Category: English Education

Social Networks, School Policies, and Surveillance

My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb‘s course at WMU join in, too.

As we consider what we will do with this network, I think that we have to ask ourselves a key question about its implementation and potential for use: how do we account for and respond to the contradiction in local, state, and federal policies regarding internet use (for instance, no blogging or social networking) and the call to teach these skills in our schools?

In other words, if we teach students how to use social networks, will they be able to use those skills once they are teaching?

Moreover, this raises another issue that my best friend Steve Tuckey and I were discussing a few weeks back — does taking a technology and reappropriating it for use in schools undermine the excitement and potential uses for that technology?

As an example, we talked about the idea of a “cheese sandwich blog,” one that tells basically accounts for the mundane happenings in everyday life. (If we build 20 million blogs, will the readers come?). Contrast that with the more substantive kinds of blogging that many edubloggers are calling for and teaching; that is, a more “academic” form of blogging. Steve asks, what’s wrong with the cheese sandwich?

He asks this not to be sarcastic (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but more to take a critical approach to how we use blogging. From an email conversation, he says, in part:

by trying to call for highfalutin standards of rigor in what our students blog about, we are essentially trying to colonize one of the most democratic spaces with the self-important hierarchy of academia. We try to set up the same old benchmarks for “good writing” in a new environment, all the while touting the greatness of its promise as something “new.” Seems schizophrenic to me. And don’t get me started on how real-time authoring serves to feed the dragon of continuous assessment…

In other words, if we reappropriate “blogging,” into an academic setting, is it blogging anymore? Or, is the definition of “blogging” (or, perhaps, edublogging), such that a higher level of discourse is now becoming expected above and beyond the typical diary/journal/update blogs of the past. And, with microblogs in Facebook and Twitter, are we going to have to think about how to make that academic blogging, too?

Steve was interested in seeing me raise this point with the other edubloggers that are thinking about similar ideas, perhaps in another forum beyond our blogs, too. Perhaps I will write a letter to EJ or something like that. If others have an idea about where and how we might discuss this issues — the appropriate use and reappropriation of blogging for academic purposes — let me know. It will certainly be on my mind as I prepare for next semester.


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Thinking about Multimodal Assessment

Yesterday, our RCWP Project WRITE team had the good fortune of being able to work with NWP’s Director of Research and Evaluation, Paul LeMahieu, on an analytic writing continuum workshop. In his talk, which was similar to the session that I attended last summer, he talked about how the continuum has been developed, the pedagogical uses of it, and how we, as professionals who teach writing, need to not just tell those who value tests to “stop,” but to also offer them something better to use instead (we hope to post some notes on the session soon on the Project WRITE wiki).

Particularly useful for the Project WRITE teachers, as he talked about the different categories for assessment on the continuum (content, structure, stance, diction, sentence fluency, and conventions — modeled, with permission, after six traits), he also talked about how this structure of assessment works for most kinds of writing, but not all and not the least of which is multimodal writing. He mentioned how there are not really any models that explore how to assess multimodal composition and how, perhaps, we could develop one through this work in Project WRITE. That is a very exciting component of this project that I had not anticipated when we originally started, and I look forward to pursuing it more soon. (NOTE: I do think that Bernajean Porter has got our thinking moving in this direction for K-12 students, and put up some good criteria and an interactive rubric maker on her Digitales Evaluation site.)

Coincidentally, I have been chewing on this idea now for the past few days as I was trying to help my students in ENG 201 come up with criteria for evaluating their final multimodal projects. As I asked them to reflect on what they have been doing and how they have been working over the past few weeks on these projects, we talked on Tuesday about how the categories of the analytic continuum (which we have been using all semester) just didn’t quite line up with what they were thinking about in terms of what to earn a grade on. Along with some criteria for judging group member performance, they went back to our discussions earlier this semester about rhetoric, and we came up with the following ideas for grading this project:

  • Ethos: the credibility of the author is established through professional language, use of appropriate sources, and evidence of author’s perspective (within or in addition to the main multimodal documents)
  • Pathos: the texts make appropriate emotional appeals that both engage the reader and provide insight into the chosen topic
  • Logos: the texts present a clear and coherent central idea, supported with appropriate evidence and argumentative strategies
  • Content and Structure: the choice of mode and media support the message in the texts and elements of multimedia are thoughtfully integrated into the project rather than as a gratuitous add-on
  • Design: the choice of design principles (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) as well as rhetorical decisions (transitions, word choice, stance) combine to make an attractive and effective presentation

So, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Students, in groups, will be assessing the other groups’ work and I will be throwing in my grade with the whole bunch to get an average. I haven’t graded anything multimodal yet, let alone a collaborative grading where students are involved in the process. I’ll write more about it once we are done, and look forward to hearing your ideas about how you are teaching and assessing multimodal writing, as well as any resources that you can point to about this messy, yet engaging, component of the writing process.

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Notes from “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How”

Today, I had the chance to attend an educational technology session at MSU featuring Nicole Ellison, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media, MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Leigh Graves Wolf, Learning Technology and Culture Programs, MSU College of Education. Their topic is “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How.” Here are some notes from the session:

  • What is educational blogging?
    • Blogging in educational settings: in the classroom, between department members, intra- and inter-university research collaboration
    • We will focus on cases where students maintain blogs as part of their coursework
    • Pew research: 8% of internet users maintain a blog, 39% of internet users read blogs, 57% of bloggers are younger
  • Why blogs and education?
    • Not much work that makes causal claims about how blogs impact education, but that is difficult
    • Focus on critical skill of writing
    • Encourages students to engage with positions divergent from their own
    • Students are invests because their is a larger audience
    • Increases digital literacy
    • Supports peer-to-peer learning and student-to-instructor knowledge sharing
    • Learning becomes less bound by time and space
  • Where to blog?
    • ANGEL — they are protected, but no RSS
    • On your own server — college is in control of the content and can protect it with complete administrative control
    • Edublogs, Blogger, WordPress — differing levels of administrative rights
    • MicroBlogs: Twitter and Facebook
  • What: An educational blogging case study
    • What are the differences among students’ perceptions regarding the educational beenfit of writing a blog entry vs. reading other students’ blogs vs. reading other students’ comments?
    • What are student perceptions of the experience of blogging as an educational activity?
    • Overall perceptions:
      • A new experience and uniquely engaging in ways that traditional papers are not
      • Encouraged a less formal writing voice. potentially eliciting a more authentic writing style
      • Exposed students to different perspective; surprised by range of responses
      • They felt it was most useful to read other people’s blogs
      • “I liked the fact that we had to comment on others blogs. It’s cool to get some feedback on what I’ve written.”
      • ” I felt it was really cool when one of the people actually cited what I said in my blog on someone else’s blog.”
      • “It taught be some things that I didn’t pay much attention to before. It was cool because i was able to see what students thought about things we typically wouldn’t talk about in class.”
      • “[comments] are nice to see when the person really puts thought into them, and sometimes make me think and want to write more.”
      • I think it is more effective using the WWW because anyone can view it and we saw that when Ryan’s blog was commented on by the actual author of the piece that we read.”
  • What: Commenting
    • Not all students saw benefits of reading others’ blogs or comments
    • Uncomfortable giving critical feedback: “Some people didn’t even write what they were supposed to. Plus, I don’t really know how to respond to other people’s ideas, I don’t want to tell them that they are wrong or anything like that.”
    • Technical problems
    • I didn’t give them lots of guidance on how to provide comments, so I would do that differently
  • What: Implications for Practice
    • Students are going to come in with a notion of what blogging is, and students may need guidance on how to reconcile their notions of blogging with the classroom context
    • In some cases, encourage use of pseudonym since this content (if public) will be archived for years to come
    • Consider technical implementation
    • Students need guidance on providing constructive criticism
  • What: Enthusiastic, yet wary and ambivalent
    • Enjoyed reading others’ blogs
    • Expands thinking
    • Didn’t want to sound preachy and start arguments
  • How to blog
    • Different Use Models
      • One to many: From the teacher as a posting to students; from the student to others
        • Provide feedback to a presenter on his/her blog
      • Many to many (class blogs)
        • People can become experts in one area
      • Many to one (RSS aggregation)
        • Use Google Reader to read all of my students’ blogs
      • Experimental Writing
        • Creating an “academic” writing in blogging environment — posts within the blog are tagged and connected as well as external links (Leigh’s example)
      • Issues
        • Anonymous blogging
        • FERPA concerns
        • Intellectual property
      • Other tools
    • How: Assessment
      • Grade for content or completion?
      • Require a set number of posts?
      • Specify timing of posts throughout semester?
      • Require comments and feedback?
      • Need to back up posts
    • How: Practical Advice
      • Blog yourelf
      • Start small
      • Subscribe to RSS feeds
      • Read other educator blogs
      • Virtual University
      • Blogs for Learning

Back to School (2.0)

Things have been absolutely crazy the past two weeks, but that has been good for me especially as I get back in the swing of teaching. As I begin the semester, there are a few things that I’ve been thinking about that I want to capture here and come back to think about more later.

First, in my writing class, the students have pretty much jumped up to each new technology that we try. On the first day of class, we began a wiki and I had students post some intro material there. This week, we created Google accounts and got set up with Blogger and Google Reader. All this is leading them to create their own research agendas, affinity groups for a multimodal presentation, and to become writers in their professions in the 21st century. Based on their initial surveys, there was a wide range of tech skills, and they are willing to help one another in the classroom, so that is good. Based on what I have seen, this will be a very “school 2.0” type of experience for them.

Second, in my methods class, we began a wiki, too. Unlike my writing class in which things are organized more thematically and students will have some choice about the types of writing that they do, I have to organize this class around a slightly more structured curriculum. That said, there is still lots of room for flexibility and I will be inviting them to do some digital composition as well. They, like the writing class, were a bit apprehensive at first about writing on the wiki, but in an activity tonight, they were doing quite well. In fact, one student synthesized a few lists of responses from separate groups on one page without being asked (as we learned last week that overwriting can be a problem). I also showed them Google Docs, and some seemed intrigued. So, we might go in that direction a bit, too.

All of this is just to say that I have been reminded again and again about taking things in slow, manageable chunks. One student half-joked that she was thinking about dropping the writing course after the first day (she didn’t, thank goodness, and did well today setting up her blog). It reminds me that some students know quite a bit about this and can help others. And, for everyone, it is nice to have reminders and tutorials; thus, I am going to look for tutorials on YouTube for everything that we do so they can go back to it later to be reminded (or, perhaps, I will make my own with Jing).

At any rate, this has me very excited about the semester and the fact that students are taking to the school 2.0 kind of learning. I appreciate all the podcasts, blog postings, and one-on-one coaching that my colleagues have provided to me so I can be at this point — and look forward to sharing thoughts back here. More to come as the semester progresses.

Happy back-to-school (2.0) to all of you!

Preparing for Writing Methods, K-8

The month of August has brought a number of transitions, not the least of which is that I begin teaching at CMU next week. There are two courses that I will be doing this fall; one is a writing methods course for K-8 pre-service teachers and the other an intermediate composition course. More on composition next week, but for now I thought that I would post some of my thinking about writing methods as I created my syllabus.

I must say that sections of this intro to the course are taken from my department chair, Marcy Taylor’s syllabus, but I have added a few things. I forgot how much a syllabus can, in a sense, be a teaching philosophy of sorts, and I really enjoyed crafting this introductory part of the document. In my next post (and once I have the assignment refined a little more), I will post what I plan to call the “Educational Contexts Multigenre Research Project.” For now, here are some of my thoughts on writing and teaching writing, as represented in my syllabus  for this fall’s class.

Course Overview
In “The Neglected ‘R’: The Need for a Writing Revolution,” the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges begin their report by claiming that

Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge. Although many models of effective ways to teach writing exist, both the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years. (2003, p. 6)

Given this national context, we will explore models of teaching writing while attempting to understand why and how writing is being “shortchanged” in our schools. A complex task, teaching writing requires that we understand why and how people choose to write, what methods are appropriate in certain situations, how social-cultural and cognitive factors play into individual writing processes, and the effects of newer technologies and multiple literacies on what constitutes “good” writing instruction.

Good writing instruction requires more than following a textbook. A trusted scholar and practitioner, Lucy Calkins offers a vision for what it means to be a teacher of writing:

If our teaching is to be an art, we must draw from all we know, feel and believe in order to create something beautiful.  To teach well, we do not need more techniques and strategies as much as we need a vision of what is essential.  It is not the number of good ideas that turns our work into art but the selection, balance and design of those ideas. (1994, p. 3)

Thus, this course is designed to help you make wise decisions about the “selection, balance and design” of writing in your elementary-level classrooms. Think of it as a workshop; the emphasis will be on creating and critiquing ideas about writing pedagogy through a hands-on approach. It is designed to focus on five basic areas of preparation:  your own writing; reading and discussion; working with children in the classroom; creating teaching materials; and written reflection on the first four.

Methods courses can never be only about “methods” or lesson planning alone. Many students expect to get a “bag of tricks” or “set of strategies” from the class that they can simply take and use directly as lessons in their classrooms. This is reasonable. Because you are anxious to get out and have your own classroom, I can understand why you may be impatient with what you see as theory or “busy work.” My goal is that you come to realize is that “theory” is all you have with which to filter the events of the classroom; you won’t know what to do completely until you get there. Think of this class as offering a theory, an approach, to writing instruction, one that will define writing and literacy in a broad manner.

For that definition, we turn to Anstey and Bull who offer us a vision of what literacy pedagogy, when deeply and critically theorized, can look like:

[L]iteracy pedagogy must teach students to be flexible, tolerant of different viewpoints, and able to problem solve, analyse situations, and work strategically. They must be able to identify the knowledge and resources they have and combine and recombine them to suit the particular purpose and context. Consequently, school classrooms and teachers’ pedagogy must encourage, model, and reflect these sorts of behaviours. The content and pedagogy of literacy programs must reflect the literate practices of local to global communities and equip students for change. Educators cannot hope to teach students all they need to know, as this will change constantly. But teachers can equip their students with the knowledge, skills, strategies, and attitudes that will enable them to meet new situations and cope with them. (2006, p. 18)

No small task, indeed. Learning how to teach writing may involve unlearning how you were taught writing. It may challenge your conceptions of what a “good” writer is and should be able to do. Thus, the focus of this course will be on practicing the strategies of a writing workshop approach as filtered through the multiple lenses of curriculum and pedagogy, practice and theory. This applies to both traditional written texts (e.g., stories, essays, and poems) and those composed with newer technologies and in multiple media (e.g., hypertexts, audio, video, and other multimedia).

One of the most fundamental tenets that scholars in our field argue is that teachers of writing need also to be writers. It is my goal as your teacher to help you become both a better writer and teacher of writing in different genres, for different purposes, and across various audiences. By the end of the course, you will believe the mantra, “I am a writer.”
References

  • Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.
  • Calkins, Lucy. The Art of Teaching Writing. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
  • National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges. (2003). The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. Available: www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf

Response to “Writing Next” Report

Monday, we will be discussing the Writing Next Report, issued by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Here are my thoughts on the prompt, “How has reading the Writing Next Report encouraged you to rethink aspects of your teaching practice?”

Writing NextThe Writing Next Report, written by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, issued earlier this year by the Alliance for Excellent Education as a report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, outlines 11 teaching strategies that improve student achievement in writing. The report is a meta-analysis of dozens of quantitative studies that allow for the calculation of an “effect size,” or “the average difference between a type of instruction and a comparison condition” (p. 13). More on the measurement process and research method in a moment, but first a look at the results of the study.The authors of the report suggest eleven writing strategies that “are supported by rigorous research, but that even when used together, they do not constitute a full writing curriculum” (p.4). This point merits particular attention as one reads the list of strategies and thinks about what good writing teachers do as well as how and why they implement those strategies. That said, the list of strategies reads like a “greatest hits” of instructional techniques that a teacher can implement in his or her classroom (hence the warning not to call this list a curriculum). Here is the list, taken verbatim from the report, pages 4 and 5 (and I have listed the effect sizes at the end, the larger the better):

  1. Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions (.82)
  2. Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts (.82)
  3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions (.75)
  4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete (.70)
  5. Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments (.55)
  6. Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences (.50)
  7. Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition (.32)
  8. Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task (.32)
  9. Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities,writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing (.32)
  10. Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing (.25)
  11. Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content material (.23)

These strategies, as a whole, represent most (if not all) of what I have come to understand comprises good writing instruction. To that end, I am pleased to know that my theoretical orientation towards the field aligns with the experimental evidence about “what works” in good writing instruction. In particular, I am glad to see that writing strategies and collaborative writing rank so high, although it makes me wonder why the process approach ended up toward the bottom of the list. This makes me wonder if they, unlike Katie Wood Ray, are making a distinction between the writing process and writing workshop, and I am guessing that they are not.

Even though Graham and Perin reiterate that this is not a curriculum, I have to wonder if some teachers, schools, districts, and states, could see it as such and “require” teachers to use each of the strategies in a writing program. Like the writing process/workshop distinction above, there are other parts of the report that do not represent the richness of discussions in our field (such as moving beyond word processing into other forms of digital writing or thinking broadly about writing to learn strategies), and I feel that the over reliance on only quantitative data may be limiting some of the implications and, in turn, potentially lead to implementation plans that are not complete.

All that said, the report is useful to me in my teaching in many ways. As a teacher educator, I think that this report can certainly offer evidence of the many practices that I use that stand up, for better or for worse, in a “scientifically-based” study. Thus, when I use these approaches in my teacher education courses and professional development workshops, I can point to the effect size data and suggest that these strategies have been integrated in a variety of contexts, yielding strong results. In other words, it can bring empirical merit to many of my theoretical practices, and the practices I share with other teachers.

As a writing teacher, this report encourages me to reconsider some ideas that I have neglected for some time. I do appreciate that Graham and Perin discussed the negative influence of explicit grammar instruction (p. 21) as it affirms my beliefs and synthesizes a number of good studies that have happened over the years, thus bringing (what we hope might be) a final curtain on the “should we teach grammar in isolation” argument. Also, the processes of summarization and sentence combining remind me — as someone who will be teaching a college writing class this fall — that not all students know how to do these tasks, or do them well. Modeling summary writing and sentence combining could offer some variety to my lessons as well as teach useful writing skills.

In sum, the Writing Next Report was useful to read as it confirmed many of my beliefs about teaching writing with statistical evidence while reminding me of the other aspects that I need to reintroduce into my practice. It also is encouraging to see these practices as the ones held up as “good” for writing instruction because, perhaps, those who works with assessment of writing might be able to think about how to measure these aspects of writing, not just the final product, which is so valued right now.

Teaching Writing in the 21st Century

Group PicTonight, I am blogging from Baltimore, where I am attending an NWP working meeting, “Teaching Writing in the 21st Century.” I feel very fortunate to be here with about 60 colleagues and friends of the National Writing Project and the Bread Loaf School of English. There are many, many wonderful people here — too many to name — and the next 48 hours we will spend together promises to be professionally rewarding in many ways.

One of the major goals for the work will be to think about how and why teachers are using technology in service of literacy learning and, in turn, thinking about implications for the National Writing Project’s future work. Given RCWP’s work in the Lead Technology Site work over the past few years, I am looking forward to sharing some of our ideas. In particular, I am looking forward to hearing about one of our co-directors, Renee Webster, as she does a presentation on integrating digital voice recorders into her elementary classrooms.

I say “hear about” her presentation instead of “see” because I have been assigned to be in a group focusing on online language learning and peer response for ELL students, a session by Joe Bellino (who took the photograph above) and Ailish Zompa that I have been looking forward to attending, too.

So, tonight it has been nice to be among friends and colleagues, and I am sure that there will be more posts tomorrow!

Book Review: Teachers’ Writing Groups

The second book that we are using in our summer institute is both practical and promotional. Teachers’ Writing Groups: Collaborative Inquiry and Reflection for Professional Growth (Kennesaw University Press, 2006) describes multiple configurations of writing group — important to our summer invitational — and is co-edited by Kathy Yancey, the keynote at MCTE’s fall conference. So, we are reading to find out more about how to conduct our own writing groups while also preparing for the fall conference. Here is my first attempt at a review.

Book CoverAs a member of many writing groups over the past five years, I began reading Teachers’ Writing Groups: Collaborative Inquiry and Reflection for Professional Growth with my own inquiries:How do teachers form and maintain writing groups that focus on professional writing, especially during their busy school years?In what ways can writing groups encourage professional publication while still nurturing the writer’s soul?Does it require a shared goal (such as writing a particular article or a collaborative project), or just a shared sense of purpose?

How do teachers decide when it is time to end a group?

As I read this text, I feel fortunate that many of my questions were addressed, if not answered, throughout it. Overall, the strength of this book comes from the stories that the teachers in the groups tell about the process itself, although I am still left with some questions in the end.So, that is where this review will begin — at the conclusion. In the final essay of the book, “Setting Teachers’ Writing Groups in Context,” Robbins, Seaman, Yow, and Yancey describe how the envisioned the writing groups in their project as

a collection of circles, with our three small writing groups clustered together as a community of practice seeking to forge connections with scholarship on social literacy practices, on professional development grounded in shared reflection, and on writing as an avenue to learning. (p. 184)

These groups, then met face-to-face and online, as did the larger group comprised of all the smaller ones, over the course of a year, all the while setting goals for drafting, response, and, eventually, publication. Their conclusions suggest that the process of writing and reflection that the groups fostered allowed the teacher writers involved to create substantial pieces, over time, that were indicative of the rich teaching practices that they hoped to describe. This took time for trust building, and was fostered by an overall sense of purpose for the large group. Along with multiple opportunities to give and get response, the group’s consistent focus on publication seemed to motivate many of the writers in this project.

By beginning with the end, I was able to go back into the three sections of the book that each writing group produced and read them with a better sense of purpose. In each of the three sections — “Creating Our Professional Identities,” “Looking Closely at Classroom Practices,” and “Designing Writing Programs” — the teachers involved took the overarching theme that developed in their group and translated it into individual essays fronted with a collaborative response about the group’s work process. To me, these introductory essays for each section were the most compelling pieces in the overall text, as each told the story of how the group worked (and, sometimes, didn’t work) together.

For instance, Kramb, Harrell, Seaman, and Yow in “The Gift of Time” describe the ways in which a set protocol helped them organize their work and stay focused as a group. They show how this process of setting norms took “time and patience,” but that, “[t]hose discussions were powerful, once we established the protocol that was right for our group” (p. 18). The notion that a group of writing teachers — all well-versed in their pedagogy and at least moderately confident in their writing abilities — still had to set up a protocol is reassuring. In the writing groups with whom I have worked, those that set and stick to protocols are the ones that last the longest and are successful. Rather than viewing this as a strict set of rules, group members are able to offer responses within these guidelines, feedback that is “both honest and kind at the same time,” according to the authors (p. 20).

The second group — Robbins, Stewart, and Kaplan — discuss the ways in which they used technology to comment on one another’s writing and also shared professional readings as a way to stay focused and dig deeper into common themes they were exploring. The third group — Walker, Walker, and Smith — offer the protocol of reflecting, at the end of each session, on what worked well for the group and what did not (p. 116). This is a strategy that I have not tried myself and think that I might suggest in this summer’s institute, especially early on in the process.

Taken in sum, the three introductory essays offer snapshots into the varied practices of writing groups and the ways in which they can work. Interestingly enough, the editors note their one “failed” writing group disbanded because the members felt too isolated, from one another and the larger group (pp. 187-8). This cautionary note reminds me to think carefully about how and why to invite teachers into writing groups and to consider the ways in which face-to-face and online collaboration can contribute to, and take away from, the group’s over sense of community and purpose. Also, through these failed writing groups, I can remember that it is OK from time to time for all writers to reconsider their goals and, even in successful groups, think about articulating what it is they want and hope to gain from giving and getting feedback. This process of reflection will enhance everyone’s group experience.

The remaining chapters of the book are the individual teachers’ essays, all of which focus on the teaching of writing and each of which warrant a description and response longer than what I can offer here. What I can say is that most of the essays offer an authentic teacher voice, built from both theory and practice, and rooted in story. I have not read all of these essays yet, so will not offer commentary on them here, but many look to be promising, especially Robbins and Stewart’s “‘Seeing’ Community: Visual Culture in College Composition.”

My concerns about the book are both in content and form. In terms of form, I do feel that the book is a bit disjointed in that each section’s preface, useful as they are, could be more detailed about suggestions for writing groups. In terms of content, I wonder about how “kind and honest” all the teachers both in the project and outside of it were in their responses to one another, with emphasis on the honest part. For instance, the responses in “Writing with Our Eyes Open: A Collaborative Response to Teachers’ Writing Groups” (pp. 173-180) seems to focus a little too much on the positive aspects of the book and could have offered some more critiques. And, of course, this is the problem with all writing groups; in our efforts to praise, I think that we too often try to be kind without being honest.

In conclusion, Teachers’ Writing Groups: Collaborative Inquiry and Reflection for Professional Growth reiterates for me the power of collaboration. I believe that the authors in this book, overall, were pretty honest with themselves and their colleagues, despite my concerns listed above.

CEE Summit, Day 2 Panel: Vision for CEE in….5 Years?

Panel: Vision for CEE in….5 Years?

This panel is a prelude to a brainstorming/visioning activity that we are going to be involved in next.

  • Don Zancanella, University of New Mexico
    • In five years, CEE should and will be further along in the process of using technology to support English Educators; right now our work is done in an ad hoc way and it is inevitable that we will be further along with technology and we need to do it strategically. We need to figure out how to do it well.
    • In five years, CEE will be further along in figuring out its role in educational policy. How do we respond at the federal and state level or help others live within that context? We have been caught up in federal policy and we also need to get involved at the state level, too.
    • In five years, CEE should or will have created better ways in supporting new English Education faculty. They can see the benefit of membership. Track faculty job openings and then follow up with people who get hired. Set up opportunities for new and adjunct faculty to meet at conferences.
    • Probing questions
      • Should the web editor have a grounding in technology, digital/visual rhetoric and other understandings of how technology changes writing?
      • State affiliates?
      • Policy action?
  • Suzanne Miller, University at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
    • In the next five years, we need to become the “keeper of the guild” and creating research agenda and organizational identity.
    • We need to maintain our own individuality, but we also need to talk about consensus and what voice the organization will put forward. We have the wisdom, voice, and action.
    • Individually, we need to step up to contribute, get doctoral students involved, and if we don’t do it, no one else will. We will cede the vision of the profession to others who have political and economic interests that may run counter to what we value.
    • We need a vibrant online community. We are looking for a CEE web editor who will help develop content and provide daily change of information. There will be a great deal of information on there, including lesson ideas, video clips, and other resources for methods courses.
    • Get grad students involved.
    • Get a research agenda and ideas out there. Conduct a national study that collects data from multiple contexts from many CEE members. Create policy documents from that.
    • What counts as literacy — we need to promote multimodal literacy as the major focus in the 21st century. What can these literacies help us to do?
    • Set policy at the state level. Could we have 50 CEE Affiliates in 5 years?
    • Create sets of documents that are readable by parents, administrators, and policy makers.
    • If we are to be the keepers of the guild, and we need to be the one developing standards for teachers of ELA.
    • We need more retreats/conferences/working meetings where CEE members can all work collaboratively together.
    • Probing questions
      • NCTE funding research; how can CEE partner with other research entities to co-sponsor research (foundations, organizations, etc)? Do not look at CEE as a stand alone organization.
      • Who gets included in our conversations in terms of diversity of viewpoints? There are people who have more conservative positions that might share some goals with us and we need to understand their positions.
      • Should we remain an almost exclusively secondary group, or include others from the elementary level? We don’t all talk the same language all the time, but we can be allies as teacher educators.
  • Kent Williamson, NCTE
    • I think that we are talking about the CEE experience as being a part of a social network that make this a community of practice that is sharing questions, ideas, and other thoughts at an informal level. Then, things move to a more formal level such as a monograph or article.
    • We need a web editor who is a great teacher and we need to encourage people to comment and post. People need to see themselves in the questions that are asked. The nuts and bolts of everyday life need to be present in the site. If there was extended weekly participation, that would be good.
    • CEE’s involvement with teacher education. NCATE isn’t the only thing that we can do to support program development. We can be assistive in helping build programs and support new faculty and curriculum adoption.
    • Licensure is not an end of the road goal, but a continuing process.
    • Data from authoritative research will being you more notability. Begin the research now for five years now.
    • More participation at both ends of the career scale: grad student and retirees. We need to tap the knowledge base of the past.
    • More collaboration with similar organizations. Groups need to find common ground at the level of program and project development while creating interdisciplinary expertise.
    • Probing Questions
      • How are we going to reach the 6 out of 7 teachers who are not members? Parents? Administrators? Open source publishing? How do we go beyond serving our members to serving the larger world.
      • The CEE website is looking more and more ambitious, even daunting. Who is the audience that will view the website?
      • English educators who are not active members of CEE.
  • Joyce Stallworth, University of Alabama
    • Chair of NCTE’s Advisory Committee for People of Color
    • CEE must be more inclusive. We have to have inclusions of teacher educators from a variety of institutions.
    • If we are to think critically and creatively about teacher education, more diverse voices must be a part of the conversation and the group must be have full participation.
    • Classroom teachers do not see CEE as important to their work; how can CEE work with teachers to create useful solutions to problems?
    • CEE can be more involved in forming policy.
    • Taking small steps to become more politically active.
    • CEE and NCTE must be more responsive to the efforts of subcommittees and recommendations and we need to be more careful about the ways in which we act.
    • Probing questions
      • The language we use to talk to legislators.
      • Who is CEE for? Teachers? Teacher educators?
      • Recruiting doctoral students from personal connections and bringing them to CEE.
  • Sheridan Blau, University of California, Santa Barbara
    • From Peter – Why is it that “doing progressivism” is seen as not being rigorous?
    • From Ernest – Schools are problematic for learning as racists, classist, and anti-intellectual.
    • From Cathy – States messing up what teacher educators have done.
    • When have schools not been like this? When we think that we win, we lose…
    • The world isn’t ready for what we propose — what does that mean for us?
      • We don’t give up on working with public schools. The best teachers feel, right now, that they are totally demoralized and we need to work with them.
    • We can do a few things in the next five years:
      • We need to become a critic of standards of ELA that we don’t agree with
      • We can offer other forms of guidance for beginning teachers
      • We need to take it as our role that we harness the research engine and provide scathing evidence-based data that show the ways in which policies and standards are not working.
      • Include both elementary and college teacher preparation.
    • Probing questions
      • The conversation hasn’t changed, some would say. I would challenge us to contextualize our problems and values here in 2007. What are we doing for the classroom English teacher in public schools? Our conversations need to be in the “now.”
      • We are also thinking about huge changes that are happening in our country and how do we deal with things in the long term? Who might be opposition to us that we have to have a relationship with here and now and in the future.
      • There are some things that are substantive and some that are more political (how do we act on what we believe). I wonder how we have a conversation about how we engage politically about what we now and believe.

More small group discussion will follow…

Notes from CEE Summit: “Reflections on the Future of English Education”

The morning session began with some intros and overview stuff, then we got into a more formal presentation called “Reflections on the Future of English Education.” Here are some notes from those presenters and there will likely be more at the CEE blog:

  • The Role of CEE within NCTE – Kent Williamson, Executive Director of NCTE
    • CEE is was formed in 1963 to get teacher educators together to talk about teaching future English teachers and a conference was established in 1965
    • A deeper purpose within NCTE and the broader education community is that it is the “keeper of the guild,” a position of authority within the professional
    • When you look at other professions, you see that there is a gateway into the professional and knowledge that is shared by the professional community
    • If we want things done by our professional community, CEE needs to be the place where there is everyday exchange of knowledge with quality control of peer review
    • This leads to the messages we send out, the research we do, and what gives us authority as practitioners in this field
    • All the strands at this conference are important and it leads us to ask if we can be trusted to chart the course of ELA instruction in this country
    • In a world where “literacy” has been appropriated by all fields, we know that we have been saying that for awhile but we need to make sure that the implications of that are clear for policy
    • I think that the public policy community is questioning the current state of educational reform, and I think that a peer review community can contribute to that conversation
    • It is worth investing in this community as we get together face to face, but it won’t be good enough if we only meet like this periodically. We need ongoing dialogues that center on peer-reviewed information that we can take out and describe what happens in the classrooms of ELA teachers.
    • There is more than a PR campaign going on. The rest of the world looks at the learning problems, but there are things that are happening in these professional communities and we need to share, report, and exchange within and outside of our community.
  • Ernest Morrell, UCLA
    • Thinking about critical pedagogy and mathematics, Bob Moses, and mathematical literacy — from this, we can think about literacy as a civil rights issue
    • When we think about literacy as civil right, we need to think about those populations in our society who are being denied their rights
    • What role can CEE play
      • We have to critique the “literacy achievement gap” because the onus is being placed on students and not institutions
        • There are many social, political, and economic consequences to this; student: “literacy is a matter of life and death”
      1. We need to think about the literacies in a post-industrial world, more than just academic literacy
      2. Identify successful practices with most marginalized students; articulate what this looks like
      3. We need to think about the practices of teacher education and professional development and how this engenders these types of classrooms
      4. We need to develop a body of scholarship that looks at these classrooms and connects to teacher education
      5. We need to look beyond literacy for a global economy and see what the public thinks is a rigorous and relevant education for students
      6. We must remembers that literacy practices happen in schools and that schools are problematic institutions to begin with
        • How are we going to take a stand within and against institutions and who we are going to ally with
  • Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia
    • Will there be teacher education in the future?
    1. Teacher education accountability movement
      1. PRAXIS, Mass. Teacher Exam, NCATE
    2. We work in a policy environment
      1. NCLB mindset moving towards colleges
      2. Federal mandates that require colleges of education to teach phonics
      3. Things are pressuring us to be things that we don’t want to be
      4. State curricula push us in directions that we don’t want to go – Hillocks, The Testing Trap
      5. Districts are having teachers teaching within prescribed curricula that are connected to testing
      6. We can’t send teachers out to teach without letting them know about these situations
      7. There are corporate entities who are making lots of money on this
    3. Alternative routes of certifications
    4. Presence of a capitalistic economy
      1. How do we acknowledge and deal with this in schools?
    5. Public opinion that runs counter to colleges of education
      1. Students put this pressure on us in this direction, too
    6. Public response of policy makers (post 9/11)
  • Why is Dewey’s progressivism seen as irrelevant?
  • Why are our values of work viewed as counter-productive?
  • Cathy Fleischer, Eastern Michigan University
    • Balancing mind-numbing conformity with research-based, best practices in our classrooms
      • Example from Michigan: we just revised state curriculum and the committee that was formed included NCTE, CEE, NWP, and other smart people
      • For those of us not involved, but concerned about it, we were happy that these folks were involved
      • Now, we look at what had to happen to get the standards approved by Achieve.org, but we still felt that it was good curricula with enough flexibility
      • Then, the roll out of the standards became connected to thematic sample units with sample exams. Even though the state is not prescribing these, many districts are adopting these units as what teachers need to do.
    • What is our role in a world where we know that our teachers will be going to schools where they will not be allowed to use writing workshop and will have to use units that are prescribed? Are we going to be seen as the enemy of school districts?
    • I believe that we have to work with pre-service teachers to help them understand all of this and help them articulate their beliefs about what they do.
    • I believe that we also have to help them be savvy in the ways that they speak to administrators, parents, consultants, and others.
  • David Stevens, Durham University and NATE
    • I have been struck so far on how many parallels there are and what is happening in England and the UK
    • I am interested in adopting a fundamentally romantic vision of English and the root traditions of the subject as a counter to the reductive tendencies of what is happening now
    • Expanding the scope of literacy and literature as well as other arts
    • If English teaching is to be relevant, maybe we need to establish a new idea of research and what effective English teaching is: English teaching as liberating
    • It seems to me that most English teachers are still feeling inspirational and adopting progressive pedagogical models; yet they face the challenge of prescriptive curricula and assessment
    • We need to find ways of being creatively engaged in English teaching while working in this paradigm
  • Questions and Answers
    • Where is NCTE at? What schools does NCTE touch/where does it not even exist? How do we invite people into the professional conversation when they don’t even know that one is happening?
    • How can we develop relationship both at the grassroots level in schools but also with policy makers and others who work with English teachers?
    • Thinking about marketing ourselves and how/when students/young teachers join NCTE. The average NCTE member joins after 7 years in the profession.
    • Mandatory membership for students as a part of coursework?
    • The gap between what we do as teachers and researchers (what we know about how learners become critical, smart, and engage) as compared to what administrators know about ELA instruction (e.g., teaching grammar). We need to adjust what we are doing with policy makers at all levels.
    • Attempting to understand the mindset that creates the dichotomy between what we value and what is advocated by others. How do others frame the debate as compared to us (we say, “Literacy is complicated” and that can lead to misperception).
    • We have to be sure that we aren’t perceived as “soft” on education and make sure that we are showing how we, too, are rigorous and relevant.
    • We have to engage at the school level in ways that work in small ways.
    • We have 1.5 million literacy educators in the US, but only 250,000 people are members of any professional organization. We need to figure out how to package what we have so that it can be localized in small spaces (e.g., departments in schools).
    • Thinking about money and asking philanthropists who might be able to help us in the same systematic ways that universities do.
    • Conservatism of the 1980s is still reflected in educational policies today; also, Jim Moffett wrote “Hidden Impediments” and we did research, but we were still associated with the excesses of the 1960s. The backlash of judging people of today with their association from a previous time.
    • Impact and consequence in policy decision — we need to remember that the legal authority for teacher licensure and curriculum standards rests at the state level and I don’t think that we, as an organization, have a relationship with any state or the agencies within the state that work on certification or curricula.
    • One of the things to learn from NCATE is the way in which they worked aggressively with a clear agenda to work with states. They came forward with clear directions and processes so that they became the voice that represented authority. If we want to do that, we need to be engaged in states.
    • Do we find reference to professional organizations in the literature on teacher education reform — there is no mention ever as part of the problem or part of the solution. We need to become one of those if we want to have a consequential impact on what of those sides of the debate.
    • These sense of embattlement that teachers in classrooms face in terms of blockades. Spending more time on testing and analyzing annual yearly progress. We need to teach our future teachers to talk to one another and the institutions that they will be embedded in much better than they are now. Parents want accountability, but we don’t know how to show them that.
    • People are listening to the things that you do and write, but we don’t always see how it happens in classrooms.
    • In NCTE, we do have an association of state ELA coordinators. It is difficult for them to work with us unless they are subversive.