Blog as Storytelling

Prepared is best, but underprepared is always better than overprepared.
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 19, 2014

Newman and I had our students create blogs this year as a way to practice formative writing that accounts for an authentic audience and prepares students for success in summatively assessed writing. For example, if we were ultimately going to write a compare/contrast paper, students would first practice the skills of comparing/contrasting on their blog.

In addition, a key part of the blog assignment is giving students a chance to think about their learning.  The blog functions as a place to practice writing, but it is also used to post summative assignments and reflections. In this way, the blog captures a student's work for the class in one place, provides an authentic audience, and requires other design decisions as students consider the genre of blogging.

Basically, the blog acts as a platform for formative practice and as a hub or portfolio for publishing a student's work from throughout the year.

Our students have done some pretty amazing work. They've designed blogs that show genre awareness, they've practiced the skills for a unit in various ways, and they've created some strong final assessments.

The truth is, though, that if you would have asked me last summer if I thought the blogs would look like they do and that we would have been able to do all of the things mentioned above, I wouldn't have had any idea what you were talking about.

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.

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.