Hidden Gems: Naming and Teaching from the Brilliance in Every Student's Writing

What Voices Dance in Our Heads?

• It is important to review our own histories as young writers receiving comments and grades on our nascent drafts.

• Exercise:

  1. Reflect on comments from family, teachers, or professors that were especially helpful or hurtful. Consider casual assessments, formal grades, test scores, or evaluations (spoken or written). Spend ten minutes on this reflection, using a double-column entry or a graphic organizer.
  2. Analyze the comments, noting any surprises, patterns, or themes. Consider the writing feature (organization, sentence structure, comma use, word choice, or content development) and the conditions of the writing task (at home or at school, assigned or self-initiated).
  3. Reflect on how these experiences shaped the writer (or non-writer) you are today.
  4. Discuss with a colleague or friend for ten minutes, noting commonalities in experiences with writing response. Discuss any standout responses and their nature, and make generalizations about response to writing. Consider what type of response (written or verbal) helped you feel powerful or discouraged you as a writer.

• Teachers' answers remain constant, regardless of age or experience.

• Negative comments on writing result in lifelong anxiety about and avoidance of writing.

• Positive comments result in lifelong ease and confidence in writing.

• Language can deeply wound and leave lasting scars, but the words we speak can be crucial missing ingredients to help a kid make a breakthrough in his writing.

• An A grade may give a flush of self-worth.

• One teacher, Traci Jackson, received the comment “Your writing is simple, yet elegant,” which guided her life.

• As a college student, the author received mostly positive comments, but a literary analysis essay with a B grade and the comment "This smacks of creative writing" stung.

• Comments such as vague, wordy, and awkward are unhelpful.

• Awkward represents a teacher's unease when a sentence doesn't sound or look right, grammatically speaking.

• Students don't learn how to revise from a scribbled AWK in the margin.

• Literate grammar structures are learned from reading a great deal of written texts.

• Kids mimic fragmented ways of talking and thinking.

• Productive comments make teachers feel noticed for their specific writing gifts.

• Destructive comments make teachers feel brutalized by verbal and written comments on their work.

• Maggie Bills' kindergarten teacher wouldn't hang her work on the wall because she accidentally added an extra g to her name, teaching her that one pencil mark could cause the adult to react with anger and disgust.

• Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, had a teacher mark all over her first short story, correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation, without saying a thing about the story itself, and she didn't write again until she was 21.

• Stories abound of famous writers who received comments such as "You will never be a writer" or "You have a B mind”, and have never quite recovered from that.

• Most adults would rather dig a ditch beside a highway in the August sun than write something.

• Responses to young people learning to write matter more than we can ever know.

• It can be hard to know what to say when faced with an illegible jumble of words, or a spindly paragraph where there should be many pages of text.

• When we read work by kids who can write circles around us, sometimes we can only say, "That's great! Keep going!" and scurry on.

• One way to help us find words to say about our students' writing is to remember those comments that felt meaningful and supportive when we were students.

• Or we can listen to and borrow from the positive comments that have burned like eternal flames inside our friends' and colleagues' hearts all these years.

• Paula (Eyrich) Tyler, the author's creative writing teacher, said, "You are a poet and you have a poet's soul."

• Geoffrey Wolfe's bold black permanent-penned comments in the margins were only positive and encouraging.

• Wolfe said the author's description of the dinner table routine in her childhood was so vivid, so delicately painted and so restrained of any blame or anger that he thought he could hear and see the little girl that was me. He said that he wanted to reach into the words and hold that little girl.

• This comment gave the author a name for what she was doing, mostly unconsciously at that time, in her writing, and it became her personal standard for good writing-restraint.

• Wolfe read the author's writing as if he were reading a published memoir, elevating the author's work and identity.

• The particular words we use with our students to comment on their writing have tremendous power and weight because speaking is as much an action as hitting someone with a stick, or hugging them.

• Language is not merely representational; it is also constitutive, creating realities and inviting identities.

• Teachers can help create kids who love to write and try to improve their writing by naming their hidden gems, their particular gifts as writers or we can destroy any desire to write by constantly pointing out what is wrong or what is missing.

• Students who figure out that spelling, punctuation, and grammar are merely puzzles, games to play to win the prize of an A, begin to write to please copy editors, rather than write for meaning or to discover their own writing identity and process.

• Kids begin to grow their identities as writers from the first mark they place on a page.

• School becomes the place to be wrong and writing becomes a place to ferret out surface and structural errors.

• A text's emotion, meaning, and intention take a back seat to so-called correctness.

• Students who have received mostly critical attention for the errors in their papers become anxious and high apprehensive writers.

• High apprehensive writers avoid any kind of writing, choose less intense language, use fewer words, and make fewer statements.

• Constant attention to and judgment on mechanics and organization becomes a systematic means for placing restraints on kids without listening to what they have to say.

• Research about writing response claims that praise and encouragement take writing a greater distance than criticism.

• Noticing and praising whatever a student does well improves writing more than any kind or amount of correction of what he does badly and that it is especially important for the less able writers who need all the encouragement they can get.

• Saying “That’s great; keep going!” teaches more than circling errors.

• Praise, especially saying that a child is “smart,” produces a short burst of pride, followed by a long string of negative consequences.

• When children were told at home or in school that they were “smart,” it created in the kids a fixed mind-set, where they believed they have a predetermined, innate (and limited) amount of intelligence and cannot learn.

• If parents and teachers focused instead on kids’ learning process, how they solve a problem, how they practice, look things up, and ask for help, the children developed a “growth mind-set,” and believed they could always improve with effort.

• Effort or process praise fosters hardy motivation.

• Calling someone “smart” can actually terrify and freeze a young person because “smartness” definitely does not translate to strong writing; in fact, when I confer with kids who have been given labels like “gifted and talented,” they often reject the idea of revising their drafts or refuse to write in front of me because they are afraid of making mistakes or not knowing something.

• We can all learn how to name precise writing qualities in our students’ work once we push past our deeply ingrained notions of what makes writing “good” and “bad.”

Where Did We Learn What Writing Should Look and Sound Like?

• When we read a piece of student writing, we are probably unable to read with any neutrality or lack of personal bias.
• What a teacher says to a student about writing is saturated with the teacher's values, beliefs, and models of learning.
• These saturated beliefs and methods of responding were given to us throughout our own education and life experiences.
• When the author published her first book for teachers, she learned how many of the rules she had so carefully memorized and shown off in her English classes were no longer considered correct, and her manuscripts came back to her covered in red ink again, but this time for following the rules she'd learned in school!
• Teaching sticks.
• If we had a terrific writing teacher who knew about composing and revising, genre forms, and reading/writing connections, we likely have a strong sense of what to look for in a piece of student writing.
• We all know what to teach largely from what we have been taught.
• If we had teachers who harped on handwriting, spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing, then those are the things that instantly leap off the page when we read our students' writing.
• Certain kinds of errors (such as "me and my friend went…") can actually cause frenzy amongst language arts teachers.
• Many of our ideas of correctness are value-laden at best and incorrect, at worst.
• Some rules that we memorized in middle school and high school no longer apply to written texts yet continue to haunt our heads and our red pens.
• Mythrules: Ed Schuster calls these ghosts of high school English "mythrules" and proceeds to divulge the history and origin of each and also gives dozens of examples of broken rules in all our favorite authors, including Shakespeare.
• It is perfectly fine, for instance, to end a sentence with a preposition; not doing so can result in convoluted sentences that sound terrible when you read them out loud.
• Sentences should never begin with a conjunction.
• A more reasonable approach to the frequent overuse of and at the beginning of sentences is first to recognize that this practice mimics oral language and storytelling, which uses and to connect sentences and parts so that the listener can easily follow the sequence and logic.
• Next, we might demonstrate with written text, how many of those sentences can be combined, dropping the and to create stronger, more succinct sentences.
• Rather than beginning with the mistakes students make, we could start by realizing that students are transitioning from the way that people speak to a more formal literate style.
• Our parents and relatives wanted the best for us so often they made sure we did well in school, and they made sure we got the best grades on spelling, handwriting, and grammar worksheets.
• These were the kind of worksheets our parents remember doing when they were in school, and they either suffered over it and got low grades, in which case they yearn for things to go better for us, or they were quite skilled at the skills, in which case we had better be the same or even better at it than they were.
• Parents may have corrected our spoken errors in an unduly harsh manner: “It’s ran, not runned!”
• Siblings and cousins may have edited our speech and writing because this is one way we learned early on that it's possible to ridicule and demonstrate power over someone in ways that aren’t physical and punishable.
• Notions of correctness in grammar and spelling may have become, for many of us, places of personal failure in the eyes of those closest to us.
• As adults, and as teachers, we may bring those lessons unwittingly to our students as we read and comment on their writing.
• District Mandates, Standards, Curriculum Frameworks
• Principals to collaborate toward a vision of what they want quality writing instruction, process, and product to look like in their particular school.
• Curriculum framework that feels reductive, restrictive, and evaluative. We aim to follow the lead of our school and our colleagues for helping our students achieve, yet we end up narrowing the lenses we look through as we assess our students' writing.
• Those students who can fulfill the restrictive list of skills and concepts get the prize, and the rest struggle or fail, creating a community of haves and have nots.
• District Mandates, Standards, Curriculum Frameworks
• When the author taught fifth grade, colleagues and she were handed a list of expected skills and concepts to be covered throughout the year in writing:
  • spelling
  • handwriting
  • capitalization
  • conjunctions
  • parts of speech
  • prepositional phrases
  • contractions
  • root words
  • dialogue
  • suspense
• Only the last two items could arguably be about composing written texts rather than isolated grammar or mechanics skills.
• The list hung like an axe over the head of my teaching team, causing us to read our students' writing in a kind of panic, searching for evidence of mastery over these skills and concepts, and wailing in anguish because we could not find it.
• Let's face it; teachers are generally a rule-following lot.
• When we're told by school administrations, state education officials, and now by federal officials in the Department of Education what and how to teach, we tend to obey.
• The problem is that often those officials are wrong.
• If what they tell us to do ignores the particular, individual children in our classrooms, then I believe that is wrong.
• If they dictate how we should teach without knowing who teachers are, if they fail to consider our ability to think and make decisions based on the living processes of our classrooms, then I believe they are wrong.

Published Writing Programs and Rubrics

• The type produced by large publishing companies that researched state standards and writing test rubrics and formed lessons, worksheets, and evaluative rubrics to match those standards.
• The problem is that most of these programs ignore the specific children and teachers in specific classrooms and most deliver isolated skills practice and do not make room for what is a messy, recursive process and a way of thinking on the page and communicating with readers.
• Rubrics save time, energy, and dozens of student questions and complaints by making a type of rubric and giving it to students before they wrote.
• This enabled them to write to prescribed expectations, and then one could simply put checkmarks in the boxes according to whether they fulfilled the requirements.
• Rubrics create a reliance on external criteria and a kind of blindness to any stray brilliance or beauty that wanders outside the boxes.
• Writing is not flour or water or fat; it cannot be objectively measured
• Writing is not a set of morals or laws; it cannot be judged good or bad.
• Rubrics offer a vast improvement over empty letter or number grades in that they provide descriptors of expectations for writing, they are still not fast enough or huge enough to catch the winds of writing.
• Rubrics claim certain linear factors of writing that can be weighed and measured reliably enough for teachers to be able to judge good and bad writing.
• Writing may not be a simple system like billiards, subject to the laws of determinism.
• Writing may more closely resemble complex, chaotic systems like global weather, economic systems, or political unrest.
• Rubrics also largely rely on what Tom Newkirk calls a "formalist tradition,” for evaluating writing that “presume[s] to isolate 'qualities' of good writing as if they existed irrespective of content and blind to the cultural and ideological biases that inevitably come into play”.
• Rubrics cannot begin to describe the complex joys and sorrows of a piece of writing, and yet as they are used in school systems, they do define young people's writing identities.
• Most kids who come to know themselves as C writers, or number 2 writers, or whatever the hierarchical classification system exists, remain a C or a 2 in their minds and hearts and become adults who hate to write.

Grades

• As with rubric evaluation, grades on poems, stories, articles, and essays cannot possibly be objective.
• There is nothing to count and measure in writing except the number of paragraphs, T-units (sentences), and errors.
• Grading, even in a portfolio, freezes student work and teacher commentary.
• Grades stop thinking because kids either become focused on what a particular teacher expects or defines as necessary to get an A or students become fearful of judgment, of being wrong.
• Grades define writing identities in vague, subjective, and indeterminate ways that do not help kids learn how to take responsibility for revising and editing or develop their writing voices.
• Grades not only suppress student learning, they suppress teaching as an act of inquiry and exploration with students.
• Grades position teachers as arbiters of excellence and failure, and do not allow us to act intelligently inside our profession.

Our Own Preferences, Expectations, and Comfort Levels

• Jimmy Williams admitted that in the past, he had read student writing through the lenses of his own moods and prejudices.
• We are human, and some days we simply can't find it in ourselves to even read, much less wax poetic about yet another illegible or incomprehensible piece of writing.
• Teaching from what we know about language and what we expect student writing to look like can be positive, as long as our lenses are global enough and generous enough to accept diverse skills, purposes, and products.
• If we only lean on what has been described then we tend to stay safe and react to what we learned in our own school experience, or what we have been told by programs and publishers to look for.

Why the Old Lenses for Reading Student Writing No Longer Suffice

• Most everyone who reads has noticed that many writers seem to defy the rules of grammar and organization.
• We all read a poem or two by e.e. cummings in high school, and invariably, our English teachers told us that cummings had something called "poetic license" for breaking rules of grammar and punctuation.
• Does that seem fair, we might ask, that we correct kids for mistakes that grown-up writers make with impunity?
• Learning correct or Standard Written English is important.
• Kids need to know the rules before they can break them.
• One danger in this proposition is that the rules we teach may be outdated.
• What we believe we know about error is often in error!
• Rules change and more quickly than ever as digital literacies, such as text messaging, begin to dominate the ways people write.
• Rules vary according to discipline, purpose, audience, and genre.
• In newspaper writing, do not put commas before the and in a series, if there are more than three items-to save space.
• The most important, hard-core facts had to appear in the first paragraph, preferably in the first sentence with the information proceeds in order of steadily diminishing importance, with the least critical information in the very last paragraphs so that if inches are needed, these can be cut without losing the important details.
• Most frequently endings of essays, speeches, and books are the amen on whatever written.
• Rules vary according to publishing style.
• Space bar two times at the ends of sentences - for correct writing.
• Across the spectrum of creativity and invention are people who push against, if not utterly obliterate, the rules and conventions-teaching and testing to "mastery” leaves many students behind, sometimes literally, as they fail to pass into the next grade or to graduate.

Why Reach for a Wider Discourse About the Conventions of Writing?

• Acknowledge and demonstrate that many types of writing exist in the world and teach that different disciplines, professions, purposes, and audiences affect the forms and conventions of texts.
• Offer a more authentic discourse about writing that reflects how all kinds of writers operate in our world and doesn't hold kids hostage in an educational system that in many ways has not changed during the last seventy-five years.
• Liberate all children, but especially those who are second-, third-, or fourth-language learners, those who struggle whether for medical and/or mental and emotional issues, or who simply "don't fit" for any reasons whatsoever.
• Encourage writing that will be read by real readers, who are more exacting and harder to please than any rules, rubrics, tests, or grades.

The Good News: Celebrating Teachers of Writing

• The sources of information we have now are vast and easily accessible.
• They teach writing as a composing process, not as a list of isolated skills to plug into prefabricated sentences.
• They teach what it means to live wide-awake to the world and respond with a blog entry, a graphic novel, a poem, a feature article, or a play.
• We should always be able to provide a comment that will lift the quality of any student's writing because the resources for teaching writing have multiplied dramatically over the last forty years.
• Since the 1970s, writing experts like Donald Murray, Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, Randy Bomer, Nancie Atwell, Georgia Heard, Carl Anderson, Ralph Fletcher, JoAnn Portalupi, and Katie Wood Ray, among many others, have propelled us into a world awash with books, articles, speeches, workshop presentations, Internet sites, and DVDs about the qualities of good writing and how to teach them.
• Most teaching preparation courses at colleges and universities are at least familiar with the writing process, and many offer courses in how to teach writing workshop.
• Professional development organizations, such as the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Writing Project, and numerous publishers and independent sources offer sustained professional development in writing, either through organized institutes and courses, or by offering onsite professional development from experienced consultants.
• As readers and writers ourselves, we actually know a great deal about what writing should look and sound like.
• Thinking that school writing has to fit specific criteria on constrained rubrics, rather than remembering that good writing moves, entertains, informs, and calls to action.
• We can rely on some of our own barometers as readers and writers of texts.
• It helps to remind ourselves frequently of what we know about good writing by thinking about these broad areas of influence.

What Do You Enjoy Reading?

• Texts contain lessons for teaching kids to write, and in fact, the more we know about these diverse text forms, the more we can tap into what kids are reading and help them draw connections for their own writing.

What Do You Enjoy Writing?

• Whatever we do in our own writing process can provide specific, powerful lessons in writing for our students.
• I think we're sometimes afraid to reveal parts of our own process, for example, the fact that we procrastinate, borrow ideas from other writers, or worry about criticism from our readers.
• Those are precisely the kinds of revelations into the writing process that kids want and need to know.

Is There Ever a Time and Place for Demanding "Correct" Writing?

• Yes.
• Some writing tasks demand a level of correctness in content, form, grammar, and readability.
  • directions for using life-saving tools, such as fire extinguishers and heart defibrillators
  • instruction manuals for operating potentially hazardous materials and machines
• Short story by a fifth grader or even an analytical essay about literature by a ninth grader are not texts that can or should be held to such rigid standards of correctness.