Quality writing does not happen in a vacuum. Likewise, it is not improved by endless and boring worksheets, grammar practice, and writing in isolation from in-authentic sources.
Writing, at least writing worth reading and doing, occurs when the writer has something they genuinely want to say, reflect on, or respond to. But how do writers gain the tools to do so? Many companies would like to tell you that a computer program (a modern-day workbook) is the solution. Just sit your students in front of a screen and have them correct sentences for thirty minutes a day and you too can have a writer who knows how to use a comma correctly! Teachers, ill-trained or supported in authentic practices accept these programs in the name of simplicity or mandates and move on. Meanwhile, they get to suffer as they read draft after draft of poor, lifeless writing from their students and lose faith over time that they can teach writing or that students can do it well.
The interesting piece to this scenario is that the teacher using such computer programs (or worksheets) to teach writing are often ignoring what they are doing in reading. In reading, this teacher probably looked at a section of a story, article, or poem, asked some questions, and quite possibly even analyzed language to some extent, looking for meaning. These are all solid teaching moves within reading, but why not use those in writing as well? Why create two separate lesson plans, when the first can serve both sides of what needs to happen in a literacy class?
Students should read like readers and read like writers. They should be tasked with experiencing the text and all that it offers, and then be challenged to look at it from a different perspective and ask the deep question, “How did the author do that?”
By just focusing on reading as a reader, we train students to be consumers of information, and never creators or synthesizers of it. We passively ask students to consider what the author was meaning when we could also offer for them to create their own meaning using the model in front of them.
Rather than just asking what the theme in a poem is, we can extend this to ask students how did the author convey that theme through language, symbols, and structure.
Rather than just asking what the argument of a piece was and if it was effective, we could ask what is the most effective way for them to argue for what they are passionate about.
Rather than just asking about text structures, we can invite them to try text structures we have seen to elevate their own pieces.
Rather than just looking at a beautiful sentence or paragraph and discussing it, we can ask our students to look at the craft of writing, the use of commas, periods, and dashes, and get them to see grammar as a tool for meaning, rather than punishment and nuisance.
If you are using great literature in your class, and we all should be, then the models are already there for you. Students don’t need worksheets, and you don’t need to be the greatest writer as their teacher. They need to see great writing in texts they can relate to, and you need to be equipped enough to be able to invite them into a multi-dimensional look at the examples all around them.
This approach creates deeper thinking in students. Over time, they begin reading in a way that is far more critical than a reader that has had a one-sided education. Rather than just consuming news, for example, they will now be able to distance themselves away from the material long enough to ask, “What was the author doing here? Why did they write this headline like this? What was the point of this structure?”
Teachers all over the world will bang their heads against the wall trying to get students to think about the author’s purpose and infer meanings in texts, but never offer students the chance to play those roles themselves and actually be the writer! It’s hard to grasp why someone might do something without ever stepping into their shoes. As students write more and think about their purpose for writing more, they will be able to read texts with more nuance and depth than they could previously.
We live on a twenty-two-acre portion of an old farm nestled in the mountains of western North Carolina. Our property has acres of woods and acres of open meadows where cows grazed, and hay was harvested. I keep those meadows mowed. It takes about six hours on a small tractor to mow all of them and I do that at least twice each month. Six hours sitting on a tractor, wearing sound-muffling-headphones, is a great time to think. It is actually one of my new revision tools and a great time for reflection. When I am writing and hit a wall, I start the tractor and mow and think. When something is troubling me, I mow and think.
Recently I was obsessed with the words: critic, criticize, criticism, and critique. I was rolling them around in my mind noticing their similarities and reflecting on how we interpret them. It seems that we are in a time when critics are present at every corner and on every tweet and post. News outlets and social media seem to thrive on criticism. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find all that negativity draining, and it has me thinking.
Some may argue it is only semantics, but I believe we feel the difference between criticism and critique. In my mind, criticism almost always comes from a negative place. Criticism lifts up what is wrong, incorrect, missing; all the negatives. Criticism seems to delight in finding flaws and flaunting them. You aren’t likely to want to help if someone says: “Just stop, that’s not how you load the dishwasher. You don’t put the plates in like that. Good grief.” Negativity never helps me move forward, improve, or make change. In fact, I find my reaction to negativity is quite the opposite. Negativity most often leads me to pull back, to withdraw, to avoid.
I view critique, on the other hand, as coming from a positive place. Critique is what my editor offers when we have a conference to talk about one of my projects. She points out the strong parts of the manuscript, she lifts up what is working well, she speaks to those places where the language “sings”, where the characters and the dialog move the plot along, and points where the story “shines.” Then, within the context of that safety net of support, she draws a tight focus on a couple of places that are not working as well. Any attention to negatives is presented within the context of what is working, and she shows how the negative bit she chooses to highlight is detracting from all that is working well.
If you are thinking this is some sort of coddling or ego management, then so be it. I’d rather think of it as guidance. Within the context of what is working well, the negative can be seen more clearly, more objectively. That is to say when negatives are presented in this way, I am able to see more clearly why something isn’t working and how it detracts from the story I’m trying to tell. Critique helps me to understand what I do well, what I have under control and gives me a window into where, how, and why I can improve. I find that critique, when defined this way, actually makes me a better writer. The next draft is tighter because I can reflect on what is working as I address what is not. Because I understand the intentions of my editor, I am energized to jump back into the work knowing exactly where to focus my attention.
From this perspective, critique is an act of caring. It requires that you reflect on what works in addition to what doesn’t. It requires that you consider your comments within a context, to pause and recognize that something isn’t “wrong” simply because it isn’t the way you would do it (e.g. loading the dishwasher). It asks you to consider whether your suggestion is coming from a place of support and potential for growth. Critique is the positive energy of a critic.
Of course, this line of thought took me to school. It gave me pause and nudged me to examine interactions with both students and teachers. It is easy to notice the flaws, to see what is not working. It is easy to point those out. But, is it helpful? Is criticism beneficial to our students or our colleagues? I don’t think so, especially when criticism is coming from a negative place.
I find that criticism most often becomes a default mode when we are operating under stress. I believe most of you will agree that this has been one of the most stressful periods in our memory for our schools, our teachers, our students, and their families. When we are stressed, we are less likely to think clearly, less likely to consider the impact of our intentions, and less likely to think through how our feedback may impede or facilitate growth and positive change. With that in mind I invite you to pause and reflect the feedback you give your students when offering suggestions for growth.
Anyone who has followed my work in the past knows that I am a huge advocate for the use of poetry (and song) in the literacy classroom for all students, but especially for younger readers and older readers who struggle. I’d like to share reasons why I think poetry should be an essential part of any literacy program.
Poetry is Joyous
Perhaps the most important reason for the use of poetry is that it is pure joy to read and perform. So many of today’s children’s poets write with such great humor that children are certain to find great delight. Poetry is fun reading!
Poetry is Profound
Beyond its ability to tickle a funny bone or two, poetry can be deeply profound and help build students’ knowledge of the world they live in. Whether it is David L. Harrison’s Rhymes for the Times that tell the story of America through poetry, Catherine Clinton’sI, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African American Poetry, Glen Alberto Salazar’s A Little Book of Persian Poetry, or Brod Bagert’s heart of science poetry, poetry can expand children’s world and stretch their imaginations.
Poetry Builds the Foundation for Reading
Research tells us that many children struggle in reading because of they are not fully proficient in the foundational aspects of reading. Poetry is immensely suited to improve many foundational reading competencies.
Phonemic Awareness
Poetry is filled with texts that play with sounds. Think of all the nursery rhymes children should learn before starting school. Diddle Diddle Dumpling, Dickery Dickery Dare, Peter Piper, picked a peck, or Betty Botter Bought some Butter are sure to help children develop an awareness of the phonemes /d/, /p/, and /b/. I can’t help but wonder if nursery rhymes were first created to help children develop their awareness of speech sounds that is crucial to their language and literacy development.
Phonics
Most poems for children rhyme. Rhyming words are words usually (not always) have similar rimes (e.g. the -ake in bake, cake, rake, take…). Helping children detect and decode rimes are a great way to develop their phonics or word decoding ability (as well as their spelling or encoding). Dr. Edward Fry, for example, found that knowledge of just 38 common rimes could help children decode over 600 words simply by adding beginning consonant, consonant blend, or digraph. Little Bo Peep is a perfect text to explore the -eep rime, and Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All is certain to help children learn about the -all rime (and much more!).
Vocabulary
Poetry is filled with rich words that poets use to weave their magic. Back to the Maya Angelou poem we can find wonderful words and phrases such as frighten, frogs and snakes, dragons, counterpane, tough guys, and much much more. Our job as teachers is simply to help children notice these great words that poets make such great use of.
Fluency
Fluency is developed largely through repeated readings of texts. Another name for repeated reading is rehearsal. Poetry is meant to be performed, so in order to get the point where students are able to perform, they will need to rehearse, hopefully under the guidance and support of a teacher. Moreover, the aim of the repeated reading is to read with good expression (prosody), which is at the heart of fluency, instead of reading fast which is the goal of too many repeated reading lessons.
Sight Vocabulary
The rhythm, rhyme (and melody) in poetry, and songs makes them easily memorized. How many of us can remember a poem that we first learned and last read in our school days? Sight words are essentially words that are memorized by sight and sound. Poetry is excellent text for helping students expand their corpus of memorized words – sight vocabulary, especially when after reading (and performing) an entire poem we work with students to analyze individual words and word patterns in the poem itself.
Writing
Because poetry often has a specific and transparent structure, it is an excellent mentor text for students’ writing. It is not difficult for students to write their own versions (or parodies) of favorite poems or songs, whether it is their own versions of Yankee Doodle, Judith Viorst’s If I were in Charge of the World, or Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son the structure of the poetic text gives students a head start on creating their own poetry. A favorite for many students in our university reading clinic:
Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son John,
Went to bed with his stockings on.
One shoe off, one shoe on.
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son John.
That rhyme is also a favorite for students writing their own. Taylor, for example, wrote (rehearsed and performed) his own version of the rhyme:
Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son Fred,
Slept all day on his bed.
Woke up at midnight and screamed “there’s a monster under my bed.”
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son Fred.
Success – A Sense of Accomplishment
Children who struggle in reading do not often experience success in their reading, especially when they compare themselves with their more proficient classmates. Poems are relatively short, and the rhythm and rhyme embedded in poetry for children make them easy to learn to read and perform. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment children can feel when they are able to fluently and expressively read a poem aloud, just as well as any more proficient reader, to classmates, teacher, family members, and others. That success is empowering. In our reading clinic, our goal is for children to leave every single day with the ability to read something well and to read and perform it for their parents and other family members.
Make Poetry Part of your Reading Curriculum
In our educational world where stories and informational texts are the dominant forms of reading, we need to make a concerted effort to allow poetry a foothold. Just 10-20 minutes of poetry reading a day can have a profound effect on children’s literacy development. Poetry is particularly well suited for remote and virtual instruction. Poems can easily be sent electronically to students and printed at home. Then, via zoom or other distance technology, teachers and children can easily practice, master, and perform a daily poem in that 10-20 time span. Let’s make it a goal for poetry to be read, rehearsed, and performed every day of the school year!
“Run often and fast, toward or away from something. Trust yourself to know which. And trust yourself to know when by the chanting clocks that hang on walls of dreams. This is called wise and this is called brave.”
—Rebecca Kai Dotlich, The Knowing Book, 2016
We are living in times of great uncertainty. The truth is, we always are. And, sometimes, it can be hard to see the forest from the trees.
Ask yourself: What is it I really want for kids? You will likely have various ideas that pop into your mind—yet they all circle back to one key truth: I want them to grow and learn with joy and curiosity. Always.
And while you can’t predict the future, you can “run often and fast” toward four cornerstones—four core values that can keep student progress and wellbeing at the center of all that you do.
1. It’s All about Relationships
This is THE cornerstone upon which everything else that we do stands. It is vital that we build genuine relationships with our students, centered on open dialogue (which includes active listening!), relational trust, and mutual respect.
Always remember that kids are people, too. Showing students respect means you see them as the unique, incredible human beings that they are, and you treat them as such. Through showing genuine respect, trust is developed—and trust opens the door to building strong relationships.
Of course, it is important not to misconstrue compliance with respect. According to Oxford English Dictionary, respect is “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” Indeed, respect is earned.
In 1975, Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of Psychology, coined the term “warm demander.” In her work and research, she found that teachers need to be high in both “active demandingness” and “personal warmth.” It must not be either/or—we need both. We must earn the right to demand effort. Only once our students know that we legitimately care for them, can we then push them to high expectations—because they know the push is us looking out for them and truly wanting them to soar.
2. Amplify Inquiry
Inquiry can serve as the cornerstone to the stance and spirit that lives in our classrooms. When you start from a place of inquiry, you send a powerful message to your students: I am a learner, too. You are not a “sage on the stage,” rather you are there to explore questions with them. You are there to build and grow new ideas together. Through this inquiry stance, you model and honor questioning and learning more than knowing.
Rather than teaching students about argument writing, about multiplication, about laws of motion, or about the Cold War, how might you instead provide purposeful questions and inquiries for them to explore in order to develop the understandings for themselves? When we make our own meaning, lasting learning occurs. That’s the beautiful “stickiness factor” that comes with inquiry.
Of course, this does not mean that your teaching expertise is no longer needed. Quite the opposite, actually. Great teachers are essential. It is vital that you serve as a lead learner to support students as they grow. In addition, it is important that you are there to give explicit instruction as needed. Contrary to popular belief, explicit teaching definitely has a place within inquiry-based learning. The power lies in the how and why of this instruction. As the International Baccalaureate Organization says in PYP: From Principles into Practice (2018): “In an inquiry classroom, explicit teaching occurs ‘just in time’ (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, Chinn 2007) not ‘just in case.’”
“Just in time, not just in case” can echo as a mantra in your teaching practice. Prioritize time for kids to live the work. Be careful not to over scaffold. Open up space for your students to intellectually grapple, think critically and creatively, and problem solve—while also being there to give “just in time” instruction and feedback to feedforward.
3. Honor Agency
The International Baccalaureate Organization defines agency as choice, voice, and ownership. While we all have agency within us, whether or not we can utilize our agency often depends on whether our environments respect, value, and support it.
Harnessing agency, then, is about empowerment. As you design learning experiences and cultivate a classroom culture, ask yourself: What am I doing to provide students with opportunities to be authors of their own learning?
In the world of education, we often refer to classroom management. However, rather than management, I encourage you to think of it as classroom empowerment. After all, teaching is not about being in control; it’s about providing an environment where students can cultivate their own autonomy, agency, and self-control. Too often, we adults lament that we want kids and teens to “take responsibility”—but are we opening up responsibility for the taking?
When you think of so-called classroom management, often what you are really after is engagement, attention, and motivation. This is all the more reason to lean into honoring agency.
In fact, both neuroscientists and psychologists have found that attention, motivation, and agency are inextricably linked. For example, cognitive neuroscientists Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis spent years at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab developing a standard test to measure how well people can focus. They found that extra motivation had an astounding effect: it increased sustained attention by more than fifty percent. Knowing motivation is that powerful, how might we help our kids get more of it? Well, for decades, Edward Deci has been studying motivation, and he has found that one of the greatest factors is autonomy.
As humans, we crave positive emotions. Feelings of boredom, stress, and/or helplessness grind learning to a halt. On the other hand, when we are entrusted to make our own choices and design our own goals and challenges, we are empowered. Motivation, focus, and learning soar.
We all want our students to develop skills for deep thinking and living a life filled with growth and learning. In order for this to happen, we have to give them opportunities to try new things, take risks, get a little messy, and learn from it all. That cannot happen in a tight vacuum of control, but it can flourish in an environment filled with trust and agency.
4. A Forever Stance
“Searching for meaning is the purpose of learning, so teaching for meaning is the purpose of teaching. If teachers do not have meaning making at the core of their pedagogy and practice, then let’s not call the activity teaching. Doing so demeans the word and the noble art and science it represents.”
—Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, “To See Beyond the Lesson,” Educational Leadership, 2004
It is crucial that we take a forever stance in our teaching and learning. We are not here to assign; we are here to teach.
Students must know, feel, and experience the truth that learning does not happen in isolation. As they learn and make their own meaning, they continually add knowledge, skills, and experiences to their repertoires. They think across, between, and beyond individual lessons, disciplines, days, months, and years.
Words matter. Whether teaching a whole group lesson, working with a small group, or conferring one on one, be intentional in communicating a forever stance. You can remind your students that anytime they are reading, painting, writing, listening, researching—or whatever the skill may be—they can choose to pull on this strategy that is now a part of their own, unique repertoires.
As you live out your forever stance, your students will, too. They will recognize that learning is lifelong and lessons are transferable.
About Tonya
Tonya Gilchrist is an internationally experienced educator, instructional coach, and curriculum specialist. Tonya earned her Masters Degree in Educational Leadership from Hong Kong University. She also holds an IB Certificate in Leadership Practice and an IB Advanced Certificate in Leadership Research. Tonya currently serves as a senior strategist for Erin Kent Consulting where she specializes in helping schools around the world amplify inquiry and honor agency across all components of balanced literacy—including readers’ and writers’ workshops. She also works with schools to support them in enhancing disciplinary literacy and in effectively utilizing translanguaging practices. You can connect with Tonya on Twitter at @mrs_gilchrist and via her blog at tonyagilchrist.com.
