Tag Archives: writing

ai, ChatGPT, education, plagiarism, Writing

Did You Write This?: Or Why You Can’t Spell “Plagiarism” without “AI”

[Header Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash]

“Did you write this?” I once asked a sophomore in my advanced English class. The student was one of three siblings I would teach, and their mother was a colleague of mine in our English department.

With students and my own daughter, I have asked questions like that one often, and I always knew the answer. The question was an opportunity for the student to confront what I already knew.

This student, you see, had turned in a cited essay that her older sister had turned in just a few years earlier. I had the paper in my files, and since I immediately recognized it, I had the copy with her sister’s name on the cover page waiting for her reply.

English and writing teachers especially, but all teachers are constantly seeking ways to insure students do their own work.

As long as there have been students, teachers, and formal schooling, however, students have sought ways to pass off writing and reading that they, in fact, had not done.

This student cold-face lied, and I handed her the paper by her sister.

Something like that has occurred several times over my forty-plus years of teaching.

A non-traditional aged woman in a night composition class for a local junior college became enraged when I asked her “Did you write this?”

I had been reading her writing for several weeks, and this essay she submitted wasn’t her work. There was no doubt and no need to prove it.

She became loud and angry, steadfast in her claim the writing was hers. After that night, I never saw her again.

Several years ago in my first-year writing seminar, a basketball player submitted a teammate’s essay from a few semesters earlier. The essay rang a bell, and after a search on my laptop, I found the original essay on my hard drive.

Plagiarism and passing off other people’s work as their own have not been rampant throughout my career, in part because I have implemented reading and writing workshop in courses. Students have been reading and writing in front of me for decades.

Lots of cheating can been avoided by daylight and surveillance.

Part of the workshop approach, as well, stresses for students that the reading and writing processes are acts of learning; further, the emphasis on process helps lessen the importance of the product as a mechanism for acquiring a grade.

“It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need,” wrote Lou LaBrant in 1953. LaBrant then continued and this may sound familiar:

Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

Over the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s article, students have written original texts far too rarely; in fact, as writers and students in general, students sit in classrooms where the teacher does much of the work the student should be doing as part of learning.

Writing prompts and rubrics have done far more harm to students as writers than any technology work around, but technology has also joined in the fun over those eight decades.

ChatGPT and other forms of AI are the current miracle/crisis forms of technology in education. Seemingly, many people in education, surprisingly, are jumping on the AI bandwagon, much like the coding wave and cellphone bans.

You see, we are trapped in a love/hate binary with technology in education that too often isn’t based in evidence.

Tech and AI products like Grammarly and Turnitin.com have ridden high waves of use despite both products, to be blunt, just being very poor quality. Grammarly gives really bad writing advice, and Turnitin.com is less effective detecting plagiarism than a simple (and free) Google search.

The broader technology problem in education, which parallels the AI problem, is that technology in education is often like a microwave; something can be completed quicker but the product is either hard to stomach or simply ruined.

A recent study, in fact, shows that students using AI to draft tend to produce very similar texts that are shallow at best. Further, students who use AI to compose struggle to recall any of their writing.

Why? Let’s invoke LaBrant again: Writing is learned by writing.

Better worded, we should think of “writing” as composing. Composing is the art of simultaneously creating meaning, developing understanding, and drafting communication in words, sentences, and paragraphs.

AI generating functional text in some real-world contexts may be a time saver, a net positive. But for students, scholars, and writers, using AI at any point of the composing process is a new form of plagiarism.

Let me be clear, this is about the composing process because AI has long been useful for surface editing; grammar and spell check is not cheating, and AI can relieve the writer some of the burden of editing (a role humans often play for other people in the world of writing an publishing).

Maybe AI will prove valuable in many ways for humans, but AI that does for students the very behaviors students must perform to learn is never justified—just as teachers doing the work for students has never been justified.

“As citizens we need to be able to write and to understand the importance and difficulty of being honest and clear. We will learn to do this by doing it,” LaBrant offers bluntly.

“Did you write this?” is an enduring question between teacher and student.

In 2025, using AI is just as damning as putting your name on your sister’s essay before turning it in as your own.

So that’s why you cannot spell “plagiarism” without “AI.”

education, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

The “Science of” Movements: Another Education Reform Red Herring

[Header image misocrazy from New York, NY, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

“Red herring” perfectly describes the bulk of education reform in the US since the Reagan administration because thosee reforms have been based on false claims to distract from needed social and educational reform in the interests of students, teachers, and public education.

The US (and many English-speaking nations around the world) have remained in a perpetual state of education and reading crises for decades.

The US has never stopped using crisis rhetoric or blaming schools, teachers, and students, but policy has been a revolving door of new standards, new tests, and new “miracle” solutions—none of which ever produce the positive outcomes promised.

The dirty little secret is that perpetual crisis/reform in education (and reading) is its own goal because constant crisis/reform is politically and economically profitable to those fanning the flames of crisis.

In 2018, the “science of reading” (SOR) became a tired and constant refrain of the media, spreading to parent advocacy and then legislation and policy.

By 2025, the “science of” has added “math” and “learning,” including many English-speaking countries where a reading crisis is the norm.

And thus, education reform in the US and other countries has now adopted at the core of education reform “science of” rhetoric, claims, blame, and policy.

Parallel to education reform since the 1980s, the “science of” education reform is not grounded in credible claims about education crisis or problems, and therefore, the blame and solutions are also not credible or effective.

The “science of” approach to education reform has been extremely effective since “science” is being weaponized, and when anyone dare to challenge the movement, those people are accused of being anti-science, often compared to the anti-vaccination movement.

Here’s the problem: Those of us challenging the “science of” movement are not rejecting scientific research in education; we are acknowledging that “science of” advocacy is misrepresenting educational challenges, educational research, and educational practice for ideological, political, and market purposes.

Journalists, educators/scholars, education “celebrities,” the education marketplace, and politicians have made their careers on false “science of” claims and unfounded attacks on anyone calling them out for not being credible.

Ironically, the evidence supports those of us who are critics of “science of” education/reading reform, and consequently, “science of” claims are red herrings, distractions from the valid education challenges and potential reforms that would serve the interests of students, teachers, and public education.

Here, then, is the core evidence that the “science of” movements are, in fact, red herring education reform.

Is there an education or reading crisis? No.

Elena Aydorova; Reinking, Hruby, and Risko; and Larsen, as just a few examples, have explained that the data/evidence simply does not support claims of crisis.

Further, “science of” advocates tend to move quickly from the false claims of “crisis” to offering false blame.

Just as there is no evidence of crisis, there is simply no scientific studies showing, for example, that the US has a reading crisis caused by a few reading programs, the implementation of balanced literacy, or the failure of teacher education to prepare teachers.

Again, there is a paradox in the “science of” movement whereby the advocates of “science of” themselves do not adhere to the narrow use of “science” to support their major claims.

For example, in the US, SOR advocates and SOR-based policy and legislation include support for a number of practices, claims, and programs that lack scientific evidence—decodable texts, LETRS, 95% rule, Orton-Gillingham, systematic phonics first for all students, nonsense word assessments (DIBLES), etc.

Broadly, also, “science of” advocates’ most damning red herring is that they are weaponizing “science” as a veneer to take a non-ideological pose although “science of” advocates are themselves mostly making ideological claims.

Direct instruction and skills-based instruction have long been at the core of conservative ideology.

Once we acknowledge that “science of” claims of crisis and who/what they blame are not evidence-based, we can also acknowledge they are mostly making ideological arguments, and then, we must unpack why.

Noted above, there is a great deal of profit in crying education/reading crisis and maintaining a constant state of reform.

As long as that reform never works.

And it never has, it never will.

The “science of” movements, then, are grounded in misinformation, oversimplification, and ideological bias.

The “science of” movements are another form of red herring education reform.

The distraction is also ideological, grounded in a rejection of the power of systemic forces and a belief in rugged individualism as well as the bootstrapping myth.

The “science of” movement is also a distraction from other ulterior motives, such as de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum and imposing AI/computer program approaches for teaching students.

More irony: Education reform is designed to keep our eyes on individual people—students, teachers—and not the overwhelming evidence:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….

Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students. (Maroun and Tienken, 2024)

Here is the science that critics of the “science of” movement recognize.

And fun fact, we are not trying to sell you anything or get your vote.

Don’t be distracted.

Recommended

Aukerman, M. (2022a). The Science of Reading and the media: Does the media draw on high-quality reading research? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-does-the-media-draw-on-high-quality-reading-research/

Aukerman, M. (2022b). The Science of Reading and the media: How do current reporting patterns cause damage? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-how-do-current-reporting-patterns-cause-damage/

Aukerman, M. (2022c). The Science of Reading and the media: Is reporting biased? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-is-reporting-biased/

Aydarova, E. (2023). “Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556

Aydarova, E. (2024). What you see is not what you get: Science of reading reforms as a guise for standardization, centralization, and privatization. American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730991

Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Navigating (another) reading crisis as an administrator: Rethinking the “science of reading” movement. Journal of School Administration, Research and Development, 10(1), 38-48. https://ojed.org/JSARD/article/view/6706

Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221

Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 [Open Access https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej202411342]

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

Tierney, R.J., & Pearson, P.D. (2024). Fact-checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the conversation. Literacy Research Commons. https://literacyresearchcommons.org

education

Buyer’s Remorse: Reading Story Sold Manufactured Crisis, Fake Miracles

[Header Photo by Alejandra Rodríguez on Unsplash]

I began my teaching career in 1984, coinciding with the current era of high-stakes accountability driving education reform in the wake of A Nation at Risk.

One of my favorite units as a teacher of American literature to tenth and eleventh graders in the rural South was the Transcendentalism era—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and (the often ignored) Margaret Fuller.

Students did not enjoy reading these authors, I must confess, but the unit itself was often very compelling.

In the late 1980s, I added a consideration of the “Reeboks let U.B.U” campaign featuring Emerson:

I tracked down the advertising agency responsible for the ad, and my students wrote a letter calling out the campaign for being contradictory.

Shockingly, we did receive a letter from the person over the campaign. They confessed that my students’ were on target with their criticism, but added that Reebok believed they were a unique shoes company and felt their campaign highlighted that fact.

As a part of that unit also I had a recording from MTV News covering a Madonna look-alike contest.

Among the dozens of prepubescent girls, one was interviewed and she excitedly stated that the girls were there to express their individuality.

While students were no more eager to read Emerson, teens soon found themselves compelled by Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Over the past 40-plus years, I think about this unit and my students often—as well as Emerson’s enduring arguments in “Self-Reliance.”

The world of education reform, I regret to acknowledge, is dominated by “little minds,” drawn to and selling the same false stories of educational crisis and miracles.

I would amend Emerson’s list a bit, adding to “statesmen” education journalists.

The current reading crisis, often identified as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, is yet another example of selling the manufactured reading crisis and education reform miracles that are actually mirages.

Since the 1980s, no education reform has worked.

New standards after new standards have not worked.

New high-stakes tests after new high-stakes tests have not worked.

Accountability for students, teachers, and schools has not worked.

No a single fear-mongering prediction or promise has been fulfilled.

With each new hot reform, the missionary zeal doesn’t fades; it just switches teams.

I am drawn to a line from Blade Runner as I contemplate the fate of the current SOR movement: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy” (Tyrell).

The uncritical support for the SOR story has been as fervent as any reform movement, so I must wonder if we are on the cusp of buyer’s remorse.

Are these canaries in the coalmine foreboding an end to yet another era of unfounded claims of a reading crisis?

  • A judge in Massachusetts rejected a frivolous lawsuit grounded in the story being sold that a reading crisis was caused by a few reading programs and the scapegoat of the moment, balanced literacy (and three cueing).
  • Unlike mainstream media, Snopes corrected Trump-appointed Secretary of Education’s claim about student reading proficiency based on the Big Lie about NAEP.
  • Possibly most surprising is this call from Perry Bacon Jr. to set aside the crisis rhetoric around education, including this acknowledgement about NAEP:

The overwhelming majority of American students are reaching “baseline proficiency” in math, reading and science, according to PISA. That’s almost certainly because of our public school systems, where about 87 percent of students in grades K-12 get their education. U.S. politicians for a while were pushing the aspirational idea that most students should score proficient or above on the NAEP tests. That is a very high and probably unrealistic standard. Most of America’s students are reaching the NAEP “basic” level, mirroring the PISA results.

The impending buyer’s remorse for buying the reading story being sold will come with tremendous costs.

As Bacon warns: “But the alarmist portrayals of our schools are wrong and undermine support for public education.”

The SOR movement has wasted huge amounts of public funding and time; students are also paying a high price because of the caustic nature of scripted reading programs and grade retention.

As I read mainstream journalists and political leaders parrot the same false reading story over and over, I cannot help thinking about the preteen girls dressed like Madonna and the Reebok add that even my high school students were able to shake their heads at in disappointment.

education

Call for Poetry Submissions – English Journal

[Header Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash]

Poetry Submissions – English Journal

Editor: Paul Thomas

Furman University

In the pages of English Journal, we look to publish well-crafted poems that connect our readers to topics central to English education: the impact of reading and writing on young people, words and language, classroom stories, and reflections on teaching and learning. Poetry reminds us, as educators, how to live in this world. Submit your work by emailing a Word doc attachment to paul.thomas@furman.edu. Use the subject line “Poetry Submission for Review.” The first page of the attached document should be a cover sheet that includes your name, address, and email, as well as a two-sentence biographical sketch. In your bio, include how long you have been a member of NCTE, if applicable, and a publishable contact email. Following the cover sheet, include one to five original poems in the same document. Finally, please fill out and attach this form granting English Journal permission to publish your poem: https://ncte.org/app/uploads/2018/10/NCTE-Consent-to-Publish-No-Assignment-EJ-poems-Collective-Work-4845-4342-1491-1.pdf

Though we welcome work of any length, shorter pieces (30 lines and under) often work best for the journal. Poems must be original and not previously published. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, though writers must immediately withdraw from consideration any poems that are to be published elsewhere by contacting the editors via email.

Poets whose work is published will receive two complimentary copies of the issue in which their work appears. Additional inquiries about poetry submissions may be directed to the editor at paul.thomas@furman.edu. We look forward to reading and celebrating your work.

Poets

Please submit poem(s) as a Word doc only.

Use this form to grant English Journal permission to publish your poem: Poet CTP

See EJ Calls for Manuscripts for information on upcoming themed issues.

See EJ Columns for information on submissions to specific columns.

For general EJ Submission Guidelines, click here.

Feel free to browse my original poetry and blogs on poetry at #poetry.

Matt Berninger, poetry, The National, Writing

Writing Purpose and Process: “there’s poetry and there’s songwriting” (Matt Berninger)

[Header image via Genuis, lyrics by Matt Berninger]

As I have noted often, over my forty-plus years teaching students to write, a few patterns remain constant, one of which is students lacking genre awareness.

On the first day of class, I often ask students what novels they read in high school English, and invariably, students include The Crucible or simply say “Shakespeare.”

They read these plays in book form, and have conflated anything in book form with “novel.”

Also, they mostly are experienced in being students who write, not writers.

So I spend a great deal of time and effort in my writing courses helping students become engaged with authentic writing practices, specifically fostering stronger writing purposes (and understanding writing forms/genres) and processes.

As a fan of The National and lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger, I was particularly struck by this new interview [1] as Berninger begins promoting his second solo album, Get Sunk:

I think this interview is a really wonderful and brief entry point to discussing writer purpose and process (note that Berninger does use some profanity and references pot smoking).

Berninger is an endearing and quirky as his lyrics. And while he may seem flippant at first (“I’ll start fucking around with stuff”), he makes some very sophisticated and accessible observations about purposeful writing and the importance of the writing process (he has begun scribbling lyrics on baseballs instead of his standard journal, for example).

When the interviewer mentions his favorite lyric from Boxer (The National), Berninger offers a brief window into the importance of being a reader as well as the recursive nature of texts: “I stole that from Jonathan Ames.”

Berninger’s lyrics often pull from books, authors, and other song lyrics. Here is an ideal place to discuss with students the conventions of allusion and references as that creates tension with plagiarism (a great opportunity to tie in so-called canonized writers such as Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot).

But the core comments I think students need to hear and then practice in the writing are about understanding different writing purposes/forms:

I do think songwriting is a very specific kind of thing…. It’s not—there’s poetry and there’s songwriting…. And I think they’re as different as like swimming and ice skating…. It’s like it’s still just words or just water but they’re totally different things.

This distinction and metaphor are powerful because they acknowledge the complexity of choosing and writing in different ways, for different purposes, and for different audiences.

Berninger also talks about his use of scribbling on baseballs for writing ideas. While quirky, this really captures the writing process in an authentic way (not the scripted way often taught in school).

As a teacher of writing and a writer (as well as avid reader), I want students to be fully engaged as writers—not as students performing a stilted essay for the teacher/professor.

We want for our students a sense of purpose, a demonstration of intent, an awareness of form and audience, and ultimately, a writing product of their choosing and for their purposes.

And in the era of intensified AI, I want to stress that AI has no place in these goals because students need and deserve opportunities to experience all of these aspects of brainstorming, drafting, and presenting a final product.

It may seem crude, careless, and flippant, but if we listen carefully, Berninger’s “fucking around” demonstrates the power and complexity of being a writer—and thus, being a teacher of writing.

[1] I highly recommend this blog post on Bon Iver/Justin Vernon as a companion to the Berninger interview.

See my posts on The National.

Capitalism, education, education reform, NAEP, reading, Science of Reading

Beware Scripted Curriculum: More Trojan Horse Education Reform

[Header Photo by José León on Unsplash, cropped]

It took a few years, but there was always a long game.

And there was a few decades of preparation along the way.

George W. Bush built the foundation for Trojan Horse education reform in the 1990s, including a false “miracle” narrative and efforts to establish scripted curriculum (a colleague and I examined that here).

Education reform, however, was never about improving learning or teaching, but about ideological agendas, conservative agendas.

The crisis/miracle cycles started with that Texas “miracle,” but included the Chicago “miracle” (to bolster Arne Duncan), the DC “miracle” (to promote Michelle Rhee’s grift), and the Harlem “miracle” (that solidly merged education reform as bi-partisan under Obama with the help of grifter Duncan).

What may prove to be the most successful (and harmful) “miracle,” however, is the media manufactured Mississippi “miracle,” grounded in 2019 NAEP scores.

Six years later, the real end game of these manufactured and false “miracles” are merging with an initial effort by W. Bush—de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum. Note the connection in a recent misleading but recurring endorsement by Patrinos (from the Department of Education Reform, funded by Walton money in Arkansas) of that Mississippi “miracle”:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

And then, this disturbing piece by Korbey: Why US schools have fallen in love with scripted lessons.

After taking a swipe at NCTE, Korbey makes the same but false connection as Patrinos above:

Nearly all the states that have seen reading scores improve recently – including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama – have changed state law to encourage districts to choose from approved lists of HQIM.

Conveniently omitted in public advocacy and endorsements of scripted curriculum, is that this is a correlation; however, research has shown that curriculum, instruction, and teacher training are not the keys to increased test scores. Grade retention is:

[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.

And another omission is that research has shown scripted reading programs de-professionalize teachers, fail to serve the individual needs of students, and have “whitewashed” the curriculum, alienating the most under-served students in our schools [see Recommended below].

And thus, the end game:

Education reform is dedicated to perpetual education crisis for market and political goal.

Scripted curriculum, then, is not designed to improve reading proficiency, but to create one more step toward AI replacing teachers the same way self-checkout replaced cashiers in our grocery stores.

Recommended

Does the “Science of Reading” Fulfill Social Justice, Equity Goals in Education? (pt. 1)

America Dishonors MLK By Refusing to Act on Call for Direct Action (pt. 2)

Scripted Curriculum Fails Diversity, Students, and Teachers: SOR Corrupts Social Justice Goals (pt. 3)

education

Misreading the Outlier Distraction: Illiteracy Edition Redux

[Header Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash]

Arthur Young graduated from high school with honors. However, as an adult, he was illiterate.

Literacy expert Helen Lowe featured Young and concluded:

Arthur could not read, even at a primer level. He could not drive a car, because he could not pass the test for a driver’s license; he could not read the street signs or traffic directions. He was unable to order from the menu in a restaurant. He could not read letters from his family and he could not write to them. He could not read the mixing directions on a can of paint or the label on a shipment of sheet rock. He had been cheated.

This story may be shocking but also sounds disturbingly familiar to a recent story on CNN:

This young woman, of course, has also been “cheated.”

But here is something important to acknowledge: The dramatic story of Young is from 1961 as part of a book on the illiteracy crisis in the US, Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today.

Both problematic stories seven decades apart are outlier narratives that are both inexcusable failures but are not evidence of any generalizations about education, teaching, or literacy.

Stated bluntly, outliers can never lead to any sort of generalizations.

One of the great failures of public discourse and policy around reading and literacy in the US has been perpetual crisis rhetoric used to drive ideological agendas about what counts as literacy and how best to teach children and young adults to read and write.

If you had a time machine, you could visit any year over the past century in the US and discover that “kids today” can’t and don’t read because the education system is failing them.

These histrionic stories are compelling because they often include real children and adults whose lives have been reduced because of their illiteracy or inadequate literacy.

Ideally, of course, no person in the richest and most powerful country in the world should ever be cheated like that.

But here is the paradox: These outlier stories are distractions from doing the reform and work needed to approach all children and adults being literate.

Once again, reading test data for decades has shown exactly the same reality as all other forms of tests of student learning (math, science, civics, etc.): Over 60% of test scores are causally linked to factors beyond the walls of schools—access to healthcare, food security, housing security, access to books in the homes and communities, and thousands of factors impacting the lives and learning of children.

At best, teacher impact on measurable student literacy is only about 1-14%.

Yet, year after year, decade after decade, the US focuses on teacher quality, curriculum and standards, reading programs, and reading test scores without acknowledging or addressing the overwhelming impact of out-of-school factors on people acquiring the literacy they need and deserve to live their full humanity.

The two stories seven decades apart from above are likely far more complicated than any coverage could detail; the are both compelling and upsetting human stories that deserve our attention, in order to address their individual tragedies as well as taking greater care that others do not suffer the same fate.

However, misreading outlier distractions is not the way to honor that these people have been cheated.

Two things can be true at once: Outlier stories are heartbreaking and inexcusable; however, they prove nothing beyond the experiences they detail.

CNN uses outlier stories for traffic and profit.

Literacy ideologues use outlier stories to drive their agendas as well as to feed the education market.

We are all cheated, once again, when we play the outlier distraction game and refuse to acknowledge and address the crushing realities of inequity in the lives and learning of children.

Each child matters, and all children matter.

Yet, only the adults have the political and economic power to make that a reality.

education

Writing Process: Scholarly/Academic Writing Edition

[Header Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash]

Like many academics working in higher education, I spent several days over my holiday break preparing my courses for spring (two first-year writing seminars and one upper-level writing/research course) and then an intense three days writing and submitting a scholarly chapter on growth mindset and grit for an upcoming book.

I am fortunate, I think, because my teaching life and my writing life continually inform each other. Especially when teaching my writing-intensive courses, I teach as a writer and scholar, fore-fronting my writing/scholarship in my teaching.

My chapter on mindset and grit gave me a perfect opportunity to think deeply about and prepare new materials for my courses this spring (access those artifacts in this folder: Scholarly Essay Process).

As a writing teacher, I have been struggling throughout my 40-plus-year career with the negative impact of templates and scripts for students developing the skills and knowledge they need to be autonomous and compelling writers.

I have rejected, for example, the five-paragraph essay model, and I have challenged the mechanical implementation of the writing process as a sequential series of steps.

The problem is that this crusade against templates and scripts is not as simple (or effective) as I initially believed many decades ago.

Another problem with rejecting templates and scripts is that a significant amount of scholarly and academic writing is bound by scripts, word-count limits, formatting requirements, and citation/style guidelines.

My evolved and more nuanced position on templates and scripts in writing instruction and assignments acknowledges that beginning writers need opportunities to read widely in order to develop their own “scripts” for a wide variety of writing types. Of course they also need structure, but starting with the rigid template does far more harm than good for emerging writers.

Then, as students-as-writers move into high school and college, they need more experiences with authentic templates and guidelines found in much of academic and scholarly writing.

The editors of the chapter I just completed, for example, sent writers an content outline for chapters to follow as well as a word count limit and citation/style sheet requirements (APA).

When I write reviews for a think tank, I receive the same structures and very rigid expectations for staying within those limits (including their own in-house style sheet).

The irony, then, is that this spring, my first-year writing seminar will focus on challenging scripts and “rules” for essays and writing while my upper-level writing/research class will be writing a strictly scripted major scholarly essay (I assure upper-level students that this experience will prepare them for graduate school, and I recently received an email from a former student in this course telling me “thank you” for just that).

While I feel like my teaching of writing has better bridged the gap between helping students acquire the broad concepts of effective and compelling writing (versus imposing on them artificial templates and “rules”), I continue to struggle with fostering in students the sort of writing process that would better serve them.

Similar to my stance on the essay form, I teach that the writing process is not sequential or a rigid template, but a set of concepts that most writing addresses to help produce a writing final product needed for the purposes of that project. In other words, these broad concepts are fairly stable but the so-called “steps” may differ and the time spent on each “step” likely will vary for different writing purposed.

For scholarly writing, the writing process includes much more than composing sentences and paragraphs. Here, then is a brief overview of my recent process this week writing and submitting my book chapter on mindset and grit.

Let me start with a caveat that I think should be shared with students.

When most scholars start a writing project, we are dealing with content that we have expertise in; my project on mindset and grit has years of blogging and gathering research behind the brief process I followed over three days.

My first steps included revisiting the chapter guidelines sent by the editors, confirming formatting, citation, word count, etc.

Then, as I stress to students, I prepared my Word document, conforming to APA guidelines and inserting the subheads, etc., along with the chapter template required by the editors. One concern I have with students is they tend to address formatting last, and I urge them to address this tediousness first. (See my submitted and not yet edited copy here.)

Next, I put the required page break in the end of the document and prepared my working references list. To create the list, I reviewed my many blogs on the topics, searched through my library data bases, reached out to other scholars for recommendations, and carefully culled sources from the references of the sources I had gathered (working from the most recent publications).

Let me stress here that as I detail my process, as I worked, these “steps” became more and more recursive in that as I worked in one “step” I would invariably return to and revise other “steps” (I caught simple formatting edits and typos, for example, in many of the “steps” being detailed here even as that is considered the editing “step”).

One goal as I worked was to create a compelling opening that included a thesis paragraph clearly aligned with the subheads and organization of the chapter. I drafted that opening on the first day and then I carefully edited and formatted all of my references, checking APA and loosely thinking about removing or adding needed sources. See the opening here:

Literacy educator and scholar Lou LaBrant (1947) asserted almost eight decades ago: “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). While valid in the mid-2020s, a slightly more nuanced argument needs to be proposed: Scientific research on teaching and learning is often lost in translation once it is packaged by the education marketplace and reduced to legislation and policy. In other words, what is popular, packaged, and mandated in education is too often an oversimplified and even misguided version of scientific findings, nothing more than a fad. An even more complicating problem, as well, is that classroom practices likely should be guided by more than experimental and quasi-experimental research (Wormeli, n.d., The problem).

Over the past decade-plus, two examples of research lost in translation include growth mindset and grit. Carol Dweck (2008), often publishing with others (Dweck & Yeager, 2019) examines the role of mindset is academic success. Grit is grounded in the research and advocacy of Angela Duckworth (2018); however, a great deal of the popularization of grit occurred through the journalism and advocacy of Paul Tough (2013) who promoted “no excuses” charter school practices, specifically the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter chain (Abrams, 2020). While growth mindset and grit are distinct concepts and educational movement, they tend to share similar spaces and problems in practice.

This chapter explores the central claims of growth mindset and grit before considering the validity of those claims in the context of the following critical questions: How are growth mindset and grit grounded while also perpetuating bootstrapping, rugged individualism and meritocracy myths? What are the roles of deficit ideologies (word gap, victim blaming, racism, sexism, classism, etc.) in popular advocacy for growth mindset and grit? As well the research and popular claims about growth mindset and grit are interrogated at three levels: (1) research validity and robustness, (2) evidence-based or ideologically based, and (3) racism and classism.

The next morning I reviewed and organized all of sources to comply with the structures required in the chapter. Here, I think, is where students are lost because of their previous experiences writing inauthentic research papers (in which many students gather the required number of sources and then simply walk the reader through their sources, writing about the sources and not their topic).

I created a table by my topics, mindset and grit, and then by the three major themes/patterns I planned to address; the key here, for students, is recognizing the need to focus on the patterns in their discussion and to cite multiple sources for those patterns.

I also created a listing of sources by my major topics, and then carefully reviewed them all to be sure I had classified them correctly and to identify the few I wanted to cite or quote more fully (I stress to students who have more experience with MLA and textual analysis that quoting is only one way to give evidence in scholarly writing and is often discouraged in many disciplines when not doing textual analysis).

Analyzing and organizing my evidence is designed to creating writing that offers a compelling generalization that is valid followed by a representative source or two to support the pattern; for example:

However, the current public discourse around mindset has made a significant turn to being critical and even skeptical (Study finds, 2018; Tait, 2020; Young, 2021a, 2021b). This shift is spurred by the growing research base that fails to replicate the primary claims of mindset advocacy or shows negative correlations or harm in implementing mindset intervention over other aspects of learning and achievement (Brez et al., 2020; Burgoyne et al., 2020; Burnette et al., 2018; Dixson et al., 2017; Ganimian, 2020; Li & Bates, 2019; Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023; Sisk et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2017). Brez at al. (2020) conclude: “The pattern of findings is clear that the intervention had little impact on students’ academic success even among sub-samples of students who are traditionally assumed to benefit from this type of intervention (e.g., minority, low income, and first-generation students)” (p. 464). And Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) make a more problematic assertion:

Taken together, our findings indicate that studies adhering to best practices are unlikely to demonstrate that growth mindset interventions bene t students’ academic achievement. Instead, significant meta-analytic results only occurred when quality control was lacking, and these results were no longer significant after adjusting for publication bias. This pattern suggests that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely spurious and due to inadequate study design, flawed reporting, and bias. (p. 163)

Again, I need to emphasize that students must understand that several of these steps require and prompt continuous revision and editing. I returned to my title and the thesis paragraph for revision as I drafted the two major subhead sections and the subheadings under those. In other words, I was then in a constant state of seeking coherence in the chapter whereby all the parts match and create the whole (which then is reinforced by the final section/closing of the chapter).

For students, I will stress that I drafted an opening on the first day, drafted the first major subheading section the second day, and then drafted the second major section and closing the third day. But the writing parts were embedded in a great deal of reading, cataloguing, and organizing.

I also completed a full initial draft, but then let that sit for a while before doing a full re-read, revision, and editing session with the entire chapter in front of me; I did several re-read-revise-edits along the way as well.

For students, then, here is what they should see as elements of a writing process for academic/scholarly writing:

  • Identify writing assignment guidelines, formatting requirements, and citation style.
  • Prepare your Word document per those guidelines, creating your initial title, subheads, and any guiding bullet points or questions detailed in the assignment.
  • Create working references list, addressing citation formatting before working further.
  • Create an initial compelling opening (multiple paragraphs) with a thesis paragraph that correlates with the title, the organization, and subheads of the essay.
  • Read, re-read, organize, and catalogue (patterns/themes) references based on the organization of the assignment; identify the representative anchor sources that will be used to elaborate on the patterns identified and cited with multiple valid sources. Be sure to carefully identify direct quotes and include citation, page or paragraph numbers, etc., when creating a matrix of patterns and analyses of the evidence.
  • Revise and edit throughout these steps, even significant revisions such as addressing the title, the thesis paragraph, or organization if the review of the evidence prompts those revisions.
  • Create a full first draft, and then let that sit. The final step should be a careful re-read to revise and edit before submitting.

The essay form and the writing process are important concepts for developing writers and students to understand, and that understanding must come from authentically engaging with both in supportive environments.

The challenge with teaching students to write generally and then as academics/scholars is that there are too many moving parts and simply no hard and fast “rules” to govern either the essays they write or the process they use to write them.

education

Course Grade Contracts: Assignments as Teaching and Learning, Not Assessment

[Header Photo by Diomari Madulara on Unsplash]

At the end of fall semester of year 41 as an educator, I can admit two things: (1) I may have learned more than my students (taught two new courses and continue to experiment with course grade contracts), and (2) I am excited about spring courses where I can implement what I learned (both about grade contracts and teaching students to write).

Since I entered the classroom in 1984, I am in my fifth decade as a teacher, much of that work dedicated to teaching writing to students but also using writing assignments as teaching and learning, not assessment.

Gradually and then at some point in the 1990s, I successfully eliminated traditional tests and assignment grades in my high school English courses. As a note of clarification, although I do not use tests or grades, I have always been required to assign grading period and course grades.

Thus, I have been seeking ways to better navigate a test/grade culture of traditional schooling (one my students have been conditioned to trust and even embrace) while practicing my critical philosophy that rejects both.

A few semesters ago, as part of that journey, I returned to the course grade contract, something I had tried in some fashion during my high school teaching years.

The problem I continued to have was that students were mostly unable to set aside their test/grade mentality, and thus, the absence of tests and assignment grades often negatively impacted student engagement and learning.

Initially, I envisioned course grade contracts would improve student engagement and lower stress and anxiety, thus improving learning.

Some non-traditional practices worked. I have students prepare for and participate in a class discussion for their midterm, for example. No memorization, no “cover your work,” and no exam stress.

This collaborative approach students both embraced and recognized as not assessment, but as learning experiences themselves.

However, particularly in courses that are not designated as writing courses (I do teach first-year writing and an upper-level writing/research courses), students tend to struggle significantly with the course structure and the use of a major writing assignments as an extended teaching and learning experiences (and not a way to grade them).

The first iteration of the course grade contract, then, focused on requiring students to submit, conference, and revise essays; I structured A and B course grades around minimum standards for the B-range (submit an acceptable essay, conference after receiving my feedback, and submit one acceptable revision that addresses the feedback) and additional revisions after more feedback for the A-range.

Despite the course grade being explicitly linked to minimum expectations for the process, students continue to see my feedback as negative and harsh, but also remain trapped in the possibility of submitting a perfect essay and never having to complete revisions.

In short, they see the essay assignment as a form of assessment and cannot fully engage in the submitting/revising process as individualized teaching and learning experiences.

Oddly, students continue to email me apologizing for their first submissions because they see the revision-oriented feedback, again, as negative or harsh—evaluative—and not a necessary part of essay assignment as teaching and learning.

The semester ending now, in fact, proved to me that using the course grade contract to shift assignments from forms of assessment to teaching/learning experiences (like the midterm exam period as a class discussion) needed another round of revision by me.

The problems I am still encountering include students struggling in content-focused courses (where they expect traditional tests and are not expecting to be challenged as thinkers and writers) because of the absence of tests/grades as well as the course structure that forefronts course content in the first half of the semester and mostly implements workshop the second half.

Here, then I want to share the new versions of those contracts to be implemented in spring. I have more explicitly included language about the purpose of the contract and added the final portfolio expectations in a format that also is more explicit about assignment expectations as well as fulfilling the contracted grade.

Here is the revised course grade contract for my first-year writing course:

And here is the revised course grade contract for my upper-level writing/research course:

The problem will remain, however, that I teach students conditioned for more than 2/3 of their lives in a culture of tests and grades, a culture that has taught them that assignments as by the teacher for evaluation and not for the student as teaching and learning.

I am seeking ways to shift the culture of teaching and learning as well as my students’ expectations for what it means to be a student and a teacher.

These are big asks for those students, but I am convinced they can make those shifts and benefit greatly from doing so.

Teaching, Writing

How to Write Like a Scholar (and Not Like a Student)

[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Having taught now an on-going 41 years—about half that time as a high school English teacher and now a college professor—if there is one thing I know very well, it is the student.

While I love teaching and my students, there is also one thing I have worked diligently to discourage, young people in classrooms performing like students.

Most student behavior is artificial (hand raising to speak, sitting in neat rows, walking in single-file lines) and often dehumanizing (asking permission to go to the bathroom). And since the core of my work as a teacher has focused on teaching writing, few aspects of being a student are worse than writing like a student.

Much of my writing instruction focuses on moving students away from writing like students and toward writing like scholars (or, ideally, like writers).

While I cringe a bit focusing with the negative, let’s consider what writing like a student looks like (and what young writers should avoid):

Starting essays with and punctuating the discussion throughout with Big Claims that are often inaccurate or mostly empty and then nearly never proven or cited.

One of the best examples of this rhetorical pattern is from The Onion: “For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation.”

Many students are drawn to the “throughout history” claims or framing a topic as “people have always debated,” “many people today debate,” or this topic is “controversial.” Scholars and writers avoid the Big Claims and especially the “throughout history,” “debate,” or “controversy” framing of a topic.

Student writing is often too big and overstated while scholars tend to work in very small and nuanced spaces around a topic; students seek to draw definitive and black-and-white conclusions while scholars deal in questions to be considered and reach tentative conclusions that are qualified.

Writing about doing the writing or research assignment.

Student papers are often filled with references to being a student writing an essay: “The sources I analyzed show,” “In the essay, I am going to,” “The research that I found explains,” “Most of the sources used,” “Many articles and papers done on these topics,” etc.

While there may be some charm to this accidental postmodernist approach to writing (alas, most students are not Kurt Vonnegut intruding on his own fiction narrative), for students, these meta-writing rhetorical moves do not accomplish anything substantive for the purpose of the essay or the content; these phrases simply add to the word count as empty calories.

For example consider the following and the revision (by removing the meta-writing, the word counts drops, and the writing is more direct and clear):

Student writing: 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).

Revised: While some correlation exists between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).

[Note that students can and should use “I” in writing when first person is appropriate and drives the content and purpose of the essay. Typically, students are apt to use “I” in empty and performative ways instead of powerfully and appropriately.]

In cited writing assignments, producing a very narrow form of the “research paper.”

I now include on essay assignments “Do not write a research paper on …” as part of the assignment. The artificial “research paper” that many students have acquired from K-12 schooling is a mechanical and prompted essay form that results in students writing about their sources instead of writing a purposeful essay with a clear audience: “One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.”

Also, as another example: “John Dewey (1953) wrote a book about progressive education. In his book, Dewey (1953) states, ‘The educator is responsible for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that will enable activity ties to be selected which lend themselves to social organization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control’ (pp. 23-24).”

Many students simply walk the reader through their “sources” one-by-one, essentially writing about their sources and not their topic. This includes text that increases word count and nothing else, empty calories: “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.”

Consider a more direct and powerful version: “Oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”

Excessive or inappropriate quoting.

You may be noticing a trend here since a great deal of what makes something “student writing” increases word count without contributing to the content of the writing.

Excessive and inappropriate quoting is a hallmark of student writing grounded in learning to cite and provide evidence in their writing primarily in their high school English classes where they are using MLA and often doing textual analysis (literary analysis).

Students have learned in the context of literary analysis for English courses that the (only) way to prove a point is by quoting. This is essentially true when writing textual analysis, but students turn that into a universal technique whereby they quote excessively from sources in all types of writing.

And thus, students (as noted above) simply write about their sources, quoting excessively from each and providing little of their own thoughts and almost no synthesis of information. One of the most ineffective but common examples is the floating quote in which the student as writer never exists: “’A democratic and inclusive sexuality education balances risk and resiliency and recognizes that they are on a continuum and are influenced by social and cultural factors in the environment’ (Elia & Eliason, p. 25).”

Scholars, when writing in forms and purposes other than textual analysis, tend to quote rarely or not at all; when quoting in scholarly writing that isn’t textual analysis, the guideline is something like quote when the “how” of the passage is as powerful as the “what.”

We may be justified in quoting James Baldwin while not so much when using information from a peer-reviewed journal articles on social mobility or racism in policing.

Mechanical essay form and thesis sentences (declarative and conclusive statements).

If you have been wondering, the 5-paragraph essay is alive and well. Students overwhelmingly believe an introduction is one paragraph that ends with a declarative thesis statement, that essay bodies have three paragraphs or sections to correlate with the three points in that thesis, and that the conclusion is one paragraph that, yes, restates the thesis.

At no point of a student’s development is a 5-paragraph essay justifiable; it is the paint-by-numbers of composition. It is not just bad writing, it is also bad thinking.

Scholars write all sorts of essay forms and construct them around much broader concepts of openings, bodies, and closing with the thesis focus often in the form of questions to be considered and not definitive assertions made at the beginning and then proven.

As with many of the examples so far, the 5-paragraph essay template is a distraction for the student-as-writer, focusing their writing on filling in the template and not addressing and developing their writing purpose for a clear audience. [As a note, I still have students occasionally label their thesis sentence in their essays.]

Essay purpose/form and audience directed at either at no audience or the teacher/professor.

Related to the 5-paragraph essay template is that students are trapped in the context of writing an essay is a form of assessment that is being assigned and graded by the teacher. As a consequence, the purpose is just doing the assignment, and the audience is either no one in particular or simply for the teacher/professor.

While the essay form for scholarly and academic writing is narrower than the entire array of what we call essays, students must be introduced to the broader essay form that involves them as writers making decisions about how to organize, to engage the readers, and to develop the purpose of the essay.

Some of the elements I introduce is the multiple-paragraph opening and closing, subheadings, the thesis as question(s), and abandoning the closing as a restating of the introduction.

Paragraphing that is very long or lacking purpose.

One thing students as writers simply cannot do is paragraphing. They have lived in a world of prescribed number-of-sentences mandates for paragraphing, and those prescriptions have been, to say the least, really bad guidelines.

Students have learned that longer is better.

While academic and scholarly writing suffer from the long-paragraph syndrome, here I do push students toward how non-academic writers use paragraphing.

Broadly speaking, readers prefer shorter paragraphs (or at least balk at long ones). And fields such as journalism use very short paragraphing.

Since a foundational part of teaching writing for me is students learning to be purposeful instead of following templates and rules, I focus on purposeful and varied paragraphing. We read and examine many effective essays that use one-sentence paragraphs and explore how paragraphing impacts the reader/audience of the text.

Word choice and tone contradicting the content and tone of the essay topic and purpose.

Students as writers are, of course, developing and expanding their vocabulary. But the diction problem that most characterizes student writing is a lack of awareness of tone—using words that have a contradictory tone to the level of seriousness of their topic.

Lots of “thing,” “good,” “bad,” and 8-color crayon box of words when they are exploring complicated and serious issues: “Sex education in the United States is all over the place, and for some students, their sex ed is almost exactly like the students in Mean Girls” or “This article was also pretty on par with the tone of the research papers” or “Because each employee’s salaries are not posted on the front desk for everyone to read, many women don’t even realize they are being gipped until someone blabs during their break at the water cooler or they hear the specifics of their associate’s raise.”

So here we are after a pretty extensive list of what student writing tends to entail. This, by the way, is no criticism of students.

Student writing is a reflection of how students have been taught, assigned, and graded. Students often learn what they are taught despite the hand wringing to the contrary.

I have two thoughts now.

First, students deserve better writing instruction and expectations throughout K-16. That instruction needs to come from teachers who are writers, not just “English teachers,” and more educators need better experiences with being writers themselves (that is the foundation of the National Writing Project).

Next, students are capable of making this transition, although the unlearning is often not fun for them or the instructor.

And thus the paradox remains: I love students but work daily to deprogram them from behaving like students.

See Also

Reading Like a Writer (Scholar): Kingsolver’s “Making Peace”