lifelong writing

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Not Waiting For Superman (II)

Like the editors of Re-thinking Schools, I am “not waiting for Superman.”  Last fall when the documentary “Waiting for Superman” made its debut, public school teachers across the nation imagined a bulls-eye on their backs, as the film portrayed charter schools and their exceptional teachers as the solution to mediocre public education. As Stan Karp, on the web site “Not Waiting for Superman,” indignantly commented,

Despite a lot of empty rhetoric about the importance of “great teachers,” the disrespect the film displays to real teachers working on the ground in public schools today is stunning. Not one has a voice in the film. There are no public school parents working together to improve the schools their children attend. There are no engaged communities. There is no serious discussion of funding, poverty, race, testing or the long and sorry history of top-down bureaucratic reform failure. [http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20100920-RSEditorsNotWaiting]

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

 

They labored over their teaching and writing portfolios, which they have shared with each other, as they have shared all the products of their labor. And they appreciated each others’ work and worth and celebrated their personal and shared accomplishments. When I read their writing and witness their teaching, I wish the “Superman” film-makers were here to celebrate, too.

When these teachers return to their classrooms in the fall, they will be full of hope for their students and their schools, because nothing is so energizing as dedicated teachers working together. What will they find? Admiration? Respect? Curiosity? Structural or material support? Maybe not. As we often warn them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.”

Because their colleagues and principals are also “not waiting for Superman.” They don’t need heroes. They are a little out of patience with “born again” teachers and apostles of the “next great thing.”  But they do want help. They know teaching is a collaborative sport, even though schools treat it as a competitive one. They know they are stretched beyond what a single teacher can accomplish.  However, they will not do “better with less,” as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has exhorted them.

Do Writing Project teachers know anything that could benefit their colleagues? Yes, they know that teachers CAN collaborate with immense success and rejuvenation, given time and the inclination to listen to each other.  These teachers have listened and reflected and offered words of encouragement that made them each feel like Superman,  even if for a moment.  Every time a teacher shared a practice or a successful lesson, eleven others were taking notes furiously, sorting the best from the valuable from the problematic.  They not only offered each teacher collegial feedback, they learned from the shape and impact of each demonstration how their demonstration could be improved.  The demonstrations gathered new elements as the summer proceeded and the kinds of response and interaction multiplied.  A group understanding of excellent teaching practice grew .

They will return to their schools in the fall, because 97% of institute participants stay in their classrooms for over seventeen years (Inverness Associates).  They will not arrive as Superman, but as a colleague with a new excitement about teaching. My prayer is that the three thousand schools that receive them will respect them as equals with the same hopes and goals for the success of their students.  They will remember that teachers need each other and provide every opportunity for teachers to work together, to share professional experience and to give desperately-needed encouragement.

Superman will not be gracing our schools in September. But I know 3,000 teachers who will reach out to their colleagues and share their dreams and practices for better instruction.  There could be collegiality, instead of superstars and rivalries.  There could be a teaching community.  We are not waiting for Superman.

Summer Institute Daily Log, June 30, 2011

 

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The Mustard Tree

The kingdom of heaven  is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. (Matt 13:31-32)

The notion of productivity is hard to define in education. Should schools be measured by the number of graduates, by the advanced degrees of their teachers, by the scores achieved by students on standardized tests, by independent observations of accrediting agencies?  None of this really captures the productivity of schools.

But the National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development network, has a simple formula for productivity. Invest in the professional growth of individual teachers with an aptitude for leadership and then support their growth and dissemination of effective teaching practices in local schools. The investment begins every summer with a 4-week institute for the development of writing teachers and continues with the graduates (called “teacher consultants”) developing their skills as writers, consultants, and teacher researchers both as an organic group and as coaches and workshop providers in local schools. The investment is $25 million, a mustard seed in the enormous dissemination of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Currently there are 7,000 active teacher consultants disseminating the mustard seed of “effective practices in the teaching of writing” in the schools they serve and in other local districts. These consultants of the National Writing Project reach 120,000 other teachers in a given year and teach 1.4 million students.  This is the definition of productivity: 7,000 teachers reach 17 times their number through professional exchanges and reach 200 times their number in students.

Is the instruction any good? The Local Sites Research Initiative has made eight studies of the writing of students in Writing Project classrooms with the following aggregate results:

The results, taken across sites and across years, indicate a consistent pattern favoring the NWP. For every measured attribute in every site, the improvement of students taught by NWP-participating teachers exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Moreover in 36 of the 70 contrasts (51%) the differences between NWP participants’ students and the comparison students were statistically significant” (LSRI 3)

By every measure, the seeds of the National Writing Project’s investment in teacher leaders have been super-producers, and the production has consistently grown from its modest beginnings in 1974 in Berkeley, California to a 200-site network today.  This is the nation’s longest enduring professional network, a network that has leveraged federal support for the past twenty years to yield this gratifying fruit.

In the weeks that follow, the funding of the National Writing Project, a pittance at $25 million dollars, will be in jeopardy as Congress swings its reckless budget axe.   It is easy to overlook the brilliant success of the tiny mustard tree, overshadowed by the immense orchard of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Not every seed out of that orchard has been productive.

When the axe swings in the neighborhood of the professional development of teacher leaders, let it pause before the mustard tree of the National Writing Project.  That tree is home to teachers, students, and even their families (through the grafted programs of family literacy), and it is one of the great over-producers in American education.

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Engfish

Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).

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If Writing Were a Celebrity . . .

If writing were a celebrity, it would have a public and private image called “transactional” and “expressive” writing respectively.  The teaching of writing over the last forty years has been the struggle of the private persona to keep up with the public.  James Britton, who coined this distinction between the transaction and the expression, first reported in 1975  (Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod and Rosen) that the majority of writing in the British secondary schools was transactional.

In the public eye, writing is about business and politics, the power brokers of society.  Just peruse the Common Core Standards for Language Arts, published in June, 2010 and see the prominent text types are “Information/ explanation” and “Argument,” the staples of business and politics respectively.  Oh yes, Narrative was inserted in the three position, after some lobbying from literacy educators over the last year. But Narrative, as described here, is what Britton called “poetic” writing. If writing were a celebrity, “poetic writing” would be her avocation or hobby.

I realize personifying writing as I have, as a marriage partner (July 15) and as a celebrity, is a bit incredible and romantic, but the media personifies all kinds of objects today, from sports to music to decongestants, and it seems to convey their status and identity in society, not to mention attract consumers. And I am all about attracting consumers, or rather, practitioners, to writing.

Britton’s classification of writing’s facets has helped us understand how it works in our lives.  He allows the reader,  the consumer of the writing, to define what it is.  So if the reader is concerned with the information and message of the writing foremost, he calls it “transactional.” If the reader is most interested in the craft or technique of the writing, he calls it “poetic.” If the reader is most intrigued by the writer, the composer of the writing, he calls it “expressive.”

These personas of writing are really a continuum, in which one merges with the other, but Britton thought the most generative, the one that allowed writers to move in and out of the other personas, was “expressive.”  Expressive writing tells us about who the writer is, as he rambles in a journal, in a notebook, in reflection, in writing to explore an unfamiliar subject.  It is the entry point when writing is difficult or when a subject is being learned. It is the facet most interesting to the writer, himself, and to the teacher of writing. It is not typically published writing.

But the private lives of celebrities do attract the snooping public.  Although the proper subject of business and politics is the trends in the economy and in reforming legislation, we are very curious about the people who negotiate these changes.  Sometimes we begin to comprehend the arcane procedures of business and government by understanding the people who wield that power. And so it is for transactional and expressive writing.  We understand the transactional by our familiarity with the expressive facet of writing.

Returning to the writer of expressive writing, she finds everything easier to write about expressively and sometimes she even finds joy in writing in a diary, a reflective journal, a trip log, or a workout journal.  Unless her career depends on transactional or poetic writing, her satisfaction comes from the expressive mode that arises in daily life.  With the proliferation of e-mail, texting, and blogging, this daily writing becomes more and more recreational, something that gives the writer pleasure in the act itself. She is not concerned with work accomplished by expressive writing, because she feels satisfaction in merely writing.

Writing’s pleasurable, expressive identity is key to its gaining social and cultural prominence. While readers know they will find pleasure in their favorite genre, whether political columnists, graphic novels or mystery or romance, writers may know the pleasure of writing by indulging in its expressive forms. The rigors of grammar and convention are eased in expressive writing, and the writer has the privilege of exploring his favorite subject– himself and what he thinks.

The public persona of writing, the transactional, is a little disdainful of the private one. The private persona is not visibly productive or powerful in the commerce of society.  It seems self-indulgent and self-absorbed.  It does not deserve to be considered “serious” writing.  So it struggles for equity in the celebrity’s personality.

The struggle between the public and private persona of writing has continued lo, these forty years. Can this be a healthy struggle, a personality torn by conflict? More on the celebrity we know as  “writing” in the next installment.

Reference–

Britton, J., Burgess, T. , Martin, N.,  McLeod, A.,  and Rosen, H. (1975). The development of writing abilities of , 11-18. London: MacMillan.

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Days of Our Reading and Writing (continued)

In our last episode we left reading and writing in the plight of many marriages: can’t live with them and can’t live without them.  We saw that many who call themselves “readers” resist the name of “writer,” but that the writer enriches the life of the reader. Thus, the question persists: Can this marriage be saved?

Many adults, who would be humiliated to confess they could not read, might freely admit they could not write.  And not because they couldn’t fill out a traffic accident report, but because they could not write with flair and conviction and grammatical precision. Such writing would be for the chosen few. On the other hand, to read meant to understand important information and to live a fulfilled life. The option of not reading at all would be unthinkable.

In contrast, writing has always been attributed to professionals whose living depended on writing. The writing process was considered mysterious.  Grammar and style were viewed as arcane subjects best left to experts.  Probably the most memorable declaration of the ground-breaking reform document The Neglected “R” was “Writing today is not a frill for the few, but an essential skill for the many” (11).  That was a consequential pronouncement.

Recognizing that our jobs often required a different kind of reading than our personal lives, theorists combined the many forms of literacy in the term “lifelong literacy,” with the goal of reading to become “lifelong readers.”  Reading has played so many roles on the stage of life, that to confine it to functional literacy, critical literacy or personal growth missed the point.  Reading was pervasive, and the way we read shifted relentlessly in the kaleidoscope of 21st century literacy.

A lifelong reader understands that reading impinges on every moment of living, from reading the side effects of the pill taken after breakfast to deciphering the manual for a new cell phone to reading a favorite political writer in the online edition of the newspaper.   Reading pervades life and has become indispensable in a literate culture.

In contrast, writing has been regarded as a skill of the workplace. Even the groundbreaking The Neglected “R” and its successors described writing in its public roles: in school, in business, and in government. These reports raised the profile of writing as a tool of productivity, but not as an essential  part of living. Reading has continued to overshadow writing in the realm of “lifelong literacy.”

Why should we care whether writing is number one or number two or equal in significance to reading? Primarily because reading and writing are less efficient as singles than as a couple. It is a little like consumption and production in the economies of life. One must offset the other. Or to return to the competitive and noncompetitive sports analogy (see yesterday’s blog), we have to nurture both kinds of urges, the competitive and the noncompetitive, and not let one overwhelm the other. So, if we are planning to be lifelong readers, we should also put lifelong writing on the agenda.

To gain “lifelong” status, writing has to be acknowledged as pervasive and self-fulfilling in the same way reading has been.  More than for its art and for making transactions, writing has to make a case for enriching the lives of literate people in the same way reading makes this claim.  Traditionally writing has not taken this central position in life, unless in the lives of writing teachers. And writing teachers struggle to sell this image of the “lifelong writer” to their students.

According to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (Guiding Readers and Writers, Heinemann 2001), lifelong writers exhibit certain social and personal characteristics:

  • Writers write voluntarily and often
  • Write in a wide variety of genres
  • Have confidence in themselves as writers
  • Present themselves as writers to others
  • Use writing as a tool for thinking
  • Write to communicate on personal and professional levels
  • Write to share experiences or information with others
  • Are sensitive to other writers, noticing techniques and styles
  • Invite comments on, responses to, and critiques of their writing
  • Draw on literary knowledge as a resource for their writing
  • Use  organized sets of information as a resource for their writing
  • Explore favorite topics and genres

Starting with “Write voluntarily and often,” these characteristics suggest daily living outside of the workplace, and such traits as “communicating,””sharing,” and “exploring” suggest self-fulfillment rather than productivity. Although these traits are integral to many K-12 school curricula, it would be overstating their importance to say they pervade the lives of average citizens. Becoming a lifelong writer is hardly a shared value of literate citizens in the United States. Me, a writer? Are you kidding?

So, as we leave the aging couple, lifelong reader and lifelong writer, we see that one (the reader) is much more prepared for retirement than the other (the writer).  The writer is infatuated with productivity and his or her role in the workplace, while the reader believes that reading is a continuous, pervasive activity from workplace to self-fulfilling recreation.  This is not merely an issue for retirement, but an issue of balance and compatibility. The question persists for another day of our lives: Can this marriage be saved?