Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School Classrooms
reviewed by Paul Thomas — January 10, 2014
Title: Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School ClassroomsIn Has Common Core Lost the Plot? (posted at Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue), Paul Horton considers Common Core’s potential impact on literacy instruction—specifically the place for narrative fiction and creative writing:
A recent Stanford study has indicated that the number and complexity of words that a parent or guardian shares with a baby before eighteen months might partially determine the rate of a child’s acquisition of literacy in later years.
Perhaps more studies are needed to determine whether there is a similar bundled connection between exposure to narrative stories and creative writing and the development of social and emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance, and sensitivity to the needs of others. To take things a step further, our codes of ethics, morality, and connection to the spiritual dimensions of experience have always been intertwined with our reading and writing about sacred texts, great poetry, and great literature.
Cody adds at the end of Horton’s piece:
What do you think? Should fiction and creative writing be sacrificed in schools to implement an untested Common Core Curriculum?
As well, while I remain a strong critic of CC and have posted a number of pieces explaining my concerns, Yong Zhao’s recent response to Marc Tucker captures well reasons to reject CC—but I want to focus on one point about creativity Zhao includes:
Very true, truly creative people know a lot and they have worked hard at learning it, but do they know a lot about what they are passionate about, or what the government wants them to know? Do they work hard at learning something that is personally meaningful, or do they work hard at learning something prescribed by others?
Should we be concerned about the fate of creativity under CC as Horton, Cody, and Zhao suggest?
I think that we should, but in a way that is grounded in how CC is likely to fail writing instruction (see HERE and HERE) and as an opportunity to reconsider how we use the term “creative.”
First, CC is not a unique assault on creativity; traditional practices, especially traditional writing practices, have always emphasized compliance over creativity—but I will concede that the entire standards era, including CC, has somewhat intensified how traditional practices limit creativity (especially because of the related high-stakes testing influence).
Now, let me explore creativity and its relationship to standards-based writing instruction through “The Psychological Basis for Creative Writing” by Lou LaBrant (1936).
LaBrant opens her discussion by confronting careless word usage among English teachers:
Although teachers of English should be an especially discriminating group when verbal products are concerned, unfortunately we have been as guilty as other educators in devising equivocal phrases and vague statements. We have talked about “tool writing,” “mechanics of reading,” “creative writing,” and “functional grammar.” We have suggested a knowledge as to where grammar ceases to be functional and becomes formal, although grammarians have assured us that all formal grammar is derived from speech. We have verbally separated good usage from grammar, reading skills from reading, and implied other such distinctions. “Creative writing” is probably another one of these vague inventions of our lips. (pp. 292-293)
These opening points lead to a powerful and, I fear, ignored redefining of “creative” by LaBrant related to student writing:
For in truth every new sentence is a creation, a very intricate and remarkable product. By the term “creative writing” we are, however, emphasizing the degree to which an individual has contributed his personal feeling or thinking to the sentence or paragraph. This emphasis has been necessary because too frequently the school has set up a series of directions, to this extent limiting what we may think of as the creative contribution: the teacher names the topic, determines the length of the paper, and even sometimes assigns the form. For the purposes of this paper I shall, perhaps arbitrarily, use the term “creative writing” to include only that written composition for which the writer has determined his own subject, the form in which he presents it, and the length of the product. (p. 293)
In other words, “creative” is traditionally used in writing to denote fiction or poetry compositions by students, but LaBrant argues for using the term to stress the importance of students being creative in all their writing as long as certain conditions are met: “that written composition for which the writer has determined his own subject, the form in which he presents it, and the length of the product.”
Students are being creative, then, according to LaBrant, when they are allowed their autonomy as writers, when they are given opportunities to make the sorts of decisions adult writers make instead of simply producing written text that fulfill the traditional paradigm: “the teacher names the topic, determines the length of the paper, and even sometimes assigns the form” (and during the standards era this occurs as a result of high-stakes accountability around those standards and correlating tests).
Anticipating her critics, LaBrant clarifies later in the piece:
Before continuing I should make it clear that in discussing creative writing and its basis in child need, I am not suggesting that this is the total writing program. There is no necessity for deciding that formal, carefully organized papers have no place in the high-school student’s writing; but neither is there need to conclude that the necessity for writing assigned and limited history papers precludes the possibility of creative work. In my own classes both needs are recognized. (p. 294)
That said, LaBrant offers in the following discussion why creative writing, as she defines it, remains important—a message I believe that should inform how we respond to points raised by Horton, Cody, and Zhao:
Creative writing provides an almost universally available outlet for creative energy….
Closely related to the point already made is the fact that free or creative writing has a social and a therapeutic value….
Free writing offers an ideal medium for the development of correct sentence structure, punctuation, and form….
Creative writing stimulates observation and understanding….
Creative writing also makes the pupil more conscious of values in literature. (emphasis in original omitted, pp. 294, 295, 297, 298, 299)
For LaBrant, her conception of creative writing demands more than traditional approaches from not only students, but also teachers:
The foregoing are the chief reasons I see for a program of creative writing. Such a program as here outlined is not easy to direct nor is it a thing to be accepted without careful thought. It demands a recognition of each pupil as an individual; a belief in the real force of creative, active intelligence; a willingness to accept pupil participation in the program planning. I have heard many teachers argue that, given a free hand, pupils will write very little. I can only say that has not been my observation nor my teaching experience…. (p. 299)
And with her own emphatic flair, LaBrant ends her piece: “Let’s not tell them what to write” (p. 301).
The standards era from the early 1980s and including adopting and implementing CC has eroded, if not erased, best practice in writing instruction—practices that had begun to fulfill what LaBrant envisions above. Teachers and students are currently mostly focused on raising test scores at the exclusion of creative writing; CC and the connected high-stakes tests are poised to continue that trend, not change it.
“Creative” as LaBrant defines it is important, and I believe we continue to ignore its importance as we rush to implement yet another set of standards destined to be reduced, again, to what is tested.
Reference
LaBrant, L. (1936, April). The psychological basis for creative writing. The English Journal, 25(4), 292-301.
NOTE: Since I have already posted a few comments on the blog mentioned below, and since I have already received a couple responses to those comments, let me open with a caveat about my selfishness in this post: (1) I am not lobbying to be including in the ranking identified below, and (2) my selfishness is much larger than that as my central argument involves how I and all academics are evaluated within the university for our public work. Selfish? Yes, but likely not the way it appears on first blush; I use myself as an example because I have the data.
—–
When Rick Hess posted his annual ranking, The 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, Jon Becker posted on Twitter:
“The 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.” Once again, a fine idea poorly executed
On the blog post itself, DrSpector raised this concern:
I am a bit surprised to not find Dr. Peter McLaren on this list. He publishes extensively and is often featured in high-profile media events. Plus, his work is hugely [edit] influential.
I had already offered a comment, but when I spent some time with the published list and Hess’s identified system for creating the rankings, I noticed two things about the list: (1) If I use my google Scholar h-index (5) and my Klout score (62), just on those two categories alone, I would rank around 191 (but I am not included at all, and I would garner points in all of the identified categories), and (2) as DrSpector’s comment prompts, it appears not a single scholar/researcher on the list would fall under the classification of critical pedagogy (McLaren and I would).
So this leads me back to “fine idea poorly executed.”
Audrey Watters has already done an excellent job addressing that concern in her On Listing Education Innovators and Intellectuals—in which she concludes:
Frankly, I think all 3 of these lists – Byers’ list, Forbes’ list, Hess’s list – are connected to this machinery.
The machinery of privilege and exploitation. Insults to our intelligence. The right of false naming. Gestures of obliviousnesses. Genuflections to financial and political power. Disdain towards marginalized voices. The erasure of progressive activism. A wishful denial of progressive change.
And thus, I have a modest proposal (not satire despite that terminology, I promise) about how to salvage such endeavors because I strongly agree with Hess’s stated intent: Universities must move beyond rewarding only narrow parameters for what counts as “scholarship,” notably acknowledging and rewarding public work by university-based scholars and academics (what is traditionally called public intellectual work.)
And here is my selfish confession since I have decided that although I continue to publish scholarly books and journal articles in peer-reviewed and prestigious journals as well as maintaining a strong association with my appropriate fields in the academic world, I argue that my public work is far more important, it reaches a much wider and diverse audience, and it is more likely to result in action when compared to my traditional scholarship. In short, as a scholarly good within and for my university and its academic community, my public work is in fact far more valuable than my traditional scholarship.
I am not on Hess’s list (and am not lobbying to be) for a couple possible reasons: (1) I (and many other academics) was simply overlooked, or (2) I was considered but not deemed a “researcher” (both possibilities are examined, again, extremely well by Watters).
And thus, “fine idea poorly executed” because as Watters explains, mechanisms used to identify and evaluate quality of voice and influence within any context are prone to perpetuating a status quo that includes some unfairly being ignored, marginalized, silenced.
Here, then, are two suggestions for executing well a fine idea:
Hess’s effort to identify and rank edu-scholars is an ideal opportunity to put our foot more firmly in the door opening between traditional university-based scholarship and the brave new world of social media. I’m eager to start pushing a bit harder in order to not only open that door but also take it off the hinges.
Two early scenes in Shaun of the Dead require viewers to understand zombie narrative tropes in order to achieve the film’s satirical intent—distinguishing Shaun of the Dead from the zombie horror films it skewers: Shaun makes nearly identical trips from his apartment to a local convenience store, the first involving a normal day and the second after the (unknown to him) zombie apocalypse.
Throughout the film, a running joke involves that humans are pretty much zombies as a modern condition; this is achieved through the zombie-like movements by the surrounding characters, even when characters are not zombies. But during the parallel scenes, Shaun does not immediately recognize the before and after (including bloody handprints and slipping on a bloody floor at the convenience store the second time) because he hasn’t yet had the possibility of zombies enter into his consciousness.
In The Walking Dead (AMC series), viewers are often manipulated by the characters’ ability (and inability) to recognize and distinguish both zombies from living humans and whether or not zombies are animated. This recognition plot element is played out in the film version of World War Z as well as Zombieland—the former, serious zombie horror and the latter, another satire in the tradition of Shaun of the Dead.
Other sub-genres, such as superhero comic book narratives, depend on the recognition plot element as well; Unbreakable examines in sort of a meta-analysis of who constitutes the hero and who constitutes the villain in superhero comic book narratives:
Elijah Price: Now that we know who you are, I know who I am. I’m not a mistake! It all makes sense! In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain’s going to be? He’s the exact opposite of the hero. And most times they’re friends, like you and me! I should’ve known way back when… You know why, David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr Glass.
Running through this recognition plot element is a message: To the uninformed, to the novice, to the unsuspecting, opposing forces (even though one may be “good” and the other, “bad”) may appear to be identical.
Dystopian Fiction, Passion, and the Education Reform Debate
Science fiction (SF), especially dystopian SF, and fantasy often work on two levels—the primary narrative serving as an imagined and metaphorical canvas allowing the author to analyze and critique the very real world. Zombie narratives are often commentaries on consumerism, for example.
Dystopian novels—such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tales—provide readers a psychic distance that contributes to their being able to re-see aspects of the normal real world that are often clouded by living in those moments. Atwood explains, in “Writing Utopia” included in Writing with Intent, that she did not manufacture the atrocities in The Handmaid’s Tale, but instead weaved real-world events into one imagined narrative. Orwell’s 1984 accomplishes much the same effect.
Writers of SF and dystopian fiction realize that there appears to be something anesthetic about the news and history; therefore, they reach for the readers’ heart, souls, and minds through hyperbole.
SF writers, in fact, are often deeply passionate people, almost single-mindedly driven to expose the wrongs they render metaphor in their writing. It seems likely, as well, that their novels and films come off far less looney than when they speak directly about the causes they champion in their fiction.
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam trilogy, I believe, remains far more socially embraced and possibly considered than when Atwood the person holds forth in public about genetically manufactured foods, climate change, or other topics quickly dismissed by the general public as looney left-wing conspiracy theories. (Barbara Kingsolver exists both as a beloved novelists and as a looney left-wing ideologue, only distinguished by her novelist persona and her speaking or writing essays as a living, breathing real person.)
And that brings me back to the education reform debate, played out primarily on social media, and the problem of tone (see my previous three posts on tone: part 1, part 2, and part 3).
The Recognition Plot Element and the Education Reform Debate
Let me start with an example.
At his Living in Dialogue blog (Education Week), Anthony Cody posted Chicago School Rations Bathroom Visits to Help Prepare for Common Core Tests—in which Cody shared a memo from a school instituting new restroom policies and linking those policies to “maximiz[ing] student learning and reduc[ing] the loss of instructional time.” The memo also explains the new policy has additional benefits:
Have students fill in the “time out” and “time in” and then turn the pass in to the teacher when finished. This will help them practice the CCS of telling time with both digital and analog clocks.
I have written an extended blog about this memo, connecting it to David Kaib’s analysis of misguided outrage—Kaib’s about outrage targeting David Brooks, the columnist, and mine about knee-jerk outrage over the restroom policy as a single incident at the exclusion of confronting systemic and historical hierarchical structures mis-serving students.
By the time I finished that blog, Ken Libby on Twitter and Sherman Dorn commenting at Cody’s blog had challenged that the headline and blog were misleading—Dorn stating directly:
This is petty bureaucracy (even if some students abuse hall passes). There is NOTHING in this that justifies the policy based on CCSS or testing — the mention of standards towards the end is silly, but not as silly as the headline here. [1]
Unless I am completely misreading people, by the way, this disagreement among Cody, Libby, and Dorn is not among people committed to dramatically different ideologies; I suspect that all three seek very similar conditions for students, teachers, and public schools.
This is a clash over tone, a real-world cautionary tale about recognition plot elements.
A few years ago, the Common Core debate was far less complicated in that the players in the debate were fewer, the power balance was terribly skewed (toward those designing CC, mostly because few people even knew about CC), and the debate was relatively insular.
As we slide into 2014, however, CC debates are much more public, and far more players are involved. Possibly the oddest and most complicated reality of the change is that two very different camps have gained fairly high profiles refuting CC—what I have labeled Libertarian Reformers and Critical Reformers.
A Tea Party-like, libertarian (popular, not pure) voice has begun to grow among parents, the public, and far right politicians, rejecting CC as (among other things) communist propaganda written by Bill Ayers (villain), brainwashing by the Obama (villain) administration, and Big Government (villain) corrupting children in the U.S.
Critical reformers are mostly educators and scholars who challenge CC as inseparable from high-stakes testing, driving huge costs (and corporate profit) associated with new standards and tests, and instrumental in corporate takeover and privatizing of public schools—with Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee as the “villains.”
If we pause, then, and consider the lessons of SF and dystopian fiction—to the uninformed, to the novice, to the unsuspecting, opposing forces (even though one may be “good” and the other, “bad”) may appear to be identical—the entire tone (and related “hyperbole” argument) debate now must be viewed in a new light. As Diane Ravitch has addressed, will CC challenges have unintended consequences?
To the uniformed public, foaming at the mouth about the socialist Obama is indistinguishable from foaming at the mouth about evil genius and billionaire Gates (the general public sees Mr. Burns from The Simpson, I suspect). As I have discussed time and time again, evidence is relatively inconsequential in the education reform debate—again because determining the credibility of evidence asks a great deal of an audience.
If we become perplexed about why demonstrably untrue narratives (Bill Ayers did not write the CC) exist nearly on equal footing with evidence-based challenges to CC (Gates and his funding have had a disproportionate impact on CC adoption, as well as influence over a number of education policies not supported by the research base, such as VAM and merit pay), we must confront the recognition plot element.
From a distance, or through uniformed eyes, the looney and the passionate look the same, and most people don’t have the time or inclination to get closer to make a distinction.
While I remain firm in my previous examinations of tone—raising the tone complaint tends to show that someone doesn’t wish to address the substance below the tone—and I do not discredit the possibility that hyperbole and metaphor can be accurate and effective, I now have to acknowledge that those positions mean little if my audience cannot distinguish me from Glenn Beck.
I want to end by returning to Cody’s blog post and the complaints from Libby and Dorn. In my opinion, all three are in part correct.
Many of us who embrace evidence-based challenges to CC have and do reach in our passion to make our (to us) credible case against CC; Cody’s headline may in fact do just that, reach—especially if his blog post suggests that CC is uniquely causing what Dorn accurately calls “petty bureaucracy.” As my blog post connected to Cody’s piece explains, “petty bureaucracy” reaches far back before CC—although my years teaching all fell under the current accountability era in education.
In their quest to hold CC critics accountably, Libby and Dorn, I think, also reach: “There is NOTHING in this that justifies the policy based on CCSS or testing,” complains Dorn. Nothing? Even though CC is directly mentioned in the memo?
CC is not an apocalyptic plot to devour our babies and children (although that may make a damn fine dystopian novel or film), but neither is CC some innocuous and inconsequential minor issue.
I agree with Libby and Dorn that CC did not cause that restroom policy, but I am convinced—based on about 2 decades of teaching in the first part of the accountability era—that standards and testing are routinely used to justify a whole host of detrimental policies and behaviors that constitute the status quo of much that is wrong with traditional public schooling—such as enforcing dehumanizing restroom policies for children and justifying that by claiming teaching, learning, and yes, even test scores, are sacred.
I do not pretend to speak for anyone else, nor do I hope to tell others how to conduct themselves, but I have been learning a valuable lesson over the past year, a lesson about the recognition plot element.
Yes, my passion has often made me indistinguishable from the looneys. That’s on me.
Passion, confrontation, and a style prone to metaphor, if not hyperbole (English major, of course), have clearly distinguished me from CC advocates. But at what cost, if I come off as half-cocked and rabid, no different than Beck asserting CC is a Marxist plot by Obama?
And thus, as a SF and dystopian fiction devotee, as a serious and dedicated public scholar, I have to consider the lesson before me: to the uninformed, to the novice, to the unsuspecting, opposing forces (even though one may be “good” and the other, “bad”) may appear to be identical.
—
[1] The exchange beneath Dorn’s initial comment is also illustrative of the recognition plot element:
MGunderson
1:28 PM on January 5, 2014
Sherman, I think what you are pointing to is that this communication memo is wrong on many levels. I have trouble with giving very young children (this is a Prek-8th grade building) incentive to NOT use the bathroom.
I believe using the principal’s CCSS justification in the headline was Mr. Cody’s way of pointing out the silliness. Are we on the same page, or have I misread your comment?
Sherman Dorn
1:55 PM on January 5, 2014
MGunderson,
It’s clear from the headline and the bold-faced intro remarks that Anthony Cody really is trying to claim that CCSS is responsible for this memo. That claim holds no water, at least by this memo.
MGunderson
2:39 PM on January 5, 2014
Ah, I take it in reverse. The principal wants to mandate something ridiculous so uses CCSS as justification for his actions. Not the other way around.
Sherman Dorn
10:11 PM on January 6, 2014
Yep, that’s how I see it.
“One of the strange things about our politics is the disconnect between what sorts of things lead us, collectively, to express outrage and what sorts of things we don’t notice,” David Kaib begins in an examination of outrage centering on a marijuana Op-Ed by David Brooks, adding:
I’m thinking specifically of how a statement can set off outrage while the background behaviors, activities or policies that the statement expresses or seeks to justify do not….
I think this dynamic is a product of two things. First, a great deal of our politics concerns people’s motives and character, which are largely unknowable, as opposed to assessing their actions on their own terms. So when someone says something, potentially revealing their intentions, it seems powerful. Second, and I suspect more importantly, it’s hard to get upset about long-standing, entrenched conditions. We do better trying to oppose some deviation from the norm, or at least, things that are understood that way.
Kaib, I think, is confronting a socio-political and popular tendency to express outrage only at outliers and mistakenly within a cult of personality—all of which offers a powerful lens for reconsidering how teachers, scholars, academics, and public school advocates can better respond to the education reform movement.
For example, Anthony Cody shared a school memo that details how a school is instituting restroom policies “[i]n order to maximize student learning and reduce the loss of instructional time”—including justifying the policies in part by connecting the restroom guidelines to Common Core standards:
Have students fill in the “time out” and “time in” and then turn the pass in to the teacher when finished. This will help them practice the CCS of telling time with both digital and analog clocks.
First, restroom policies are a nearly universal norm of traditional schooling; thus, the likelihood that this memo will spur outrage is greatly reduced, per Kaib’s point above. However, one aspect of the policy does achieve outlier status (connecting the practices to CC) so we may anticipate outrage focusing primarily if not exclusively on that—reinforcing Kaib’s central argument that the norm of institutional and hierarchical control will remain mostly unchallenged.
Now, let me illuminate this further with an anecdote from my own career as a high school teacher. While I believe the memo above is a powerful artifact of many elements found in traditional schooling worthy of our outrage, I also think we must continue to see how policies manifest themselves in the day-to-day lives of students, teachers, and administrators.
I grew up in a small and deeply conservative (read: racism, classism, and sexism were norms and thus unexamined) Southern town in rural upstate South Carolina. After attending high school in my home town and completing college fewer than thirty minutes away, I returned to my alma mater to teach high school English for 18 years.
That school had when I was a student and continued while I was a teacher incredibly rigid and authoritarian policies for student behavior and dress. Many stereotypically strict private schools paled in comparison.
Included in those school rules (by the way, students had to pass a school handbook test at the beginning of each year) were restroom policies that mandated automatic demerits for any restroom visit during class (implicit in such rules were arguments similar to the new policies in the memo shared by Cody—protecting instructional time). The school had a demerit system connected to an in-school suspension structure governing these rules.
One year, I taught a young man who was an elite student and athlete (athletes were under a double set of extremely rigid and harsh guidelines, meaning any school infractions tended to be replicated and intensified by their coaches). During class one morning, this young man stood up quietly, walked to the trash can near the door, and then vomited (almost noiselessly) in the trash can before returning to his seat.
Once I realized what had happened, I calmly told him he needed to go to the restroom. He very politely explained he couldn’t risk the demerits.
And so let me stress here that while the new restroom policy shared by Cody and the student’s behavior in my class may appear to be outlier examples within perfectly normal and reasonable in-school policies, I must contend that they are neither outliers nor reasonable.
A comment, I believe, at Cody’s blog post helps make my case. Sarah Puglisi posted this response to the restroom policy: “Said Admin will no doubt pee as needed.”
For classroom teachers, and all workers under hierarchical structures, Puglisi’s comment is a succinct and powerful point. Let me return to my student who felt compelled to vomit in my trash can and remain in class to avoid the automatic (and I’d add “no excuses” and zero tolerance) punishment he was to receive for a situation beyond his control: The principal who sat as the personification of authority over this policy chain had his own bathroom in his office.
In the context of Kaib’s examination of distracting outrage and Cody’s exposing new restroom policies connected with CC, I want to stress several important points related to the central threads of the education reform debate:
A pattern of education crisis and outrage has characterized the education reform debate for nearly 150 years. The result has been that education reform looks like the conditions of an overcrowded Emergency Room. While ERs often achieve laudable outcomes under stressful conditions, medicine is certainly better administered within a preventative care model.
The conditions of an ER are likely beyond our control to eradicate; people will continue to experience traumatic injury.
Our schools, however, need not be ERs. If we are willing to step back from crisis/outrage and then change the larger norms that tend to go unnoticed, starting with norms that are dehumanizing, as Kaib explains, we can reform our schools in ways that respect the basic dignity of children as well as honoring larger social commitments.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 