talked a lot during the three hours I had with each group. I was self-conscious about that; even going in, I built in time for the teachers to do work similar to the kind of work they can ask their students to do. But teachers will grow professionally simply through having time to talk to each other about their plans, through planning together, through reflecting together, through assessing together. Such collaborative time fits with all of the best practice advice, but the school-day and school-year schedule provides very, very little of it. Therefore teachers are faced with doing some of what is best for their professional lives, and thus clearly beneficial for student learning, on their own time. They do it, because they know it makes a difference and because it’s important to them. A school that prioritizes teacher collaboration must, must, must also provide dedicated time for that collaboration. Even when such time is not provided, though, teachers work together. I gave the Laurel County teachers a couple opportunities to work together. I wish I had given them more; next time I will.

3. Sharing is scary. One aspect of working together that many of the Laurel County teachers did not immediately embrace was the sharing of the ideas they generated and the paragraphs they generated. I sensed that many of them had not been asked to share their writing with anyone in quite some time. And yet – and I know this is a predictable point, but it is one well worth repeating – we ask our students to do just this all the time. So two conclusions can be reached: first, teachers need to write more, such as with their students, and they need to share at least some of that writing with an audience, like their students or their colleagues or professional publications; and second, teachers need to recognize the trust relationship that students enter into when they submit work to a teacher to read. We can’t take that trust relationship lightly. We can expect students to turn in their best work – that’s part of their responsibility in upholding the relationship. Similarly, we must nurture that relationship through every step of the writing process. Assignments need to include choice and encourage risk and authenticity; class time needs to be devoted to writing work, including exploration of mentor texts, conferencing, drafting and revision, and interaction between peers; and feedback needs to always encourage and direct. Even the best writers in our classrooms will benefit from the feedback of an interested reader. The struggling writers in our classrooms need more than the reinforcement that comes with pointing out errors. All students need to be encouraged to keep writing, to try new things, to share their attempts. Clearly, teachers too need this encouragement: so keep writing teachers! try new things! share what you write! It absolutely will make a difference to the way you teach and the way your students learn.

4. No writing assignment matters without a plan for feedback. The feedback plan needs to involve a philosophy, a commitment to student success, and an organizational strategy for students and teachers to keep track of the narrative data generated by student writing and teacher feedback. Encouraging a feedback philosophy was a significant part of my PD focus in working with the Laurel County teachers. But philosophy alone does teachers very little good. Instead, that philosophy – whatever effective feedback is in theory, for example – is only relevant when it is tied to meaningful practice. At the heart of that practice, then, is the reality that teachers and students alike need a method for making sense of the writing that comes at them. Students have to be taught how to process the feedback they receive. This can be a simple mapping or planning of revision strategies if given the chance to revise. It can be accomplished through short, deliberate conferences. Either approach works – and the two in conjunction can work very well – as long as students are given the chance to make sense of what they’ve been told. In the same way, teachers have to organize their sense-making. They have to find a method of keeping track of how students are doing individually: what they need to learn, what they are being told in response to their writing, what they have done well. Teachers also have to find a method of keeping up with how the class as a whole, more or less, fares on a particular assignment: remediation needs, minilesson priorities, plans for next year and next week and the next day. Carl Anderson suggests organizational methods in Assessing Writers. Mark Overmeyer does too in What Student Writing Teaches Us. I referenced both of these books on Tuesday, and I showed Laurel County’s English teachers how I manage the narrative data I receive. More than that, though, I encouraged the teachers to find a method that works for them and to adopt a philosophy that makes that method matter to them and to their students.

Now, two days later, those Laurel County teachers are seeing their students for the second time. I know the excitement remains. I know they are deliberate in their practice. I know they are starting the year right. And I know their students will benefit because of it.

I woke up on this Monday morning for the first time in four weeks with almost nothing to do. That’s not entirely true, of course: we’re trying to sell our house, so there’s plenty to do at home; I’m aiming for tenure, so this article that still exists in notes and ideas is waiting to be written; I have two teenage girls at home, so there’s that job of building an electrified, boy-proof fence around the house that I’ve been meaning to get to. But I didn’t get up this morning at 6:00 so I could leave the house by 7:30 so I could be on EKU’s campus before 8:00 so we could write into the Summer Institute day at 8:30 sharp. And even though sleeping in a bit is quite nice, I can’t help but miss something too. Here’s what I miss, and here’s why I think it so very much matters:

The Summer Institute energizes. This fact alone catches many of the fellows completely off guard (called fellows because of the 6 hour tuition fellowship those who participate in the SI for credit receive; there are always more of these than pure stipend-seekers, so we call them all fellows, until the SI ends, at which point they all become teacher-consultants, or TC’s). All of a summer’s participants have just finished a school year, are drained from it, and are no doubt made jealous by their colleagues’ immediate and vivid Facebook posts showing them at the pool or the beach or on the deck or in the woods, anywhere but in a classroom. Also, their districts have already scheduled all their PD for them, which means the SI won’t offer that carrot either. So they begin the summer thinking they’re sacrificing something, maybe even that they’re martyrs. But it takes even the most resistant only about two days to realize that the SI is no sacrifice at all. The SI offers freedom to think, to experiment and take risks, to learn in new ways and see themselves in new ways, to feel the overwhelming helplessness of being alone on a highwire but with a clear safety net of colleagues, committed facilitators, the massive and connected NWP network, and a deepening knowledge of best practice instruction under them. The helplessness disappears quickly, and is replaced by limitless energy.

The SI empowers. We begin, even before the summer, by looking together at student work – products – the fellows bring to interviews and introductory meetings. Together we start talking immediately about process. It’s process that dominates our conversation throughout the summer. Process transfers: the good work a first grade teacher is doing can be recycled in a middle school math class and a high school English class, and the SI gives that math teacher and English teacher opportunity to reflect on their own and each other’s plans and share their thinking. Because of this focused work, SI fellows leave the SI better prepared than ever to enter their classrooms the next year – their students benefit. Because of this collaborative work, SI fellows leave the SI better prepared than ever to lead in their schools the next year – their colleagues benefit, their administrators benefit.

The SI emphasizes what really matters. The Demonstration sits at the foundation of the SI experience. Every fellow teaches a portion of one SI day, building on the teaching and learning process that happens in their classrooms they introduced when they interviewed. The Demonstrations work best when they invite participants to be active, when they get the rest of us writing and thinking. Many of the best have us moving, mentally if not physically, in a lot of different directions, writing for a variety of purposes, collaborating to generate or develop or publish ideas. Best practice instruction informs Demonstrations, because best practice is transferable, able to be recycled regardless of content area or grade level. Every summer, some of the fellows are shocked to see how the good things they’ve been doing intuitively can be planned for intentionally and then effectively communicated – demonstrated – to their colleagues. This is consistent with the writing project vision: teachers teaching teachers. As attractive as that sounds, all of the current research tells us that what really matters is student learning. During the SI, teachers learn. Because of the learning that happens there, students throughout the region will learn.

The SI exercises muscles too-little used. The SI stretches us. We use writing exercises instead of prompts, believing that students, just like us, will respond better over the long term to the development that comes from being asked to stretch and then stretching to grow in new ways than to the prodding and poking that comes from the product orientation that is a prompt. We end every day by reflecting on what we’ve done that day, what we’ve learned, how we can use our new knowledge. Some fellows create spaces in their composition notebooks, or on their websites, devoted to “ideas for next year.” Reflecting allows us to own our knowledge, to put it in terms we can work with, to commit to it. It’s not a natural act, though. The rest of life goes so fast that we don’t have the time – or don’t take the time – to meditate on what matters most. The SI builds that time in; there’s no hiding from it. And just like with any exercise, we’re better off for it.

This marked the fifth year I’ve been involved with the Summer Institute at EKU. Every year I’ve become more excited about returning to the classroom in the fall, eager to try new approaches, more confident in my plans for ways students will learn and work students will do. Every year I grow more invested in the teacher consultants the Writing Project supports. I’m so ready to visit their classrooms, to brag on them to their colleagues and mine, to steal – I mean, recycle – more ideas, to be introduced to potential applicants for next summer. Is that you? If it is, I’m already thinking about the work you’ll do. Building that boy-proof fence gives me lots of time for thinking, you know.

The 2013 Summer Institute fellows were invited/challenged to write "This I Believe" essays this week during Eddie Mullins' Demonstration. I so greatly admired their enthusiasm for the assignment and their willingness to take risk (more than a few posted drafts of their essays that same day and night) that I wanted to join them in writing the essay. Thanks to Eddie's terrific Demo, I had three or four solid ideas; evidently I believe in a lot. Eddie showed us how to make decisions about possible topics and in the end I realized the following was my most promising possibility. So, here it is:

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First of all, this essay is not about sex. There will be no bauw-chicka-bauw-bauw anywhere; but I will write in great detail about going to bed with my wife. I believe in the sustaining power of 10 p.m.

Years ago my wife was asked to name her favorite time of day. She’s a principal, and loves working with teachers and students every day, but she didn’t mention any of the hours at school. She’s a devoted mother to two fantastic, fun, brilliant, beautiful girls, but she didn’t mention dinner time or homework time. Instead, she answered simply and directly: 10 p.m.

When all goes as planned, we get home from school, eat dinner, do homework, and hang out as a family before the girls take showers to get ready for school the next day. If all has gone well, my wife and I go to bed at 10:00. Once there, we get to what we too often don’t have time for during the busy, busy day. We debrief. We talk about school; we share emails and talk about the big and small events of the day. We plan for the next day. We talk about the girls. We read, side by side and, sometimes, to each other, sharing passages or whole pages of a novel or a magazine article. We watch tv and talk through the commercials. We share prayer requests we’ve gathered through the day. We check facebook and make fun of those people who post too much information about themselves. We ask questions that can’t be answered and dream of possibilities for vacations. Eventually, we decompress enough that we’re ready to turn off the tv, turn on the noisemaker (it rains every night in our bedroom) and go to sleep.

That sleep is made possible, though, because we’ve shared those few minutes. Every night, year after year, we’ve done so. And it has sustained us. Our lives are so busy. Everybody’s life is. We spend so much time completely removed from Thoreau’s innocent but inviting advice to “simplify, simplify.” But at 10:00 every night, my wife and I are reminded of what really matters.

We find in each other what humans across the globe find in those they love: peace, contentment, restoration. The irony is that we’ve carved out entire lives that build us up and let us build others up. We take equal roles in parenting; we’re lifelong educators with no vision of retirement. But we realize as we lie there each night that everyone in the world needs moments like our 10 p.m. Because in it, we can use each other to find ourselves, and to prepare for tomorrow all over again.

We have a bird problem. About a year ago, blackbirds had taken up residence in our grill and, by the time we found them, had begun a small, chirping family. This spring, the tree by our front porch became home to a momma robin. As territorial as we would like to be, she declared war – loudly, repeatedly – every time we walked out the front door, and she marked her space as only birds can. Our only defense was to clean up the front porch, and I chivalrously resisted the urge to use the high-pressure water hose on anything but the concrete.

Fortunately, I found respite from this battle – well deserved R & R, to continue the metaphor – by thinking critically about, of all things, birds. I don’t mean I forged my own avian philosophy; rather, I allowed myself to be drawn into Anne Lamott’s. Actually, Lamott’s dad is the birder in her family, and his daughter appropriates wisdom he shares with her brother and passes it on to readers in the middle of her discourse on the writing life. It’s the kind of message Lamott consistently provides. She reflects her dad and tells us to write bird by bird. She explains the importance of SFD’s (you’ll have to read the book to decipher the acronym). She advocates surrounding ourselves with friends who also write, who will read what we write, who will tell us the truth about that writing, and who will commiserate with us when others – not our friends – share truths that hurt. She convinces us to see ourselves as writers, defining that more by the way we look at the world than by whether or not we’ve had anything published. She speaks our language, even using words we at the EKU Writing Project use often: trust the process. As we read, we learn of Lamott’s process and are encouraged to find our own.

Lamott writes to empower readers, who read what she writes because we are writers. The book distills years of her writing workshops, answering questions she’s been repeatedly asked, anticipating questions new writers undoubtedly ask. I had questions, and I discovered partway through the book that I could follow Lamott on twitter (@annelamott) and, if bold enough, ask. But as I worked my way through the book, she gave me answers.

I asked: can I be a writer if I haven’t published anything?

She answered: There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way…. Then she answers this question more later, when she says: Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems.

I asked: how can I find my focus?

She answered: all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. (And she shares with us E.L. Doctorow’s answer, too: writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.)

I asked (and I’ve asked many times): can I avoid dialogue, since I never seem to write conversations that really matter?

She answered: One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.

I asked: what vision of the world should my writing reveal?

She answered: there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

And I have asked, finally, again and again: why do we do this? Why do we write and why do we teach writing these days, when students resist it and the rest of the world does its best to not honor it at all?

And she answered, beautifully: this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion – not to look around and say, “Look at yourselves, you idiots!,” but to say, “this is who we are.”

Anne Lamott gets who we are. She understands the writer, not just because she is one, though that’s a big part of it, but also because she’s carved out a life where she has been surrounded by them. Writers matter to her, because she sees how they matter. Her final message is thoughtful, direct, and triumphant: “You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.”

Yeah, that’s what we’re after as writers: we want to find ourselves, and, in doing so, hopefully we find something to say that somebody else might understand and, maybe, a way to see it that speaks to them. Writing is a respite, as we write and as we encounter the important thoughts of someone else who understands that writing matters.

The dry run that is the EKU Writing Project’s Introductory Workshop is no simple dress rehearsal at all. Rather, for the fellows who have been selected to participate in the Summer Institute, it’s more trial-by-fire than easing their way in. I should have known it would be as I made the schedule, largely basing the day’s activities on the schedule EKUWP has been using for at least the last five years. But it wasn’t until I took a breath, right around 3:15, that I realized the day provided no breaks. We throw them in.

Our fellows began the day by writing (I won’t mention the evidently cruel pre-Workshop activity I foisted on them just to find their seats: they weren’t happy). After sharing the writing that started the day they hit the computer lab, to participate in a flipped tag-team Demonstration on website design. With a transition that lasted only long enough to introduce the writing workshop group process and to the writing group members they’ll spend hours with over the next several weeks, fellows spent a full hour workshopping the poems they’re writing before the Summer Institute begins. These groups flowed naturally into the pre-Summer Institute book groups that gave fellows a taste of the reading workshop time that will be a regular part of their daily life this summer and reinforced the see-yourself-as-a-writer message that will help them see themselves as ever-more confident teachers of writing as we move through the summer.

Lunch interrupted reading workshop groups. It might seem that lunch would provide a break, but filling the plates of twenty-five people (because the mentors joined us right on time, after all) in less than thirty minutes is hectic enough, and giving just enough space (physical and temporal) for mentors and fellows to chat – and in some cases meet – devoured whatever might have been left over.

The Writing Project believes that an army marches on its stomach, so after lunch the real work began. Small groups pored over student samples fellows brought in, with a rigid protocol driving our interaction, talking together to think through teaching practices, assignment and assessment questions, writing processes, and Demonstration possibilities.

Mentors are an invaluable part of this process, and as group members talk, fellows and their mentors write furiously, capturing thoughts and making plans. Mentors have experience; they know Demos. We ask them to stay in regular contact with fellows as they leave the Introductory Workshop and wait for the Summer Institute to begin. In the role of mentor, they’ll serve as sounding boards. They’ll translate the wealth of information fellows are provided. They’ll field questions and test out ideas and calm rough waters. Because, like I said, we throw the fellows in. But we know they can swim. Today, they start to prove it to themselves.

My wife and I are both big fans of first days. Destined to become teachers, I guess, we both can recall vividly our first days of kindergarten, our first days of high school (still surprised, looking back, that I wasn’t stuffed into a locker), our first days student teaching, our first days with our own classrooms.

One of the things I like best about my role facilitating the EKU Writing Project Summer Institute each year is power of the first day for each year’s fellows. I think about this now because we had Orientation on Monday evening, that chance for this year’s fellows to come together, to get their feet wet, to have some of their questions answered and fears dispelled while new questions and new fears rose to take their place. There’s a fear and a wonder with first days. And I realize that my job – in the college classroom each semester, in the Writing Project each spring – is to stoke those first days, to let them linger a little bit. For that fear and wonder is a good thing. It might make us feel a little anxious, it probably causes our blood pressure to increase a bit, and it always leaves some scratching their heads wondering just what they’ve gotten into, but it also energizes us. First days are exciting, pregnant with possibility, as the saying goes.

At the same time, though, I realize that Orientation is an incomplete first day for the Writing Project. After all, these fellows already participated in interviews, nerve-wracking in their own right, when fate is yet to be decided. And they still have the Introductory Workshop, that day that by its very name is a start to something. Then there’s the actual first day, when the Summer Institute begins in earnest and leads into, for us at EKU at least, the whole month of June.

The thing that all these first days have in common though is the sense of expectation. The opening of new books. The careful organization of necessary materials. The questions about what will happen when and what matters most. It’s clear, when I field fellows’ questions during Orientation that our role as teachers doesn’t make us any more comfortable with first days than we might be otherwise. Instead, it might make us more expectant; after all, we stand before students every year (or every semester) in the position of authority – knowledge is power, and on the first day of school teachers have the knowledge and students sit at our mercy. So maybe that’s the lesson of Orientation. First of all, that privilege is unavoidable. Somebody has to know what’s going on (some of my colleagues might refute that that describes me), and the rest have to be there to find space to move from passive to active participation. So maybe this thought will allow us to empathize with students a little bit more come August or September, when they fill our classrooms and look to us with varying degrees of eagerness and dread. We know they have questions, because we do. We know they have fears; we do too. But we know they can find their way, and it’s our job to help them do it, from the first day.

I like being in my father-in-law’s Sunday school class. Now I teach a class for adults, so I’m not in his class often, but on those few occasions when I am I always learn something and am always impressed at his knowledge of the Bible and his enthusiasm for his topic, no matter what lesson he’s sharing. My favorite part, though, every single time, is when he pauses, looks up from his Bible and very self-consciously adds his own perspective. I like this because he always prefaces whatever wisdom is about to come by saying, “This is Donnie talking; I’m not giving you what the Bible says, this is Donnie talking.”

I thought about that a couple of days ago during my last day with the teachers at Farristown Middle School. We have already finished our study of Cris Tovani’s So What Do they Really Know? and spent this final meeting looking at teachers’ application of Tovani’s ideas. Every teacher brought a set of student work with feedback on it and walked the group through their feedback practice. The rest of us had the chance to ask questions about the feedback we saw and find opportunities to strengthen our own feedback practice by “recycling” what works. Importantly, we used Tovani’s instruction, especially from her chapter “Feedback that Fortifies,” as a lens for our observations and a filter for our language.

We took from Tovani the following “truisms”:

- Feedback should be timely (we struggled with how to quantify that - it's always daunting)
- Feedback should occur regularly
- Feedback should be given in student-friendly terms (a Farristown math teacher handles this well by using students’ names as she writes to them)
- Feedback should promote revision in the work students are doing and/or the thinking they need to do going forward
- Feedback should connect to (and inspire) minilessons
- Feedback should occur throughout the work process (only at the end, in response to summative work, is too late to do students any real good)
- Feedback should balance positive comments and statements suggesting areas for growth
- Grades are not feedback

By the time we met on Friday, teachers had heard these ideas several times. But the deliberate move from theory to practice clearly resonated with teachers. They took a risk by exposing themselves to their colleagues. The ideas they shared were their own, things that worked with their students. The questions they asked of each other were prompted by real concerns and a shared desire to engage ever-more effectively with their own students. It was clear that they had been influenced by Tovani, and equally clear that they had adapted her ideas to the needs, learning styles, experiences and voices of their students. When they shared the work students had done, their responses to that work, and the difference it made to student learning, they showed that they owned the practice of feedback. By that ultimate moment in our time together, it wasn’t Tovani talking any longer, the wisdom we gained from each other on Friday is theirs.

I’m excited to link this blog post to another one today, because today my writing appears somewhere other than here. A couple of weeks ago I seized the opportunity to write on one of my passions – and I couldn’t recommend it more.

I follow Sherry Gick (@libraryfanatic) and Franki Sibberson (@frankisibberson) on twitter and noticed a few weeks a call for guest posters on the blog they share, “Reading Teachers Running.” I took the bait, and took advantage of writing about two things I love to talk about: teaching and running.

It occurred to me as I spent of part of spring break working on the piece I agreed to submit that I was excited about seeing it in print, eager to know what people think, imagining that people would read it. I found myself editing based on my imagined – and very real – audience. I had a very real reason for writing too, and was entering a conversation that had been going on for a while, even on that very blog. It influenced the way I wrote, the details I wanted to include, the tone I tried to maintain, and when I decided to end the thing.

One of the first things I did, even before I started writing (I kind of knew what I wanted to say but had no idea how to say it), was to spend some time on Reading Teachers Running so I could see how they talked on there. I wanted to know the kinds of things they wrote about, the language they used, how long each piece was – really practical things that would make a difference to the piece that was taking shape in my mind. In short, I took full advantage of the readily-available mentor texts the blog presented.

I have taught my college students to use mentor texts, but mostly just in theory. I read the Writing Project’s Content Area Learning Task Force’s newsletter on Mentor Texts just a couple months ago, but mostly just as an admiring onlooker. Suddenly, though, I needed them myself. So I found them, and I used them. This will only help me connect students with the kinds of mentor texts that will help them think through and do the kind of writing they plan in my classes in semesters to come. And I hope readers of this blog will think seriously about the role mentor texts play in their thinking and writing process and find ways to communicate this to their own students.

I’m glad I dove in and wrote the piece for Reading Teachers Running. It would have been easy to dismiss it – it wasn’t the most pressing thing I had to do on my spring break (read: taxes). But I knew I could do it, and I felt like I should. We ask students to do writing all the time that we don’t want to do, writing that we don’t even try to do. The two lessons, then, are these: first, we need to be trying the writing we ask students to do; doing so will give us great opportunity to think about the process writers (us) really engage in to get writing work done. That’s valuable information for students struggling to figure out how to approach a writing task. Second, we need to find opportunities for students to do the kind of writing they want to do. We can’t stress the importance of those real-world purposes enough. I found out that it really does change everything.

Check out Reading Teachers Running. Follow Sherry and Franki (and me) on twitter. If you’re not on twitter, join. I can give you a whole list of education leaders to follow and learn from. And, if you’re interested, I can recommend a bunch of runners to follow too.

Finally, thanks for reading this blog when you do. I hope you continue to do so; I’d love to have comments from you about issues I raise here; and I’d like to think that, when the offer goes out, you’ll volunteer to write a guest post for this blog. It doesn’t hurt, and it can definitely help... a lot.

Cris Tovani ends her book on assessment, So What Do They Really Know?, by taking a hard look at grading. Her premise in the chapter is given away by the title: “Grading is Killing Me.” I couldn’t say it better myself and, through my conversations on Friday with the faculty at Farristown Middle School, I discovered that Tovani and I have very good company. Some of Farristown’s teachers identified grading as the worst part of their job; others, though, joined me in declaring their disdain with greater force: for many of us, it’s the worst part of our lives. That’s right: our lives.

So what is it that creates such animosity, builds up resentment, causes angst, turmoil, even anger? Farristown’s teachers and I engaged in the same debate I’ve been having internally for years – and it feels great to know I’m not alone – and each session finished in some useful problem solving: we all want the same thing Tovani wants for her students, and for herself. We want our attention to student work to be manageable, to be relevant, to be authentic, and to contribute to student growth. When our time spent grading takes over our lives, when the stack seems insurmountable, when the hours we put into our feedback and the precision with which we assign a score or a percent or a letter is ignored by students and reveals “mistakes” or “errors” that show up again and again we lose it. In response, we search for a method that means something, a practice that makes a difference. Tovani offers direction. As I talked with Farristown’s faculty, I listened for ways to put into words the things I’m still in the process of figuring out. What solutions do you have? How do you make it work? How does your assessment, grading included, help students grow?

1.      Grades should reflect both what students learn and what teachers value (Tovani 130). Ideally, those are the same thing. Our priorities should be clear to students before and as they work and they should be clearly and consistently communicated to students. Standards based assessment makes this easier when the standards become the language of learning not just the language of assessment. When we start with learning targets and provide targeted feedback that helps students grow toward achievement (or mastery) of the standard, then assessing or grading in that same way is neither a surprise nor unfair.

2.      Students suffer when they are forced to make decisions about what is important in a class and what is not (131). When students are paying attention to points they are shifting their priorities away from their learning and onto their attainment. This leads to all those things teachers hate: groveling, asking for extra credit, asking for make-up work, submitting work in week nine that somehow disappeared in week two. Tovani talks about students “playing the game of school.” When we encourage such “play” we are suggesting that school is artificial and arbitrary. Instead, assessment should be a natural outgrowth of the learning, work and performance that happens as students grow in their knowledge and ability. They should not have to guess at the rules and they should not strive only to “win.”

3.      Grades cannot ignore what really matters, even when figuring out how to assess such things is difficult (132). Standardized tests offering multiple choice and constructed response questions are convenient, efficient, and useful for broad comparisons. Their model, the ACT, is supposed to suggest college readiness. As numerous studies have shown, it doesn’t. And the “career” part of the CCR Common Core Standards has no connection to such forms of assessment at all. Tovani references the article “Rigor Redefined” as emblematic of the kind of thinking required in the professional world and, thus, the kind of scaffolded learning students should be engaged in. How well do End-of-Course assessments and K-Prep measure students’ ability to “collaborate with colleagues, ask the right questions, and problem solve” (132)? Those things are impossible to quantify, slippery, even, to qualify. But they’re what matter, and we must find ways to teach them and ways to assess them.

4.      We don’t grade practice. And there should be more practice than “game time.” But we can’t wait until the end, the “game time,” to offer a grade (136). We don’t live in a vacuum. Students don’t come to us knowing everything they need to know to be successful in our class. We have to meet them where they are, give them what they need to be successful, let them figure things out, then determine how well they fare. The other day I heard someone say, “Of course they can’t do it right the first time; they’ve never done it before.” This thought should drive our feedback. It should give us pause when giving students only one chance to demonstrate understanding and when thinking we need to grade every single thing students do.

5.      Maximizing standards-based instruction is going to require a culture shift. GPA’s will have to go away. Colleges will have to find measures other than grades for admissions. Scholarships will have to use criteria other than grades for awards. Parents will have to evaluate their children’s success in ways other than honor roll and traditional report cards. Report cards will have to change. They already have in elementary schools. Recently the Kentucky Association of School Councils advertised its “Student Mastery Gradebooks” for purchase. Standards can communicate real information to students about their learning, their progress, and their success. They can communicate this same information to parents and to universities, but thinking must change. If the result is that we stop comparing students with each other and instead compare individuals to established competencies, all the better.

6.      Every teacher needs a grading philosophy. Tovani writes: “we need to know why we grade the way we do and be able to communicate it clearly to students, parents, and administrators” (148). For many of us, if we grade the way were graded when we were students we do our students a disservice. By doing so we give them too little information, draw their attention to weaknesses much more than strengths, and force them to work for a grade rather than the learning that happens when students are engaged in their work and teachers are assured that the work really matters.

What’s your philosophy? How do you make grading decisions? What matters to you? And what difference does it make? Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.

There are a couple reasons I agreed to lead the book study at Farristown Middle School this year. The most recognizable is that the school’s principal, who is not only brilliant but also incredibly beautiful and terrific at selecting a spouse, asked me to. The other reason is that I’ve been developing a “feedback philosophy” over the past year or so, stemming from my Writing Project work on assessment and standards-based instruction. My wife knows, of course, about this feedback work, and when her school’s student voice data showed that students wanted and needed more or better feedback, she asked me if I would lead her teachers through a study of Cris Tovani’s book So What Do they Really Know?. She used another of Tovani’s books, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?, last year when she led the book study, and knew that her teachers would benefit from immersing themselves in Tovani’s voice again and that the school’s students would benefit from their teachers’ focused thought on how to respond to the work they do in their classes.

Our book study is nearly over; we met on Friday to work through chapter six, “Feedback that Fortifies,” the chapter toward which we’d been building since we started. The chapter title suggests Tovani’s perspective, and the Farristown faculty indicated that they share it (though I think they’re expecting to identify still more with the final chapter, “Grading is Killing Me”).

The biggest surprise Tovani includes in the chapter is her careful focus on conferencing, something we might be inclined to see as distinct from feedback. Her linking the two, though, helps us think of feedback as an umbrella term, with conferencing as one specific form feedback can take. As we talked on Friday, we figured out that feedback has four forms: verbal (conferencing), written, peer, and self-assessment. It’s important that students understand the presence, and purpose, of each of these. The first two, coming directly from the teacher, can be introduced from the start of the year, and should have a regular (timely and regularly occurring) place in every classroom. Students need descriptive responses to their work, they need answers to their questions, and they need to be questioned individually in order to achieve the level of critical thinking teachers know they’re capable of.

Teachers must regularly write and talk to students about their work in student friendly terms that incorporate the language of the skills and standards for which students should be striving. That language then becomes part of the students’ language; they learn to think about their work the way their teachers do because that’s the only way it’s talked about. Gone are the abbreviations, the seemingly random “x” marks and circles, the coded language. All are replaced by purposeful statements, pointed observations, questions to which a teacher actually expects an answer, clues to what the thinking and writing in a particular discipline must really look like. No comment, no conversation is directed at a particular piece alone: process over product, thinking over outcome. Students gain transferable knowledge. They take this knowledge to revisions of a particular piece, to the next project, to their other classes now and in the future. And they adopt this perspective as their own when they leave school and enter careers.

Students also bring this knowledge to each other’s work, but only once they’ve internalized it. Peer feedback of any quality cannot be expected in August or September, but the groundwork can be laid then. Once students learn from their teacher how to talk about their thinking and their work they’ll be able to start talking to each other about each other’s work in the same way. The scaffolding for these conversations must be deliberately constructed. The pressure for students to respond only positively, without any real engagement, is famously strong, to the point of probably being stereotypical. But any time students write for an audience other than their teacher, even when that audience is still within the classroom, the work’s importance increases. When work becomes more important students invest more of themselves in it. When they do that, they form the basis for real collaboration and, finally, authentic, lasting, self-assessment.

Self-assessment, after all, is the skill our world needs students to adopt. As I put it to the Farristown teachers on Friday, if students can’t think critically and can’t do so independently, I don’t want them to vote, and I’d rather them not drive on the same roads I’m travelling. In terms of school work, students can be taught how to think, and they can be empowered to think critically. And when all of their teachers, from kindergarten through graduation, join together to consistently and purposefully guide their growth they can be led toward independence. They can be, in other words, “fortified” to do the work their life, not just our schools, will demand of them.

This time I’ve spent with the Farristown faculty has been great. My own instruction is shaped by the conversations we have every few weeks, and I’m bringing these thoughts and others like them together in a piece on feedback that might have something new for educators interested in improving the way they communicate with students. The teachers are finding ways for students to benefit from a concerted effort to target feedback to individual needs. And my wife knows she has helped her teachers develop professionally because she listened to what her students told her and did something about it. That’s how feedback works.