Primum Non Nocere: Should Teachers Have an Oath, Too?

The Latin phrase, primum non nocere, translated from the original Greek, is generally associated with the Hippocratic Oath, which is sworn by some physicians, often more out of tradition than conviction. This English translation of "first, do no harm," never appears in the Oath itself, but it's grown comfy along with the other maxims of Hippocrates.

Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

Still, this concept is one to which doctors generally subscribe. Should we, as teachers, consider the same maxim? Might we have different ideas from Socrates, John Dewey, or Bill Gates (kidding) to which we, as English teachers, subscribe?

Last year I served as a jury foreman on a medical malpractice suit, and this concept of "first, do no harm" came up repeatedly. Of the 12 jurors and 2 alternates, I think 4 of us were educators. The prosecution lawyer on behalf of the deceased patient regularly invoked this phrase, asking if what the doctor prescribed for his patient was really in the patient's best interest if it possibly led to his death. The lawyer asked us, "Did the doctor violate the concept of 'first, do no harm?'" Recently, I started thinking of what our binding agreement might be to our students. What should they commonly expect of all of us? Maybe this phrase could be adopted by educators. Or maybe it's too passive because it implies a position of doing nothing, possibly.  Maybe we need a phrase that demands action.

Children, Digital Literacy, Girl Talk, Remix, and a Timeless Essay from 1988 via Frank Smith

Anecdote
As I was putting my just-turned-two daughter to bed last night she asked me, as she always does, to read "Pooh."  She loves this book because it is just an encyclopedia with various pictures of animals and we get to look at the animals and talk about how they are different from one another. 

Side note: My daughter refers to the book as "Pooh" because, in infinite marketing genius, the publishers simply splatter pictures of Winnie the Pooh and friends at various corners of the page, making it irresistible to children.

When I was done reading "Pooh," and put my daughter in her crib, she asked me to give her a collection of books that she loves to read called Gigi.  She has asked for these books before, but I never thought much of it.  Of course, at this age, by read, I mean look at pictures and talk about what she sees.                          

But, what was different this time is that I noticed--after standing in the hallway and listening to her talk about the pictures--she was making up a story as she went along by combining what she thought happens in the various books in the set, at least according to the pictures.

I was excited to hear her jabbering on about Gigi's friend and daddy, how they weren't able to wear the dress they wanted to, and there was probably something about having to go to time out. 

The Kiddos

My daughter was mimicking what she has heard my wife and me say, and she was using that language that she had picked up along the way to give the pictures in her little books meaning.  This activity wasn't strange to her.  As far as she knew, she was reading.

This experience reminded me of Frank Smith's collection of essays, Joining the Literacy Club, published back in 1988.  I went back and reread his opening essay and have some thoughts about how Smith's ideas about reading and writing apply to my much older students.

Specifically, I'm curious about how Smith's insights inform students' understanding of technology and its relationship to reading and writing.

My Audience, My Blog, My Cause, My Goals: Student Feedback on Blogging

Image courtesy of Flickr

"Alright. I'm using random.org to call you up for your blog conference. You'll have 4-6 minutes to go through the prompts I've given you. I'll have a computer up here already so you can walk me through your thinking. According to random.org, the first person is...."

Thus my blog conferences, as described here, had begun.

Here is a list of my period 3 and 4 blogs, and I've included Hackney's period 7 blogs, too.

I am writing this post after my first day of conferences. My students (as Sean's would later in the day) began their conferences with me about how this semester of blogging has gone. Our blog assignment sheet can be found here.

Essentially, we gave students their choice of blog platform--Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, Weebly, Snack Websites--and had them post almost weekly in the genre we were studying for that two-week unit.  For example, our curriculum includes a Literacy Narrative as the first essay. Their first blog post had to be a narrative about something that happened to them on the job. If they never had a job, some students posted about trying to get one, and others wrote about summer work with their dad or mission work with their church. The blog was a chance to formatively practice the writing genre so that they could perform it better summatively. In terms of which blog platform they chose, most of my students used Tumblr, about a third used Blogger, and just a few used Wordpress or Weebly.

Not one of my students had been a blogger prior to this course. A few had a tumblr account but didn't really do anything with it. One girl told me today that she thought blogs "were just for responding to what other people said, like what my mom had to do for an online class she took in college."

Here is the list of topics the students were assigned for blogging; they follow the writing progression for the course: Literacy Narrative, Annotated Bibliography, Single-text Analysis, Compare/Contrast, Literary Analysis, Multi-source Synthesis/Argument.

When the students wrote an argument essay, they had to blog about a cause on change.org. Suddenly, they were activists petitioning others to sign on for a cause, to make change happen. One student told me today, "I had to get more people to look at the petition. My goal for next semester is to find out how to get more people to read my blog." The student used hashtags on his change.org post to get the petition viewed more frequently.

I had the students walk me through their journey of audience awareness. I asked them how their understanding of audience developed. I heard them say things like, "Well, at first, I knew it was just you, so I didn't care as much, but then when you had us start following others in the class, I was like, 'I don't want them to think I'm dumb,' so I tried harder." Another said, "The audience at first was you and the class, but then you showed us how to check our page views if we used Blogger, and people from around the world were viewing my blog. I felt like I had to be more interesting." And, my favorite, was this: "My goal for next semester is to make my blog more glowy and sparkly so more people read it and comment on it."

I took nothing they said as a personal attack; rather, I felt like a Physical Therapist talking to a patient about how the stretches made him feel (it hurts when you move my arm like this, so don't do that). When I heard comments like, "I just couldn't connect to that post you made us write about that TED talk," or "That post in response to tipping from the New York Times, I just didn't care. That set me back because I didn't have anything to say about it, so I was late on that one," it's those comments that I will use as formative feedback for my own teaching.

How can I improve this blogging experience next semester? Next year? For other teachers who ask me how it's going? How much will I control the topics and how much will I let them choose?

I know--because I've searched for the info myself--that there are thousands of blog posts about how to be a better blogger. About how to teach blogging. About how to make interesting posts. Well, I'm one semester in, so here's my humble addition to the existing literature about teaching with blogs:

1. Make the posts occur regularly.
2. Give them choices.
3. Use the blogs as formative writing practice for summative writing assignments.
4. Check in with them regularly.
5. Get testimonials from previous students about the positives and drawbacks of the various blog platforms.
6. Make them read each other's blogs.
7. Use technorati.com, the blog search engine, to get them reading blogs.
8. Conference with them.
9. Grade them with care, because they care about being assessed on how they feel.
10. Identify your tech wizards in class and empower them to help others.
11. Create opportunities for kids to teach each other how to do make posts more interesting.
12. Help them expand the audience: email the links to parents, other teachers, or other classes.
13. Oh yeah, and write along with them. That's what got Hackney and I writing this blog in the first place.

I am open to all kinds of feedback on this, and please, feel free to open up my students' blogs in the link near the top and give them some feedback, too. We look forward to next semester when we can enrich this experience even more.

Achtung, Baby! Using Audio Feedback in the Classroom

When U2 had something to say to their fans in the '90s, they used German and asked us to Achtung, Baby!  When I have something to say to my students, I use Audacity, Screenr, Jing, or even Audioboo, and I, too, want them to listen up.



From Flickr, courtesy of xrayspx

The issue of how teachers give feedback has been relevant as long as teachers have asked students to compose their thoughts. Written feedback may appear as only terminal comments, as praise/comment/question, as a series of checks and question marks, or any combination of words and symbols meant to reward, punish, shame or inform the writer (depending on the professionalism and disposition of the teacher). English Journal published an essay from Bardine, Schmitz-Bardine and Deegan that highlights a number of key points about feedback. One key issue is the benefits of conferencing. I've highlighted the work of Don Murray in 2 previous posts ("Implications 1" and "Implications 2"), and of course he wrote about the importance of discussing students' work with them, also. It's no secret. But what if we are struggling to find the time, management style, or method for having those meetings?

While it's not an honest quid pro quo, audio feedback is a worthy surrogate for the conference, and I'll explain why.

Let's Retire the Boxing Gloves

I recently came across another article concerned with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the impact that they will have on English classes.  This time, from Emory University’s English professor Mark Bauerlein.  To be honest, I’m kind of getting tired of the same complaints being raised over and over again about the standards.

Ultimately, I think—and the standards emphasize this in the document—that implementation comes down to the state and local level, and if the committees charged with writing curriculum ask themselves the hard questions and spend the time to reflect on what is best for students, the end product is going to be strong.  That has been my experience.

Besides, if anyone is going to critique the standards—to be clear, I’m just talking about the standards, not the exams, data culture, political rhetoric, etc. that comes along with them—he/she should check out this 2011 article that appeared in Education Week, by Mike Schmoker and Gerald Graff.

 

As far as Bauerlein’s concerns about literature selections being limited in the English classroom, let me explain why this is not a concern if the standards are implemented effectively.  In addition, to be blunt, this appears to be just another manifestation of the divide that has happened the past 25 years or so in English departments between literature and rhetoric and composition professors. 

Reflections on Don Murray's Implications for Writing Part 2

image from wikimedia,
some rights reserved from Stowe

Don Murray has so much good advice for writing teachers that I had to break my reponse into two posts. Again, his focus is on having teachers see writing as a process, not a product.

Implication 6: Mechanics come last. Comma splices are difficult to ignore, but they're even more difficult to correct withou a pen in hand. When I'm conferencing with a student, I've tried to leave the pen on the desk and read for meaning and logic. After revision, that sentence with the comma splice may not even be there. It's an important lesson to teach our peer editors, also. They need to look for more than misspellings.

Playing College: Twice the Credit, Half the Respect

The November 2013 Council Chronicle arrived today. I'm always interested to see what's new. The cover lists that there's a "New NCTE Policy Research Brief" related to "First-Year Writing." At Joliet West High School, Sean and I teach a dual credit Rhetoric course: students take a placement test, and once admitted they can earn credit from Joliet Junior College for English 101-102: Rhetoric by getting a C or higher. The link above explains in more detail how it works.

To teach the course, JJC requires a Master's in English, and after I earned a degree in English Studies from Elmhurst College, I picked up two sections of Rhetoric and have taught it since 2008. As the class grew, Sean picked up 1 section, and he even picked up a night class of Rhetoric at the college itself.

I bring this up because the Policy Research Brief from NCTE suggests that the class we teach at the high school "cannot fully replicate the experiences of First-Year Writing because high school students' social and cognitive development is at a different level" (14). Further, the Policy adds, "Allowing college credit for writing courses completed while in high school will not help students to fully develop capacities for engagement, persistence, collaboration, reflection, metacognition, flexibility, and ownership that will help them to grow as writers and learners" (15). Well...where to begin.

Beethoven vs. English 101

A Composer Composing

Composers vs. Composition. There's a connotation there: composers are artists, they are musicians, they are creative. Composition, on the other hand, is that class we take; it's studious; it's tedious; it involves a desk, a lamp, some white noise, a can of Diet Pepsi or a mug of lukewarm coffee. How can we help our students to think of themselves as composers?

My sons (are not droids)

The medium. That's one place to start. An artist has tools at his disposal. Composer John Williams of Star Wars and Indiana Jones fame had violins and trumpets at his disposal. Digital composition offers our artists tools. Do they want sound? An image? A video that works as a metaphor? A hyperlink to another composer whose work has inspired their own? There's a creative freedom with a digital medium that can foster our artists' creativity. On paper, a students' creativity--or lack of it--can be exposed, but that isn't so wrong. We need to see those flaws, too. But what if the images, links, videos and hypertext aren't crutches for students, but instead opportunities?

Reflecting on Don Murray's Implications for Writing Part 1

As writing teachers, we can teach how we were taught, we can teach as a reaction against how we were taught, or we can read what the experts who have come before us suggest is a best practice and we can try that. When it comes to teaching writing, a name I've gravitated to is Don Murray.

The Essential Don Murray: Lessons from America's Greatest Writing Teacher is a book that includes "Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product." Published in 1972, this piece explains the "implications of teaching process, not product." I'd like to reflect on how these implications have manifested themselves in my own teaching of writing (rather than pretending that I've come up with these practices on my own). This post will include Murray's first 5 Implications, with another post to follow regarding Implications 6-10.

Rebecca Black, Who?

I felt like things were clicking on Friday.  My 9th grade classes spent the day writing a literary analysis essay either on their own or with a partner.  We used Billy Collins' "Marginalia" as our text.  Students had already done a close reading of the poem on Thursday, so they were ready to go.

I was freed up to move around the room and read what students were writing and answer any questions they had.

Just Writing

“What did you learn in English today?” It's a ticket in the door, but that door is at the student’s house, and the question is asked by the parent. The answer is one that we hope they give thoughtfully. Reflectively. But what if it’s not? What if the student literally describes what he saw for today’s 55 minutes: I dunno, Mr. Newman talked to kids in class about our essays, but he didn’t get to me, so I just typed all period.

That is literally what happened today. And I can’t say that this kid isn’t telling the truth, or is leaving out the most important part. I did talk to them about their papers today. I didn’t get to everybody.

Becoming a Student, or--What Did I Teach Them to Do?

Last year, Hackney and I really thought we were on to something as we taught presentation skills: we watched Steve Jobs videos; we made the students practice with metaphors as visuals; we limited them to just a handful of words on a slide; we sent them up there without notes.

Cut to September 19th. Hackney and I were to present to our peers at Joliet Junior College's "Bridging the Gap" workshop, detailing what college professors needed to know about the Common Core State Standards, and explaining what high school teachers needed to know about college expectations. We decided to focus on writing. We also started to fall back on what was comfortable for a presenter: slides with text that would guide our presentation. Hadn't we warned our students about that?

Anabasis

This is a bit of an experiment. We had the idea last year to start a blog and it never materialized.

But, this school year, Newman and I had our rhetoric students start a blog. They are in the process of learning the genre and are growing as writers because of this assignment.  We are seeing some cool stuff. Students are making design decisions and beginning to see some of the complexities that go along with writing to an authentic audience.