Category Archives: Teaching

Teaching, Writing

Fostering Authority in Students as Writers

[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Over my 40-year (so far) career as a teacher, I have spent the bulk of that time teaching adolescents and adults to write.

An inordinate amount of that effort focuses on a great deal of unlearning since many writing assignments for students are exclusively student behaviors, not authentic practices or producing authentic artifacts.

This semester I am teaching two first-year writing seminars and an upper-level writing/research course. All of these students are in the midst of submitting cited essays.

This is the time of unlearning the “research paper.”

For the upper-level course, students work through an authentic process of choosing a topic, searching for their primary and secondary sources, submitting an annotated bibliography, and then submitting a cited essay (an analysis of media coverage of an educational topic).

Throughout that process, I note that, for example, the annotated bibliography is for them, a sort of prewriting of the cited essay (not an assignment to submit for a grade). This is an effort to lay the foundation for an authentic process of writing an original analysis grounded in evidence.

Despite my repeated warnings, students in this course still often turn in a first submission that is not a media analysis but a “research paper” on the educational topic. For example, instead of submitting their original analysis of how the media covers dyslexia, they submit a “research paper” on dyslexia.

Concurrent with that assignment, my first-year students are preparing their first formally cited essay (using APA). The essay before this assignment requires them to cite using hyperlinks, again emphasizing an authentic and more common approach to evidence in the world outside of formal schooling.

For both first-year and upper-level students, however, the urge to write a reductive and stilted “research paper” is deeply engrained from their K-12 schooling.

One consequence of that artificial experience and template is extremely cumbersome style that includes students writing about their “sources” instead of using their sources as either the focus of their analysis or evidence for their claims.

For example, these sorts of sentences are common:

  • Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).
  • Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color out of schools.
  • One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.
  • Journalists for mainstream media sources have argued that standardized testing adds a lot of stress and without many benefits.
  • Published scholarly work has concluded that testing is necessary, and journalists Donnelly (2015) and Silva (2013) back up these views.

This sort of meta-writing—identifying that scholars do research, treating the sources for an assignment as “my sources,” acknowledging that the student has done the research or reading—is a failure of the students to understand both the nature of cited writing and their own obligation as a writer of scholarship.

The upper-level course has a very challenging assignment that requires students to understand different types of sources and to write in different styles within the cited essay.

For these students, they have to gather evidence of media coverage of an education topic (the primary evidence of their analysis) while also having a body of scholarly sources that serve as the foundation of that analysis.

The brief literature reviews forces them to focus on the patterns in those scholarly articles, which provides the lens for analyzing the media coverage.

In the media analysis and evaluation sections, then, students must incorporate textual analysis, which requires a much greater sophistication than the examples above.

Here is the expanded guide I have created for those students to navigate the stylistic shifts and the use of evidence in cited essays:

Media Analysis Guidelines (EDU 250)

For 8-10 pages, a proposed structure:

Opening – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); be sure to include essay focus on media

[ ] Open with a specific narrative that focuses reader on your educational topic (and possibly use a media example).

[ ] Prefer shorter paragraphs (throughout essay).

[ ] Thesis must focus on media analysis. Prefer identifying questions you will answer about media portrayal of educational topic. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

Literature Review – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the sources (write about your topics, not the sources); must be fully cited (prefer synthesis and avoid presenting one source at a time) and address all scholarly sources included in references

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in the scholarly evidence. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

[ ] Do not write about your “sources”; write about what the evidence shows concerning your educational topic.

[ ] Primarily focus on a synthesis of your scholarly sources; do not walk through one source at a time.

[ ] All scholarly sources must be included, and you must fully cite using APA.

Media Analysis – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the media and include several examples; directly identify media outlets and journalists

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in media coverage of your educational topic.

[ ] Identify journalists and media sources specifically; choose some key quotes to show readers evidence of media coverage patterns.

[ ] Must cite fully in APA.

Media Evaluation (identify if media claims are valid or not) – 2 pages; this is the most important goal of the essay so evaluate the media coverage by implementing your knowledge of the scholarship (do not refer to “research” or “sources”); must be fully cited

[ ] This is the key section where you show whether or not the media coverage is valid (supported by research) or not. You must connect media patterns with the scholarly research.

[ ] Do not refer to “my sources,” the “research,” or the “literature.” Use your scholarly sources to evaluate media coverage.

[ ] Must fully cite throughout in APA.

Closing/Conclusion – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); must emphasize essay focus, media analysis

[ ] Return to a concrete or specific example from media.

[ ] Maintain focus on media analysis and give your reader something to do with your analysis/evaluation.

This assignment seeks to offer students an experience with what is common in academic and scholarly writing (graduate-level work and published scholarship). The assignment guidelines are too much of a template for my liking, but I am aware that many real-world scholarly works conform to such template or narrow guidelines (see this work of mine written to a strict template).

For both my first-year and my upper-level students, however, what I am seeking is how to foster in them greater autonomy and authority as writers and scholars.

My students’ cited essays are never called “research papers,” students always have choice about topics for their essays and must generate their own thesis/focus for the assignment, and my feedback supports these students incorporating evidence (sources) as ways to build their authority as writer and scholars.

For example, we work on fairly simple stylistic shifts that create authority and move cited essays beyond the research paper:

From this:

Research has shown that standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

To this:

Standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

Students have far too many experiences at the K-12 level that use inauthentic writing assignments (such as the “research paper”) as a mechanism for assessing if students have acquired skills—finding and analyzing sources, implementing academic citation, etc.

Those approaches have the goals reversed.

Students as developing writers and scholars need to acquire those skills in the service of their writing and expression; the cited essay is the thing we are seeking, and their authority as writers/scholars is the most important aspect of our feedback and (if necessary) assessment.

Can a student organize and focus an examination of a topic or idea in ways that are compelling and grounded in valid claims?

To do that well, academic and scholarly writing demands citation that serves to support the authority of the writer.

Ultimately, the urge in students to write about their sources is a reflection of their not yet understanding their autonomy as humans, writers, or scholars.

Students as writers must be allowed the full experiences of being a writer and thinker, guided of course by teachers of writing. But we as teachers of writing often do far too much for the student and ask far too little of those students.

Few students will move on from formal schooling and be academic or scholarly writers. What we must provide them with, then, is writing experiences that support their coming to embrace their autonomy and authority as thinkers along with the ability to express themselves in ways that are credible and compelling.

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Education, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Teaching Writing: Reconsidering Genre (Again)

[Header Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash]

My midterm exam for first-year writing invites students to interview a professor in a discipline they are considering as a major. The discussion is designed to explore those professors as researchers and writers.

On exam day, we have small and whole-class discussions designed to discover the wide variety of activities that count as research in various disciplines, and more importantly, what writing as a scholar looks like across disciplines.

The outcomes of this activity are powerful since students learn that research and writing are context-based and far more complicated that they learned in K-12 schooling.

Two points that I often emphasize are, first, that many (if not most) of the professors confess that they do not like to write, and second, I help them see that a profoundly important distinction between their K-12 teachers and professors is that professors practice the fields they teach.

This brings me to two posts on Twitter (X):

First, Luther is confronting a foundational failure of K-12 writing instruction—students being taught the “4 Types/Genres of Writing” (narration, description, exposition, persuasion).

That framing is deeply misleading and overly simplistic, but that framing is grounded in two realities: most K-12 teachers who teach writing are not writers, and the so-called “4 Types/Genres of Writing” are rooted in the rise of state-level accountability testing of writing (not any authentic or research-based approach to teaching composition).

Second, so I don’t appear to be beating up unfairly on K-12 teachers (I was one for 18 years and love K-12 teachers), Dowell is then confronting the often careless and reductive ways in which “academic writing” is both taught and even practiced (academic norms of published writing ask very little of scholars as writers and even impose reductive templates that cause lifeless and garbled writing).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in state accountability testing that asked very little of students. The “4 Types/Genres of Writing” quickly supplanted the gains made with authentic writing instruction grounded in writer’s workshop and the influence of the National Writing Project in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those writing tests prompted students to write narrative or expository essays (for example) that were only a few paragraphs long (likely the 5-paragraph essay). These were scored based on state-developed rubrics that teachers taught to throughout the year.

In other words, as Gerald Bracey warned, writing instruction became almost exclusively teaching to the test. And since K-12 teachers of writers were primarily not writers themselves, this reductive and mechanical way to teach and assess writing was rarely challenged.

Let’s be blunt. K-12 teachers not resisting this dynamic is a logical response to an impossible learning and teaching environment that is dominated by accountability and high-stakes testing.

My criticism is that teachers and students were (and are) put in this situation; I am not criticizing teachers and students, who are the victims of the accountability era of education reform.

Further, while students who move from K-12 to higher ed discover that their K-12 preparation in writing is inadequate and often deeply misleading for how they are expected to write in academia, this new situation is not some idealistic wonderland of authentic writing (as Dowell confronts).

The K-12 to higher ed transition makes students feel unfairly jerked around (many are exasperated when they find out they didn’t need to “memorize” MLA and may never use it again), but navigating academic expectations for writing is equally frustrating (one first-year student this spring noted that my first-year writing seminar is unique, they said, because I teach writing while other professors simply assign and grade writing).

Students deserve better at both the K-12 and higher ed levels so here I want to offer a few thoughts on how to move past the traps I have noted above about teaching writing.

I highly recommend Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest by Ann Johns.

Johns argues for fostering “genre awareness” (addressing in complex and authentic ways Dowell’s concern) and not “genre acquisition” (for example, the reductive “4 Types/Genres of Writing” approach):

The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach.

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).

Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest

Here I think is an outstanding graphic (Johns draws from Bhatia) of moving past confusing modes of writing (narration, description, exposition, persuasion) with genres of writing (OpEd, memoir, meta-analysis, literature review, etc.):

At both the K-12 and higher ed levels, then, teaching writing has been reduced to serving something other than students—either the mandates of high-stakes testing or the nebulous and shifting expectations of “academic writing,” which include very dangerous traps such as a maze of citation expectations among disciplines.

My first-year writing students and I are at midterm this spring, and we just held our conferences for Essay 2 with a scholarly cited essay looming once we return from spring break.

In those conferences, we have been discussing the huge learning curve they are facing since I ask them to choose their essay topic and thus develop their own thesis within a genre of writing.

They are making all the decisions writers do in authentic contexts.

Before my class, they have had most of their writing prompted, most of their thesis sentences assigned to them, and most of their genre experiences entirely reduced or erased.

So I explain this to them, assuring them that their struggles are reasonable and not a product of them failing or being inadequate.

These are new and complex expectations of young writers.

But is the only fair thing to offer them, this experience of becoming a writer as an act of them as humans and not as a performance for a test or to fill in a template.

Recommended

Investigating Zombi(e)s to Foster Genre Awareness

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “Why They Can’t Write”

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “The Writer’s Practice”

A Nation at Risk, Big Lies of Education, Crisis, Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Florida Miracle, grade retention, Grit, growth mindset, literacy, Media, miracle schools, NCTQ, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, reading, School choice, Science of Reading, Social Context Reform, social justice, Teacher Autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching, Testing, VAM

Big Lies of Education: Series

Here I will collect a series dedicated to the Big Lies of Education. The initial list of topics include :

  • A Nation at Risk and education “crisis”
  • Poverty is an excuse in educational achievement
  • 2/3 students not proficient/grade level readers; NAEP
  • Elementary teachers don’t know how to teach reading
  • NRP = settled science
  • Teacher education is not preparing teachers based on science/research
  • Education “miracles”
  • Reading program X has failed
  • Whole language/balanced literacy has failed
  • Systematic phonics necessary for all students learning to read
  • Nonsense word assessments measure reading achievement
  • Reading in US is being taught by guessing and 3 cueing
  • Balanced literacy = guessing and 3 cueing
  • K-3 students can’t comprehend
  • 40% of students are dyslexic/ universal screening for dyslexia needed
  • Grade retention
  • Grit/ growth mindset
  • Parental choice
  • Education is the great equalizer
  • Teacher quality is most important factor in student achievement (VAM)

Series:

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

Big Lies of Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness

Education, Merit Pay, Teacher Autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, VAM

Education Lies that Won’t Die: Teacher Value

The list is mind-numbingly long—education lies that won’t die.

I have detailed often the standard manufactured crisis/miracle rhetoric surrounding discussions of education in media, among the public, and by politicians.

And currently, the manufactured reading crisis is grounded in the Big Lie about NAEP and reading proficiency.

Many education lies that won’t die are ideological beliefs masquerading as evidence-based claims; two of the most persistent of those involve assertions about teacher value and merit pay schemes.

Of course, teacher value is incredibly important to student learning; however, this argument is misleading at best, at worst a lie: “Research has shown that the number one factor influencing individual student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”

It is an incredibly compelling misrepresentation of the data available, primarily because it appears to support the value of teachers.

Yet, the evidence over many years shows that measurable student achievement is mostly driven by out-of-school factors (OOS) with in-school factors and teacher quality as a subset of that, both significantly overshadowed by those OOS factors:

Teachers Matter, But So Do Words
ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)
Family Background Accounts for 40% of SAT/ACT Scores Among UC Applicants

The paradox is that teacher value is very difficult to measure through student achievement tests. Further, claims about teacher value that misrepresent that value force teachers and students into nearly impossible conditions to be successful.

Locally, a district is revisiting value-added efforts to attract and retain teachers in high-poverty, majority-minority school, paired with merit pay schemes (that have been tried multiple times in South Carolina unsuccessfully).

Value-added methods of teacher evaluation and merit pay are ideological commitments, and both are strongly refuted by a large body of evidence.

Simultaneously with these failed schemes, education is increasingly hostile to teachers—parent organizations framing teachers as groomers and indoctrinators along with states and districts trending toward curriculum bans and scripted curriculum that de-professionalize those teachers:

“Phonics Monkeys” and “Real Life Reading”: Heteroglossic Views of a State Reading Initiative

If we genuinely value teachers—and having been in this profession 40 years, I suspect that on balance we do not—we would address teaching and learning conditions (class size, teacher autonomy, etc.) within a larger effort to address social inequity in children’s communities and homes.

Ideology is not evidence, and education, teachers, and students deserve much better than political leaders and administrators using our schools as experiments of that ideology—especially when we have ample evidence that ideology is flawed.

Recommended

VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around? Peter Greene

UPDATE

Maroun, Jamil, and Christopher H. Tienken. 2024. “The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States” Education Sciences 14, no. 2: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.

literacy, literature, reading, Teaching

Centering Students in Novel and Play Study

Student knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature are necessarily a reflection of their teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature.

I teach first-year writing at the university level; much of my work is helping students unlearn and reconsider that knowledge and those beliefs they brings from K-12 education.

Teacher posts on social media are often windows into the misconceptions those students bring to college. I recently fretted for a few days after seeing Advanced Placement teachers refer to book-length nonfiction as “novels,” which triggered a recurring situation when I ask students what novels they read in high school.

The answers often include The Crucible and Shakespeare as well as more recently Between the World and Me—prompting me to note that none of those are novels. Students have mis-learned to call any book assigned and studied in school a “novel,” the seeds of having weak or even flawed understanding of genre (see also here), medium, and mode in reading and writing.

Before I could spend any time on that social media post, however, I came across this:

https://twitter.com/triciaebarvia/status/1700497686317633937?s=20

I agree with both challenges here, but think Anger’s post is way more than a “bad take.” Here are a couple reasons why before a fuller discussion of how to center students in novel and play study.

First, I have little experience that assigning a single novel/play for all students to study under the guidance of the teacher is somehow mostly absent from high school literature classes.

Second, whole class study of novels and plays centers the teacher’s authority (the teacher guides the students through the work and then assesses students on that teacher’s framing of the work) and acquisition of knowledge about a singular work (essentially trivia).

Dropping the whole-class study of assigned novels/plays is not only a needed shift in literature study with students, but also a better approach to fostering student autonomy and healthier beliefs and deeper knowledge about literacy and literature.

One instructional and assessment shift is fostering students’ skills at text analysis instead of knowledge acquisition about a specific text. Traditionally, we assign The Scarlet Letter, walk students through the novel page-by-page, and then test students on knowledge they have retained about that novel.

Instead, we should be giving students multiple experiences interrogating texts and then putting them in new text situations to assess their ability to analyze texts. For example, we can do whole-class instruction on a short text by Hawthorne as preparation for having students analyze a text by Hawthorne students haven’t read before.

The key is not knowing facts about Hawthorne’s canonical novel, but fostering their ability to analyze a text better because they are familiar with that author and have context for anticipating those new texts.

The assigned whole-class novel/play is appealing, I think, because it allows greater control of instruction and, again, centers authority in the teacher and the work being studied. None of that, however, is fostering the sort of autonomy, knowledge, and beliefs students need, and deserve.

In the late 1990s when I was teaching high school AP Literature, I made the switch from assigning whole class novels and plays to complete student choice in the major works my students studied in preparation for the AP Literature exam.

I documented that first experience in English Journal because I learned some key lessons the hard way.

First, this shift requires purposeful and direct instruction that supports students’ ability to choose novels and plays. My students taught me that over a decade of being assigned what to read had failed them as skilled or even eager consumers of works.

Teachers disproportionately do way too much for students (see also the problem with rubrics and writing prompts) and inculcate compliance over agency and autonomy.

Finally, let’s consider how making the shift away from whole-class assigned novels and plays can be navigated by teachers despite the valid challenges that poses.

Novel/play knowledge and instructional strategies are often the two most pressing concerns for teachers accustomed to traditional novel/play study.

Yes, I have had students choose novels/plays I had not read (but often read eventually because students chose them) but that in no way hindered my ability to offer instruction or assess their work. In fact, when students are allowed to be the authority on a text, they often are more fully engaged in both reading and understanding the work.

Next, allowing students tethered choice in texts can fit into traditional practices.

The primary structure of novel/play study grounded in student choice and agency is that I designed thematic units within which students chose their works (tethered choice).

For example, one unit was Black writers and the lives of Black Americans. Students had to choose and justify a novel within that theme (we focused on works that helped prepare them for the AP exam, for example, but in any class the purpose must be established for studying the work—understanding American literature or preparation for college, etc.).

Next, for each work the student chooses, they had to build a resource folder on that work by doing searches in the library; these resource folders had literary analysis and author material that supported the student’s study but also gave me access to knowledge if I had not read the work.

Now, I think this is the key for teachers concerned about how to conduct instruction.

We still had whole-class discussions around the thematic element, but each student was invited to share their journey through their chosen text. All students, then, were encouraged to connect and contrast as the discussions unfolded.

For example, one student would note the use of flying motifs drawn from African mythology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, prompting other students to share the use of flying motifs in other works.

These organic connections were much more engaging than when I orchestrated page-by-page analysis of a shared novel or play.

These class discussions were embedded in reading workshop structures that allowed students time in class to read and research as well as conference with me and other students (especially when students chose the same work).

Using these approaches, students read more, were more deeply engaged, and gained much healthier beliefs and richer knowledge.

As teachers, we must constantly interrogate when our commitments are grounded in retaining power and authority versus fostering the autonomy and agency of our students as well as the integrity of our fields of literacy and literature.

Despite social media protestations, I doubt whole-class novel/play study has disappeared from high school literature classes, but I also certain that making the shift away from that and toward student agency would be one of the best developments for those students.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, Social Context Reform, Teaching, Testing

Moving Beyond the Cult of Pedagogy in Education Reform

As a teacher for forty years and a teacher educator for more than half of that career, I have always struggled with the tendency to oversell teacher quality and instructional practice.

Does teacher quality matter? Of course.

Does instructional practice matter? Again, of course.

But both teacher quality and instruction (pedagogy) are dwarfed by teaching and learning conditions within schools and more significantly by the conditions of any child’s life.

As I have noted recently, the peak era of focusing on teacher quality, the value-added movement (VAM) occurring mostly under the Obama administration, instead of identifying high-quality teachers as a driver for improving student achievement found out something much different than intended:

VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.

ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)

Teacher quality necessarily includes two types of knowledge by a teacher—content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.

Yet the VAM experiment revealed something we have known for decades—standardized tests of student learning mostly reflect the student’s relative privilege or inequity outside of school.

Despite the refrain of Secretary Duncan under Obama, schools have never in fact been “game changers.”

While neoliberal/conservative education reforms leveraged the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and unsubstantiated claims that the Left uses poverty as an excuse, people all along the ideological spectrum are over-focused on instructional practices. And that overemphasis is used to keep everyone looking at teachers, students, and instruction instead of those more impactful out-of-school (OOS) influences on student learning.

A companion to the cult of pedagogy in education reform is the “miracle” school claim, but “miracle” schools rarely (almost never) exist once the claim is interrogated, and even if a “miracle” school exists, it is by definition an outlier and essentially offers no guidance for scaling outward or upward.

The paradox of the cult of pedagogy in education reform is that until will directly address OOS factor we will never have the context for better teasing out the importance of teacher quality and instructional practices.

The current education reform trapped in the cult of pedagogy is the “science of reading” (SOR) movement which oversells the blame for student reading achievement as well as oversells the solutions in the form of different reading programs, reading instructional practice, and teacher preparation and professional development.

The “miracle” of the day in the SOR propaganda is Mississippi, which is very likely a mirage based on manipulating the age of students being tested at grade level and not on teacher quality and instructional practices.

Not a single education reform promise since the 1980s has succeeded, and the US remains in a constant cycle of crisis and reform promises.

Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that many OOS factors impact negatively student learning and that social reform would pay huge dividends in educational outcomes if we simply would move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform.

For example, see the following:

My entire career has existed within the neoliberal accountability era of education reform that oversells education as a “game changer” and oversells teacher quality and instructional practices.

Like time-share frauds, we are being duped, and teachers and students need us to move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform and focus on the much larger influences on students being able to learn and teachers being able to show that their quality and instruction can matter.

Education, memoir, teacher preparation, Teaching

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Teacher Education

How can anybody know
How they got to be this way?

Daughters of the Soho Riots, The National

I graduated high school 8th out of 150 students and took with me a great deal of affection and respect for two life-changing teachers—Harold Scipio (chemistry/physics) and Lynn Harrill (English).

My academic success was bolstered by making mostly As in math and science courses, but I puttered along with Bs in English (resisting the drudgery of vocabulary tests and assigned novels). Therefore, I left high school intending to major in physics.

School had taught me I was good with numbers, and I learned that the field of English was grammar book exercises and diagramming sentences (junior high school) or vocabulary tests and assigned novels I had no interest in reading (high school).

Those experiences with English in school were in stark contrast to my ignored and marginalized literary life at home—collecting and reading comic books as well as reading voraciously science fiction and thriller novels.

In fact, that closeted life of reading was teaching me that genre literature was wonderful while English courses and teachers indirectly and directly told me genre writing was trash, that I should read real literature.

I entered a junior college less than thirty minutes from my home with those perceptions of school and myself as well as a youthfully distorted view of my abilities as a golfer and a want-to-be comic book artist.

There a few interesting things happened, notably linked again to teachers for whom I developed affection and respect—Steve Brannon (speech) and Dean Carter (British literature).

Mr. Brannon re-introduced me to e.e. cummings (in a speech course of all places) and sparked my first-year realization that I am a poet and writer; it was during the spring of that first year of college that I began writing seriously.

The other pivotal moment was when Dean Carter (who regularly berated me for my shoes and clothing in front of the class) approached me, asking if I’d like to start tutoring for the course. I clarified for him that I was a math and science person, not an English person.

After Dean Carter explained to me that I was the strongest student in that British literature survey class, however, I began tutoring and soon discovered that I was good at helping other students and I also enjoyed it.

Somehow I didn’t quite get it yet, and I was still mulling options for when I transferred to a four-year university, toying with architecture and pre-law.

A friend with whom I had gone to all 12 years of public school and then junior college and I were set to transfer to the main campus of the state university, but he had a paralyzing accident that summer. I panicked and chose to attend the satellite state university near my home instead of venturing to the main campus.

Having spent over 20 years now in higher education, this next part is something we rarely talk about—how people really chose their majors and how coincidental and haphazard that life-shifting decision can be.

With my friend’s accident and my late change of universities, I was rushed through registration where I was asked (as a rising junior) my major so courses could be chosen for that fall.

At that point I had no real idea but my thinking had shifted to majoring in English (still possibly as a path to law school). Coming from a working class family where neither parent had attended a four-year college, I was hyper-practical, however.

So on the spot I decided I would major in education because that would prepare me for a job and a career. When I said “education,” the advisor nudged me by asking what kind.

Having no idea what that meant, I shrugged and then was prompted with elementary or high school. I immediately said high school only to be asked what kind of high school teacher.

It was at that moment I chose secondary English education as a major; three years later, I entered as a high school English teacher the same classroom that Lynn Harrill had taught me in.

That full circle, I eventually recognized, helped me reconsider what I believed when I left high school, notably that Mr. Scipio and Mr. Harrill had set me on course to be a teacher.

Now here is what we don’t talk about when we talk about teacher education.

Once again, over the last 2.5 years of undergraduate education, I had some really influential professors.

Dr. Tom Hawkins was my secondary English advisor and teacher, and he planted the seeds of how I would eventually think about teaching and learning, specifically about grading (and he introduced me to triathlons, which set me on course to be a life-long serious cyclist).

But I was also an eager English student, taking extra English courses beyond what was required by my education certification; English professors Dr. Richard Predmore and Dr. Nancy Moore profoundly shaped me as a writer and as a potential scholar.

My student teaching was divided between two schools and two teachers, one middle school and one high school.

Here is the really complicated part.

I was greatly motivated to become a teacher so that I could create English classes unlike what most English classes were (no grammar book exercises and tests, no diagramming sentences, no vocabulary tests). And student teaching mostly proved to me all the ways in which I did not want to teach.

Once I was firmly in schooling from the teacher side, I also realized that virtually all the literature I had studied in college would never be works I could teach. In fact, I had to scramble to be prepared to teach the texts assigned and in textbooks during student teaching.

My teaching career began the fall of 1984, right at the beginning of the current 40-year accountability era sparked by the manufactured crisis of Reagan’s A Nation at Risk.

I was handed over a dozen textbooks (grammar, literature, and vocabulary texts) and the journalism course (school newspaper and literary magazine).

Now this is what people really do not want to talk about: I was almost entirely unprepared to teach that fall.

I had no background in journalism (I was a writer, sure, but I had been on the annual staff in high school and dabbled in college newspapers very slightly), and, as I noted above, I was not familiar with almost all of the required literature across four different English courses (mostly British literature) in the textbooks and the required novels/plays.

Most significantly, although my central goal for being an English teacher was to teach my students to write, I soon realized I had almost no composition pedagogy—other than I was myself an accomplished writer in school and college as well as a practicing professional writer (submitting a great deal of writing for publication without success).

Much of that first decade of teaching was spent teaching myself to teach; that journey was supported by also working through my MEd during those years.

But one of the most significant moments was entering the Spartanburg Writing Project (SWP) housed where I had received my undergraduate degree.

I had been teaching (frantically) for several years when I took the SWP summer institute, and it is there, once again, that a teacher changed my life.

The director, Brenda Davenport, essentially took me aside and set me straight, metaphorically kicked my butt.

I had been teaching myself to teach writing with a missionary zeal that had driven me down the wrong road; certainty and arrogance were quickly replaced with humility and patience.

Brenda helped me learn the one thing that we almost never talk about when talking about teacher education and teaching: teaching is learning to teach, and there is no finish line.

I spent much of my first decade of teaching trying to perfect The Way to teach. But each different Way I designed fell just as flat as the Way before.

After SWP, I embraced a true Deweyan approach, recognizing that each new class is a new experiment, informed by all the experiments before but its own different set of humans and requiring different ways of teaching and learning.

You see, there is no One Right Way to prepare people to teach (just as there is no One Right Way to teach reading, for example) because nothing can prepare a person to start teaching.

This fall I start year 40 as a teacher. It will not be like that fall in 1984 when I was first called a teacher.

But it is entirely new, and like that first fall, this is another experiment where I learn how to teach by teaching.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, teacher preparation, Teaching

Critically Reconsidering Teacher Education (and NCTQ’s Shoddy Reports): A Reader

In 2018, a simplistic but compelling story was established: Teachers do not know how to teach children to read (60+% are not proficient readers!) because teacher educators have failed to teach the “science of reading” (SOR) in teacher prep programs.

These false narratives about teacher ed, NAEP data, and reading have gained momentum and now drive reading policy and legislation in practically every state in the US.

There is an ironic truism—“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”—most often misattributed to Mark Twain that certainly describes the misguided SOR movement’s central claims wrapped up in the initial mantra that SOR is both simple and settled.

Here are two complicated counter-points that are supported by the full body of evidence:

  • Reading instruction can and should be significantly reformed (in the context of addressing wider systemic inequities), but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.
  • Teacher education can and should be significantly reformed , but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.

I have been a strong advocate for education reform, beginning with my entering the field in 1984, and subsequently a strong advocate for teacher education reform, starting with entering higher education and teacher education in 2002.

In “Of Rocks and Hard Places—The Challenge of Maxine Greene’s
Mystification in Teacher Education,” I wrote about teacher education: “As teacher educators, we are trapped between the expectations of a traditional and mechanistic field and the contrasting expectations of best practice guided by critical pedagogy.”

Below, then, I offer a reader about critically reconsidering teacher education and why the use of NCTQ “reports” are misguided and fail the test of scientific evidence.

Teacher Education

NCTQ

Education, Teaching, Writing

Teaching and Learning in Writing-Intensive Courses

The fall of 2023, I will be walking into my year 40 as a teacher. I started my career journey as a high school English teacher in the high school where I graduated and even the same English classroom I had sat in as a student during my sophomore and junior years.

The somewhat early years teaching high school English at Woodruff High (Woodruff, SC).

Many of the teachers had been my teachers when I was a student, and I was then (seemingly suddenly) a colleague with veteran and well-loved members of the school and my small hometown.

One of those English teachers assigned their seniors only one essay, due at the end of the academic year and never returned or commented on by that teacher. Many of those seniors were destined for college and had essentially no writing instruction their entire senior year—filled instead with weekly vocabulary tests, grammar tests, and textbook tests on British literature.

Just down the hall, I was embarking on 18 years of responding to about 4000 essays per year by my students; I was committed to teaching students to write well by having them write often and in workshop experiences.

I just completed my spring 2023 semester, which had two writing-intensive courses. This spring followed my only sabbatical experience in the fall of 2022, although I had been in higher education for 20 years.

I returned to teaching with a renewed commitment to decreasing stress and high-stakes for my students while trying to foster greater engagement by those students.

For about three-quarters of my teaching career, lowering stress and high-stakes has included de-grading and de-testing my courses, although the de-grading applied to assignments since I still had/have to assign course grades (see here about delaying grades).

However, once again, a number of students offered feedback on student evaluations that deflate significantly my enthusiasm for many of my efforts to support autonomous students.

In courses with required conferencing, some students noted that conferences should be required; this disconnect is linked to students being responsible for requesting and scheduling those conferences.

In a semester where I responded to about 200 essays over three courses and 24 total students, some students complained that I did not provide enough feedback for their work and/or that my feedback was too negative or not specific enough (see here about negative feedback).

At the core of these tensions and disconnects, I feel, is the essential paradox of who is responsible for learning.

For over twenty years now, I am teaching adults, yes, young adults, but college students are adults. My career before higher education was high school, and again, I worked with teens and young adults.

Yet, most students have experiences in formal schooling that teaches them they are passive agents in the teaching/learning dynamic. My students, particularly those who struggle in my course, think the responsibility for their learning is me, the teacher.

My teaching is grounded in critical pedagogy, and I practice an awareness that the role of the teacher is to teach with the role of the student, to learn. More nuanced is Freire’s argument that the teacher is always a teacher/student and the student is always a student/teacher.

Critical pedagogy views teaching and learning as liberatory—to learn is to become fully human, which is a state that requires autonomy.

Broadly, my role as a teacher (and mentor) is to provide the ideal context for students to learn; however, I cannot make someone learn.

As painful as this is to admit, teaching does not guarantee learning, and ultimately, learning is the role of the student (acknowledging that far too many students are in life situations that inhibit that autonomy).

My students are mostly in ideal contexts to learn, yet they often struggle even as I create courses with low stakes (no grades, no tests, no lateness penalties, etc.) and encourage high engagement; that struggle is grounded in the stress that students feel by having the responsibility for learning shifted from me to them.

Traditional and enduring practices around assigning and teaching writing prove to be barriers for student autonomy—essay prompts, rubrics, comprehensive marking of student writing, etc.

Here is another story from my first years of teaching.

A very highly regarded teacher of English moved to the high school when my district reorganized around a middle school concept and shifted ninth grader from our junior high to the high school.

I often taught that teacher’s students, and they explained to me that they would submit their essays, and then the teacher would return the papers with comments before using the overhead to show the students how to rewrite the essays.

Students dutifully followed the essay that teacher rewrote for them and resubmitted essentially identical essays.

My students today often have one of those two experiences—the negligent writing teachers who assign almost no writing or provide no real feedback or the hyper-controlling teacher who uses scripted prompts and rubrics (the enduring five-paragraph essay included) while also commenting exhaustively on submitted essays.

For those students, my classes are disorienting and often difficult to navigate.

While I have worked for decades to reduce high-stakes environments in my courses to reduce stress, students are often stressed when the responsibility for learning is shifted toward them

As I ponder how to revise further my writing-intensive courses, I continue to look for ways to increase student engagement. Currently, here are the structures I use with varying degrees of effectiveness:

  • Reducing how much I copyedit and comment on student drafts and increasing face-to-face conferencing.
  • Providing students with resources that support their learning to revise and edit their own writing.
  • Grounding writing assignments in authentic forms of writing and inviting students to explore examples of published writing to support their own awareness about forms and purposes for writing.
  • Maintaining a culture of low-stakes that includes not grading student work while in process, establishing workshop environments for students as writers, and providing structure for students without using punitive or coercive procedures.
  • Establishing minimum requirements for student engagement that include required drafting of essays as well as options for additional drafts and conferences by choice and request.

A couple years ago, I created guidelines for students to better support their own drafting, revising, and editing—How to Revise Your Essay after Receiving Feedback—and guidelines for how students should navigate my use of highlighting when providing feedback on essays—Revising Drafts with Highlighting as Feedback.

Regretfully, I am not seeing these materials being as effective as I hoped because at the core of the problem is not my structure or guidance, but that students remain committed to seeing my role not as teaching but as making them learn.

For example, I often mark needed revisions on essays and add a comment to check for the issues throughout the essay, yet most students only revise what I have marked.

That is a habit they bring to my classes, and one I find nearly impossible to break.

What I am addressing as a writing teacher, then, is a subset of how to foster learning autonomy in students.

Traditional schooling and the pervasive consequences of the Covid era are working against students’ abilities to recognize and embrace that autonomy.

And having an outlier class like mine that centers student autonomy, despite my commitment to lowering stress and high-stakes, is ironically highly stressful for my students.

And thus, I have much to ponder before walking into my classrooms for year 40 this coming fall.

Education, literacy, Lou LaBrant, reading, Science of Reading, Teaching, Writing

Beyond Reading Skills: Phonics, Vocabulary, and Knowledge

When I entered the classroom as an English teacher in 1984 at the high school where I had graduated just five years earlier, students lugged around two huge textbooks for their English courses, one of which was Warriner’s English grammar text.

Students were conveniently color coded by these texts since the publishers provided different ability and grade levels of the literature and grammar texts. And universally students hated these textbooks, the carrying and their use in the classrooms.

Since I taught different ability levels (we used and A, B, C level system for each grade) and grades, I had about 15 textbooks across my five courses because students in English also were assigned vocabulary books (the publisher we used proudly printed in bright letters that these vocabulary books prepared students for the SAT!).

At least the vocabulary books were small paperbacks.

Two important facts stand out about those first couple years teaching in the traditional expectations for English teachers at that school (mostly the same teachers who taught me as a student): first, Warriner’s regardless of grade or ability level had essentially the exact same chapters for teachers to systematically and comprehensively teach every year, and second, teachers expressed repeatedly that students never learned those grammar lessons, noting that student writing failed to improve in terms of grammar, mechanics, and usage.

Another big picture point to make here is that when I was a student, grammar texts included lessons on “shall” and “will”; that my students had to cover an entire chapter and be tested on “who” and “whom”; and both my students and I had to “learn” about pronoun/antecedent agreement (specifically the use of “they” as plural only).

Today, we must acknowledge that all of these rules and the consequences of students “not learning them” have evaporated since “shall” and “whom” have graciously disappeared and “they” has been (finally) acknowledged as a resourceful pronoun.

As a beginning teacher, I had entered education to teach writing, although, of course, I loved literature also. Yet, the grammar- and skills-centric approach to teaching English, I recognized, was failing students miserably—I mean literally because students were miserable, learning to hate English, writing, and literature.

Of course, my stories here speak to a disturbing reality in education: Lou LaBrant, writing in 1946, noted: “We have some hundreds of studies now which demonstrate that there is little correlation (whatever that may cover) between exercises in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the principles illustrated in independent writing” (p. 127). And then in 1947: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87).

Yet, English teachers throughout the decades kept beating their heads against the grammar and skills wall, lamenting “kids today” for not being good writers—regardless of decade, regardless of the grammar programs implemented.

This raises a current issue about “scientific” or “evidence” as the basis for how teachers teach, notably in the current reading war.

Here, I think, is an excellent overview by Jal Mehta (Harvard University) about why calling for “scientific” or “evidence” to mandate teaching literacy is just as misguided as the evidence-free practices I witnessed as a beginning teacher almost 40 years ago:

What may have started out about a decade ago as a sincere plea similar to LaBrant’s—the teaching of reading in practice often failed to be effectively evidence-based (“scientific”)—has turned into the exact sort of one-size-fits-all ideological movement that Jal warns about: scientific as a “weapon.”

The SOR movement has refueled the myth of the bad teacher, continued to perpetuate false narratives of crisis and miracle schools, profited the education marketplace, and driven deeply problematic reading legislation and policy, including inequitable grade retention.

The mistake being made is also perfectly identified by Jal: “In my experience, the best educators and leaders see lots of complexity, consider context, and artfully weave together different approaches to solve particular problems.”

Ironically, this is the exact approach grounding both whole language and balanced literacy as philosophies of teaching reading and writing; however, as we have witnessed, both WL and BL also became convenient labels for practices not following those philosophies or simply slurs ideologues use to criticize.

Instead, the SOR movement has become ideological and weaponized to create simplistic and unfounded crisis rhetoric for politicians and skills-driven reading policy and practice.

For example, no one argues that phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge are not key elements in reading. But the SOR movement demands a linear and sequential skills-first approach; teach phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge systematically before students read.

The skills-first approach is essentially authoritarian (what phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge students “need” is determined and outlined for students and teachers) and necessarily erases diversity of language and experiences by students.

The counter approach, the complex approach to reading, acknowledges the importance of elements such as phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge, but also honors that the relationship between so-called skills and reading is reciprocal, not linear or sequential.

In other words, yes, students need some direct and purposeful instruction in phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge building as they become beginning readers; however, most of a person’s acquisition of phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge comes from reading—not direct or systematic instruction.

The problem with systematic and comprehensive teaching of any literacy skills is that the goal and accountability around teaching and learning become the acquisition of the skills (phonics tests, vocabulary tests, knowledge tests) instead of the authentic goal of fostering eager, independent, and critical students who read.

Ultimately, if we genuinely want evidence-based reading instruction for children in the US, we must recognize that the most important sources of evidence are the children themselves and the most valuable person to understand what children need to read are their teachers.

However, beyond shifting to what evidence counts, we must also recognize that students and teachers cannot be successful unless we address learning and teaching conditions (the one move politicians refuse to make).

Regretfully, as Jal recognizes, students and teachers are again simply pawns in another fruitless war won by the SOR advocates “who are loudest about ‘evidence-based practices,’ [and] ironically tend to be more ideologues who have a few preferred solutions that they think can address every problem.”