Borderland

After my students began writing on Tell the Raven, my role as a writing teacher changed. I used to teach the writing process. Now we write and use a writing process. It’s an evolving practice that my students and I work out together. This is a look at my classroom now.

1. Keyboarding practice. The kids use Alphasmart keyboards every day (15-20 minutes) to work through a keyboarding tutorial. Some type up to 55 wpm now. Daily practice is key.
2. Rough drafts. Students write every day. All rough drafts are written on the portable keyboards. I have a keyboard for each student, and 7 computers in the classroom. Students who are ready to conference about their writing dump the file into a text editor on a computer, and save it to the building’s file server. They print their story and take it to the conference table.
3. Peer conferences. There is a small table for conferences. It defines a space for talk that doesn’t disturb (in theory) others who are writing. At the table students meet to discuss meanings, not mechanics. They take marked-up copies of their work from the conference to the computer so they can revise the original work. Then they paste the piece into the text entry field for the website. They tag the piece “final draft” as the category for work they want to publish.
4. Teacher conferences. I read through all of the student entries each day and make notes about any questions or suggestions I have. These notes become a conference agenda that I propose for the student to work on with me. I maintain a checklist on a clipboard so that I can track who I meet with each day, and what we discuss. We set a goal for a “next step” at the end of our conference, which I note. At the conference I sit with each student at a computer asking questions and making observations about their writing. This is the primary teaching time I have with each of the kids when we can individually discuss their work. Dialog is the primary teaching method.
5. Mini lessons. Early in the year students need to learn about basic writing conventions and the workshop processes that I want them to observe. Later on we can focus on content and storytelling. I usually choose one (1) thing to talk about for no more than 15 minutes. Then, “Go.”

This isn’t student blogging in the conventional sense of what a blog is. I wanted the site to be a community writing project more than an aggregation of blogs. I don’t know how much difference the site structure and limits imposed by the CMS itself makes, but it seems likely that constraints placed upon participants by the publishing platform will influence the content and discourse patterns of the community. This years’ group really wanted to be fiction writers. I tried to influence them otherwise, but they were determined, so I worked with them to support that focus. Drupal worked well as an engine for a moderated site that gives kids the ability to comment on each others’ work and to get feedback from outside the classroom. It also gave me an administrative interface that made management of their work straightforward.

I negotiated my teacher role with the kids in one important instance. A question came up for me about how much editing for writing errors I should be doing, so I asked the kids. They told me that they expected me to help them, but not do it for them. They also told me not to publish their work with a lot of mistakes. “How else will we learn?” they asked. I couldn’t disagree.

Lisa Delpit made a case against “progressive” approaches to process writing. She argued that process writing without explicit instruction in the mechanics and conventions of written language perpetuates the “culture of power” for students from non-white, non-mainstream backgrounds. Delpit argued that more authoritarian, task-directed approaches to teaching are preferable for Blacks and other minority-background students who tend to expect teachers to fulfill the role of authoritarian figures.

“Progressive pedagogy, Delpit warns, is often informed by white middle-class values and only works to preserve the status-quo.”

Delpit’s book, Other Peoples’ Children, gave me reason to rethink how I implement process learning approaches. I learned that every instructional decision, progressive or otherwise, privileges some students while disadvantaging others. We study grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation in our conferences and mini lessons. I have them do other writing exercises outside the context of publishing. It’s whole language, and it isn’t a free-for-all.

The process I’m working out for writing with my students generated a new approach to instruction that I’m excited about. One of the hardest things about it is the need to turn my back on some of the classroom management/control issues and allow students the freedom to make decisions about how they use their time from moment-to-moment. Part of finding the time to conference individually with kids is teaching them to make decisions on their own when they get stuck. Sometimes they make poor choices. That’s another lesson topic.

I’ve seen real gains this year in my students’ ability to express themselves in print, and I like the intellectual autonomy that comes out of the workshop approach. This is generally an hour of intense activity that goes by in a blur for me each day. It’s productive energy.

These workshop resources and writing conference guidelines may be worth a look.