WHO PUSHES MY PEN AND GUIDES MY TEACHING?

I write riding on the pens of those who came before me.

I teach writing  looking over the shoulders and peeking into the minds of those who created new images of what writing instruction could look like.

It was almost 30 years ago, that Jim Sims, the Language Arts Director for Columbus City Schools, handed  me, along with my two colleagues and friends, Melissa Wilson and Marlene Beierele, copies of Writing: Teachers & Children at Work by Donald Graves,  with directions to read it and see if we could use some of the ideas as we wrote the new elementary writing curriculum for our school system.

We each went home and dipped into this book; we each read the entire book in one sitting. We returned the next morning on fire-- exhilarated and brimming with new thinking.  We did not write that day, but instead talked and processed, reacted and responded, sorted and discussed what we had read, the new ideas and principles we had encountered,  and what they meant for the work we were doing.

From Graves, we learned that children learn more about writing each time they write, if given the time to write. He taught us that children could write about people, places events, and feelings that were real--they could plumb their own lives for interesting, write-worthy topics. He challenged us to consider the interactions and contexts in which we were asking  a child to write, what the child brought to the writing by way of skill and knowledge, and how we could teach what the child still needed in the context of her writing.

I know this all sounds familiar and routine in 2014, but in 1985, this was revolutionary.

And yes, much of Donald Graves' thinking went into the Writing Guide that was used in our district for  more than a decade.


 A year later, our same team was asked to revise the newly minted guide. That year we were given The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins. From her work we welcomed and incorporated the notion of mini-lessons.  These short lessons provided necessary instructional scaffolding to foster better writing.  They addressed the needs of the students as they arose--presenting, modeling, and guiding the use of all aspects of the writing process.

This was just the piece that was missing from our evolving thinking and our previous guide.


Now armed with new and revolutionary thinking that dramatically transformed how we thought about writing, and  how we taught writing, the questions became How did this all fit in with the rest of our day?  What does this really look like in the classroom?

Enter Regie Routman  with Transitions, Invitations, and Conversations. Her books became staple texts in several literacy initiatiatives in our district.  They showed us possible frameworks for teaching all of the language arts-- how to incorporate our new thinking into our teaching day with real students in real classrooms.
                     
                      

It seems that just when we were ready for more, the next needed idea would arrive, the next important principle would emerge.

Katie Wood Ray's Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom  was right on time.She taught us how to use mentor texts to learn how to write what we wanted to write.  She affirmed that it is through reading that we are able to learn about writing, as we ask what words, structures, techniques and strategies a writer has used to achieve a desired effect.  She helped us deconstruct texts-- noticing, identifying, and naming what authors have done-- and  begin to use those same moves in our own writing, and more importantly, to help students use them in their writing, as well.

And synthesizing all that we learned, Ralph Fletcher reminds us of the areas of expertise on which we draw to teach--  all that we know about language and writing, all  that we know about the world, all that we know about our students and teaching.  He reiterates the need for mentor authors and texts, and considers elements of craft.  What a Writer Needs is what we needed to extend our own knowledge and confidence, and that of our writers.






In more recent years, as I worked to help my students develop more sophistication and creativity in sentence construction, I turned to Don and Jenny Kilgallon and their sentence imitation models. Along with their resources and my own systematic instruction that I gradually developed with my students, we saw vast improvements in this area. There is at least one text for each level, with all  of mentor sentences are excerpted directly from classic and contemporary literature. (My sentence work will probably be the focus of a future post.)

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And finally, as we place greater emphasis on nonfiction, as we focus more on writing essays, research, and arguments, as well as the transition to college writing, the following resources have been  essential. In fact, I reread Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition periodically for the benefit of my personal writing.


 

I gratefully acknowledge my mentor teachers.

I appreciate their books that have led to transformation of writing for me, as well as the instruction I offer to my students

I thank the writers who push my pen and whose voices I hear in my head as I teach writing.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

As a teacher, whose shoulder do you stand on as you teach?  Which books have most influenced the way you teach writing, or your specific content area? What have you learned from your mentor teachers and texts?

If you are not a teacher, whose shoulders do you stand on in your chosen field? What books and resources have been essential in your growth and maturation?

Write a history, essay, or personal narrative detailing your evolution in writing life, teaching life, or professional life.

READING ON THE WAY TO WRITING

Writers read.

What are you reading?       

If you want to write, you must be reading---filling your head with wonderfully simple plots or delightfully complex ones with lots twists, turns,  and  surprises-- gathering new narrative possibilities for your own writing.

If you want to write, you must be savoring poetry that reflects your life, shows you the perfect metaphor for what happened yesterday, or names what was unnameable until that one particular poem read on one particular morning named it for you.

If you want to write, you must  be reading nonfiction, informational texts, newspapers and  journals--current events, local goings-on, and reflective essays provide much ink for your pen. And literary journals keep you abreast with what your peers and literary superheroes are writing.

If you want to write, you must be filling your head with language and words and  ideas-- and life.

If you want to write you must read--a lot.

You must read like a writer, not only enjoying, savoring, and learning, but also noticing and naming what writers are doing in  texts, and later imitating to create your own texts.

In a previous post, we considered the important role of reading and mentor texts. (see Mentor Texts: Learning to Write from What We Read)

 In Language Arts (May 2008, Vol. 85, No. 5), I wrote the following about reading like a writer as part of a review of  Wondrous Words by Katie Wood Ray :

...Katie Wood Ray invites us to not simply appreciate the finished product, but to closely and critically examine the underside to see how the colorful patterns were created. Likening the search for writing ideas to a seamstress shopping, she reminds us that the seamstress will “take a lot longer . . . turn jumpers and shirts inside out, sometimes sitting on the floor to study how something is made. While the rest of us mere shoppers are looking only at sizes and prices, (Katie’s) friend is looking closely at inseams, stitching and ‘cuts on the bias’ . . . she is shopping for ideas for clothes.” 

Katie Wood Ray challenges us to push beyond mere reading purposed for enjoyment and understanding; she urges us to become apprentices to other writers, to learn the craft of writing by eagerly examining, deliberately deconstructing, and intentionally imitating the work of other writers.

Writer read.
And... writers read like writers.

So what am I reading?
What am I reading on the way to writing?

I am currently engaged in reading a number of books for a variety of reasons.

Each morning after reading the morning office in the Book of Common Prayer, I read the day's appointed devotions from two sources.  

Can I use the beautiful language  and  complex, formal sentence structures I find here in my own writing? 

I love poetry and have fallen in love with the work  of Richard Blanco, the young poet who read  One Today at Barack Obama's second inauguration.  I am reading his chapbook, Place of Mind.  And a second book by Blanco rests in my to-be-read pile. 

Can I write about home and history and the sea like Blanco?

For the class I am taking  on digital writing, this week we are reading one of our several texts,  Learning in the Cloud: How ( and Why ) to Transform Schools with Digital Media by Mark Warschauer.

Here I find several charts and suggested content that will help me complete my matrix-- Ways to Work with Digital Tools-- an assignment for the class which details my recommendations for instruction and professional development in digital writing. 

I will be featured on NWP Radio on March 28, along with Lynne R. Dorfman, co-author of Mentor Texts, Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6.  I  am looking forward to this and in preparation for our conversation, I am rereading one of  Lynne's books.

Can I effectively use and encourage others to use mentor texts in new ways?

Additionally, I am reading, in spurts, two other professional books, Ralph Fletcher's new edition of What a Writer Needs, and Christopher Lehman's Energize Research Reading and Writing. 

I saw Lehman speak at NCTE 2012 and wanted to read more of his ideas. I have used the first edition of Fletcher's book for years in my own teaching, and with teacher writing groups, so naturally I needed to check out the second edition..

In addition, I am currently deeply interested in sentence crafting, so I am slowly working my way through How to Write a Sentence: And  How to Read One by Stanley Fish.

Can I write nonfiction clearly and creatively like Fletcher and Lehman? Can I utilize new sentence structures that will better convey my meanings?

Finally I am also reading Seeing Red- A Pedagogy of Parallax: An Epistolary Bildungsroman on Artful Scholarly Inquiry by Pauline Sameshina ...just for my personal pleasure.

Can I write an epistolary poem embedded with information
about teacher education or writing instruction or some other academic field?


And then there are whatever current entertainment, cultural, news, professional or literary magazines and journals that have arrived.  I won't list all of those.

And  of course, there are several piles of next books, piles to shop through when I am ready for something new.

From all of these books that I am currently reading, I  am learning more about writing. I am seeing new writing possibilities.

Writers read.  And  writers read like writers.

What are you currently reading?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibility

What are you currently reading?

You may want to actually make a list.

What is each text teaching you about writing?

What might you write that is inspired by each text?