Revision: A Guest Post

Tom is one of my oldest professional colleagues. He's younger than me, so not that kind of old, but we've both been at the same school for over twenty years, making us some of the old timers now. For the last decade or so, he's been teaching mostly math, but when he's not doing that, he's writing. His writing career started at an early age, and he's been writing ever since. I knew this about him when I decided to take on the National Novel Writing Month challenge a few years back. I am going to take credit for convincing him to give it a try, and he has kept going with it, long after I quit. He knew he had some good stories to tell, and for the last couple of years, he's been pursuing finding an agent for one of his NaNoWriMo books. Happily, this is the year for him, as he signed with an agent who is excited about his middle grade book, FOLLOWING INFINITY. We decided to do guest posts on each other's blogs, and I asked him to share some thoughts on revision, which is a challenge for most of us, no matter what our writing ability. 

Our district began specializing in intermediate grades ten years ago, which means I haven’t formally taught anything to do with writing since 2004. There have been times I’ve missed working with a curricular area I’m so passionate about, but when I read Betsy’s blog and learn of the strategies she incorporates into her classroom, I’m reminded of what an uphill battle it can be to engage elementary students in writing. Then it seems that maybe working with numbers and shapes isn’t so bad after all.

In a post Betsy wrote about revision, she described how she had students pair off to share their writing and offer each other suggestions about how to improve their work. Too often the students would report back to her that the writing was already good enough so no changes were necessary. Speaking as a teacher, hearing a comment like this would have me mentally roll my eyes and redirect the students to try digging a little deeper, and give them some direction of what to look for. To hear this comment as a writer could quite possibly drive me into pulling my hair out. To put it simply, a lot of what people would think of as writing takes place in the revising. I’ve made the comparison for people that drafting a manuscript is a lot like a sculptor getting their hands on a massive lump of clay, and the revising that follows is when that clay is gradually molded into art. To highlight my point I decided to keep track of how many times I’ve made changes to this post you’re reading before I decided it was ready to send to Betsy. Updating this paragraph will be the last thing I edit before I send it, so I can now say I’ve read and revised this post in some way at least twenty different times.

I thought it was great Betsy was trying to get her students to work with critique partners, since that’s what many aspiring and professional writers do. The trick is finding people who will understand what you’re trying to accomplish, even if they don’t necessarily share your vision, and will be able to read critically and provide you with honest feedback. I’ve been lucky enough to have a small group of people over the years (Betsy being one of them) I’ve been able to rely on as some of my first readers. Collecting opinions from different people helps you identify any problems you might not see yourself because you’re too close to the work. If you have a lot of people identify how something about your story isn’t working for them, it’s pretty clear that needs to be addressed. But sometimes you’ll get contradicting feedback and you have to go with your gut on what to do. Example: Last summer a teacher friend read through a middle grade manuscript I had just finished revising. She gave me some great feedback, including points about one particular (and I’d say pivotal) scene that left her feeling so disturbed she had to stop reading and walk away from it for awhile. It made me wonder if I had pushed the moment too far for the age group of the target audience. Fast forward to eight months later when I received revision notes from my agent Carrie, who also had comments on that same moment but in the opposite direction. Hearing from different people, especially regarding a scene that could be polarizing, helped me clarify why it was important to keep it; ‘disturbed’ was the reaction I had been going for after all, and it worked. But without the benefit of outside opinions to consider I may not have reflected on that scene the way I did, and as a result I might have missed out on newer ideas that stemmed from that moment.

I’ll admit, when the revision notes came in from my agent I opened them with an equal mix of excitement and trepidation. We’d already discussed an overview of her ideas during a couple of phone calls so I knew what to expect. I was looking forward to seeing her specific notes and getting back to work because I knew she understood what I was going for and saw ideas to explore that would make the manuscript even better. But it meant a lot of revising to do on a project I’d already done a fair amount of heavy lifting on three or four times before. Her feedback wasn’t exactly “I love this so much, now go back rewrite the whole thing,” but some of the changes she suggested were big: edits that could result in removing entire chapters, developing characters she wanted to see more of, cutting some characters out, redefining the relationships between others, and expanding on sections of the story to develop the overall progression. This was no thirty seconds of us standing in the back of the classroom and then me telling Mrs. Quist that “my partner thought it was good so I don’t really have to change anything.”

But if I hadn’t gotten that kind of feedback, I would have been disappointed. For her to think about the manuscript so critically shows me how invested she is in seeing this become something more. And I have to say, it was both reassuring and a little scary to know just how dead-on her suggestions were. With the work I’ve been able to do on it so far, I can already see the new directions the story will go and what it will be like when it’s finished.

And once it is, you can bet I’ll be anxious to hear Mrs. Quist’s opinion.

If you would like to read more about Tom's writing life, plus a host of other topics (he has an extensive music collection, views a variety of movies, and is generally a reflective kind of guy), I recommend you check out his blog What I Did On My Summer Vacation. http://ernieyoureafool.blogspot.com

On-line posters

Next year I’ll be doing something new: all of our fourth grade teachers will be looping up to fifth grade, keeping our same classes that we’ve had this year. I’m very excited about this for a number of reasons. I’ve been in fourth grade for thirteen years, and I’m feeling like I need a curriculum change, and I’m glad I’m moving up as I like the complexity of the content as the grades move up. I’m also happy to be spending another year with these kids; we’ve had a great group and I’m glad I can continue on with them.

That being said, I know that I need to mix things up a bit for next year, and provide new opportunities for these students so that it doesn’t seem like a complete repeat of fourth grade. One area I plan to have kids use more often is technology in the classroom.  They need to be able to comfortably word process a page-length document by the end of fifth grade, and I know that much of their work in middle school will be done and turned in on computers, so I want to be sure that they’ve had opportunities to do that in my classroom before moving on.

I also want to hit the ground running in the fall, since I don’t have to take all the time to get to know them like I have all the other years, and to that end, I’ve started to introduce some things that we can practice now, and then hopefully just review a bit before putting it into independent practice in September.

One project we’ve tried is making multi-media posters using our district’s Discovery Education account. Each student has a user name and password, and once they log on, they can begin to use some of the tools Discovery Ed has. I had my students  make multi-media posters about the Dust Bowl, since we had just read a nonfiction text in guided reading. Using the Board Builder program, students were able to include text boxes, still photos, and maybe best of all, short movies from the Discovery Ed collection, all to give the best information they could about the Dust Bowl.

The posters are far from perfect, but the students were very engaged each time they had a chance to work on them. They especially liked selecting movies (no surprises there), and many included more than would be ideal on their posters. It would be great to have them look at each other’s posters and offer suggestions, and I may get to that this spring, but that would be a definite skill to practice in the fall.  They were also quick to pick up the basics, and helped each other out, making it much easier for me to get around to help on more difficult tasks. They could even access this account from home, and a few students did that.

I’m including a couple of examples of posters below; there could be all kinds of discussions about how effective or distracting the backgrounds are, if there is enough information in the text boxes, and what else is needed to make the poster more easily understood. But it’s a start for now, and will definitely be an option for “showing what you know” in the fall.

Exploring Text Structure

It’s been a while since I felt like I’ve done anything new, but spring is kind of here, and with it comes restlessness that needs novelty. I don’t know if this counts as novelty, but I’ve been excited by the thinking I’ve seen the last couple of days in my classes.

Our latest reading unit is on text structure, which, for some reason, I just couldn’t get my head around. I understand that it is how text is organized, and that there seem to be more text structures in nonfiction than fiction, at least for fourth graders, but I don’t think I could really see why spending a lot of time with this topic made sense. In order to try and get more out of this, I reread the structure chapters in Falling in Love with Close Reading, and I decided to make a checklist for my students to use. I took an opinion piece about school uniforms that students were supposed to read, and copied that piece along with a structure checklist, and gave it to my students. Then we proceeded to read the text together.

As we went through the piece, students could see that the point of the writing was to convince the reader that school uniforms were great. Then we continued to read, finding examples of claims, counterpoints, and descriptions. Finding and naming what the writer was really doing in the piece was interesting to me; I’ve done similar things in the past, but I liked breaking down the structure even more specifically. Students color-coded the different structures, underlining each in a different color,  so that when we finished, it was clear that in this opinion piece, the writer used claims more than any other structure to get his point across.

The past couple of days, we’ve spent reading a book called Farm Workers Unite, which tells about Cesar Chavez and his work starting the United Farm Workers union. We did the same thing with the structure checklist, reading the introduction, and then a chapter about the life of migrant workers. For that chapter, I had the kids work together to “code” the text structures. I then asked them to identify the structure used the most often, and to tell why they thought they writer used that the most for that chapter. It didn’t take long for the kids to notice that it was almost all cause and effect writing. The hard part (but for me, the most interesting part) was thinking about why the author used that structure. One student pointed out that it was very different from the introduction, which led us to chat more about why that would be.  I pointed back to the title of the book, and then a number of kids got more animated. “The writer has to show how bad it was for the migrant workers, so that he can explain why they decided to unite and go on strike.”

I’m not going to read every nonfiction piece with a structure checklist nearby. But as an adult reader, it’s made me more conscious of looking at how writers organize their writing. Now my goal is to be more purposeful in helping kids see why writers choose the structures they use to best communicate their thinking, and maybe it will transfer over to student writing. It’s worth a shot!

Communication

We’ve just finished up our “spring” conferences (with our below zero temperatures and multiple feet of snow, it doesn’t feel anything like spring), and I am part of a school team that is working together to move our school to Title One status next year, and both opportunities have left me thinking a lot about parent communication. It’s clear that both as a teacher and a school, we have room for improvement.

It isn’t that I don’t communicate. I do. In fact, I think I provide a fair amount of information about what is going on in my classroom. I send home a newsletter (we started with biweekly, but have moved to a monthly calendar, which my wonderful partner teacher also emails to families with email accounts), and I update my website each week, listing my homework requirements and providing links to copies of the homework, in case a student has misplaced it. I let parents know about this in each monthly newsletter, and I told each family about this at the fall conferences in October. However, I still found myself telling families this same thing again at our spring conferences, especially those families that said, "When I ask my child if they have homework, they always say no." Sorry to say, not all kids are reliable reporters, so I have my homework online. 

Our school sends home a monthly newsletter as well, but I’m pretty sure that like our monthly calendar, many families don’t have time to read it.  An additional concern is the language barrier that a number of our families face; long sheets in English don’t help if you don’t speak or read English.

So I’m trying to think of ways that would be more effective in reaching more families without putting in additional large amounts of time. Our school has a Facebook account, and a number of families have “liked” that, but our principal pointed out that a large number of the likes are from staff members. I think if we were to post things more regularly on that page, we might find more people checking it out, and I think our staff is interested in exploring that.

Another idea that we tried to start using this fall is Remind 101, a very slick text message reminder system that would have allowed us to send out text message reminders about homework due dates, field trips, or special days at school. The teacher can set up messages in advance on his/her computer or cell phone, set the time for them to be delivered, and the parent then receives the message in a timely way. The parent cannot send a reply back, so the teacher’s privacy with regards to his or her own cell phone remains intact. I would have loved to use this but our district has currently said no due to privacy concerns. It isn’t meant for emailing individual concerns about students, but someone needs to convince our district of that.

I’ve also read about a number of classrooms in other districts using a class Twitter page to update families. I think this would be fun, and I would train students to write something each day and then they could type it up. I don’t know how many families are on Twitter, but I’d be interested in exploring this further. At this point in time, I believe our district has said no to this as well.

Finally, I need to find ways to more effectively communicate with families who are not English speakers. I think there are translating programs or tools online that I may investigate for written work, and lately I’ve been thinking about writing up some kind of script and having my students who speak that language be filmed saying the script in their native language. I would then put it on my webpage and show all the students in my classes, who could tell their families at home to watch it.

What are the best ways you’ve found to communicate with families?

Cleaning Cotton

We’ve had a crazy winter here in Minnesota, and have so far missed five days due to cold, not snow.  It’s made getting back in the rhythm of school a bit challenging since our winter break, and I’ve found that I’m feeling like I’m constantly behind compared to where I was in my curriculum last year. I’m also  disappointed that I haven’t been as inspired to blog, since I don’t feel like I’ve tried anything worth blogging about. But this week I did do an activity I discovered last year, and maybe some of you will think it’s worth doing.

 In addition to reading and writing, I also teach social studies, and last year I got to attend some in-service training on using inquiry in the classroom. The two professors who taught the class were great, and gave me lots to think about in terms of how I could make social studies more inquiry-based, instead of just reading out of the text book the whole time.  I’ve never done the book exclusively, but I started to think about how I could incorporate more hands-on activities into our units. Our curriculum focus is the states and regions of the United States, and last year at this time, we had begun to study the South. I was digging around on the internet for something more interactive we could do to learn more about slavery, and I found this website called Cotton Classroom (http://cottonclassroom.com/) You can order a box of uncleaned cotton and they also provide a lesson plan to use. I decided to give it a try, and shortly afterward, received a box packed with cotton.

As a northerner, I haven’t seen a field of cotton, let alone worked with it in any form other than cotton balls from Target, so I was pretty interested. It comes with tons of seeds in it, and also bits of leaves and stems. I had the students create a t-chart labeled “I notice/I wonder”, gave them each a pile of cotton, and they got to work. I loved hearing their conversations as they worked to get the seeds out, and I had to remind them to put those good ideas down in writing so they wouldn’t forget them! It’s one of the best activities I do in terms of engaging the students, because everyone is busy trying to get those seeds out.  After a while, someone usually says, “Did the slaves have to clean the cotton like this?” It leads to some realizations about the difficulty of the work slaves did, and is a great segue into discussion of the cotton gin and how technology changed cotton farming.

Cotton Classroom also includes Solomon Northup’s primary document about slaves picking cotton, and it’s a great resource to help students realize how difficult and often violent the life of a slave was. Once the students have spent some time trying to clean that cotton, they are even more receptive to Northup’s descriptions of the work expectations masters had of slaves. There is no good way to recreate the slave experience, and I’m not sure I’d even want to try, but this small activity has been a great way for students to begin thinking about slavery and technology. I highly recommend it!

Revising with a Peer

I am not the master of having kids review each other’s written work. It isn’t that I haven’t tried it before. I have. Many times. And it invariably goes something like this: “Class, I want you to get with another person. I want them to read your story and offer suggestions about how to improve it.” I try to model and give suggestions about how this might work, and it always seems to go well when we do this as a class with something I’ve written. But once they get with a peer, it takes about 30 seconds before both students announce that they’re done. I’ll ask, “What changes did you make?”, and the kids will say, “We didn’t need to make any. My partner thought what I wrote was really good.” I will smile, and cringe inwardly, because I know that changes could be made. Revision is challenging for good writers, let alone ten year olds, and once something is down on paper, most of us don’t want to change it.

Happily, I was visiting with one of my very dearest friends, who is a teacher librarian at a middle school, and she teaches a writing workshop for sixth graders. She told me about having her students revise by having them ask each other questions. “They need to ask the other person something that will allow the writer to give more information,” she suggested.

I liked the sound of this because it was more concrete than other revision directions I had tried. My teaching colleague tried this a week before I did, and had really good results with kids writing short essay/opinion paragraphs. I tried it with our Slice of Life writings. As soon as the draft was done, they got together with a partner, and either read the slice, or had it read to them. I wanted them to write their question on a post it note, so that I could easily see what it was. I also wanted to see if the writer incorporated the answer to the question in their revision. (We did this as a class first before working in pairs.)  The pieces I’ve seen so far showed much improvement over their first draft, and the students seemed engaged and on task when they were working with each other, so I’m encouraged by this effort. One of the things I have to evaluate is whether they use the writing process, and making revisions meets this goal.

I’m looking forward to trying this more as we write more Slice of Life pieces and also begin working on our essays. Have you tried peer revision with any success? What strategies have been useful?

Beginning the Slice of Life Writings

This month I started having students write “Slice of Life” paragraphs, short commentaries on something they’ve done or something they’ve observed, and then I posted them in the hallways and invited our school staff and students to make comments on post-it notes. I’ve been very pleased with the initial response from everyone so far, and I’m excited to continue the project. I wondered if students might complain about having to write something, but because they are doing something like this every day in our daily writing, I haven’t heard anything negative. In fact, it’s been the opposite. Once the students saw their writing posted, and got a few comments on post-its, they wanted to write more. Some have three or four writings in their folders, just waiting for the okay to put another one up. I didn’t want to overwhelm the readers, so I had the first writings up for three or four days, and then we just taped the second piece over the top of the first piece, so readers could keep reading.  Every day, students ask if they can go out and read and make comments on the writing. I’ve had to monitor that a bit more closely since I can’t have five kids in the hallway unsupervised, but I’ve encouraged kids to respond in the morning when they have a bit of time. Other teachers and staff have been kind about reading and leaving a comment or two as well. 

            Is the writing perfect? Not so much. It’s very clear which students need to be more rigorous in checking spelling and punctuation, and some of them have a very loose understanding of what a paragraph is, so I’ve tried to address that as we’ve gone along. But I think as students see what their peers are writing about, that will encourage them to polish things up a bit.

            The part I think has been the most powerful, though, is reading about how a student is worried about her dad, who was taken to the hospital that morning, or the student who is concerned about the neighbors who are fighting. I wouldn’t normally hear all of those stories, but writing them down allows students to be heard. Some kids wrote about how they got their dog, or injuries they’ve received, or a recipe they’ve tried – the topics are all over the board. I think most people just need someone to listen to them, and if they can’t do it by talking, then writing allows them to share. For some kids, I think it’s easier to write things down than to say them out loud. By putting their writing up on the wall, they have a new audience. And the comments are often very compassionate, reminding the writers that they aren’t alone with their concerns. I’m excited to see how these writings evolve over the rest of the year!