thesisthoughts

This morning I lay on the lawn in the springish sun and buried myself in the first chapter of Nancie Atwell’s book – In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading and learning.

This chapter is written as a narrative, Atwell tells the story of how she became a teacher “with a capital T”. She puts her experiences in the classroom and in PD under the spotlight and describes her personal professional growth.As I read I was impressed by the flowing writing, the fascinating descriptions and the honest reflections. I reminded myself of the readings I have embraced in the last few days and am sure that Atwell did not have all of these understandings ready and waiting before she began writing. I now have no doubt that those connections and reflections developed and blossomed during the writing of the narrative.

Many of the stages Atwell describes remind me of myself and of my professional journeys. I remembered the rush of enthusiasm I experienced as I discovered Whole Language and created a revolution in my classroom and led the revolution in my school. I looked back on the process underwent as I forced myself to grapple with genre theory and attempted to make real changes in my teaching. I also have narratives to tell – I’m just not wonderfully eloquently as the author is.

Atwell describes the pain associated with honest reflection; she portrays the difficult process of looking in the mirror and seeing that your “creation” (curriculum, personal educational theories etc) is just not working. An extremely important point that Atwell makes is: “But something happened to me that happens often in revolutions. As part of my transformation I embraced a whole new set of orthodoxies. As enlightened and child-centered as the new rules were, they had an effect similar to the old ones: they limited what I did as an English teacher, but from a different angle” (p. 17).

Crucial questions arise from this point:What are the rules and orthodoxies that I developed and or embraced at various stages in my teaching career? What are the rules I teach by today? To what extent are those orthodoxies preventing me from supporting of my pupils, each according to his or her personal needs? I must try to address these questions…in writing of course!Towards the end of the chapter the author reassures herself and her readers:

“As long as I write and read, pay attention to who my kids are, and keep in touch with each writer’s needs and intentions, there’s a good chance I can avoid the worst of the orthodoxies-the maxims that prevent me from teaching my students what they need to know”  (p. 26).

Atwell cites Jerome Bruner (1986) who described scaffolding and support as the “hand-over phase”. Atwell explains “In hand-over, understandings and strategies that emerge during an interaction between a more competent person and a less competent person gradually become internalized in the learner’s mind…The key to this kind of teaching is that it’s based on knowledge, not rules” (p. 19-20)Atwell lists her roles in the classroom:

“a listener and a teller, an observer and an actor, a collaborator and a critic and a cheerleader” (p. 21).

On pages 22-23 there are lists of useful questions for the reflective writing teacher – I aim to answer at least some of them in the next few days.  

Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. 

This afternoon I was introduced to a new blog set up by a teacher for her students and colleagues and also to a new term “concept scrapbook”.

http://www.mycontextfile.blogspot.com/

In her blog, Mrs H. invites her pupils to explore the various images she has chosen to present on her site and to read the accompanying texts she has composed. She urges others to begin collecting “imaginary landscapes” which interest them. Mrs H’s opening paragraph is both explanatory and invitational:

“Here’s my ’scrapbook’ of images and materials related to the VCE English Context of “Imaginative Landscapes”, along with some thoughts about the materials I’ve chosen to include … I hope this inspires you to start pulling together your own Context Scrapbook, either in hardcopy or online – Mrs H from Waverley Christian College, Victoria”.

I imagine this invitation was also extended in classroom activities and discussion.

My first reaction to the blog was simply to enjoy the incredibly clever visual and multimodal texts featured on the page. I was especially  fascinated by the sidewalk chalk creations as they were done by hand. I can’t believe anyone has the talent to compose such intricate 3D images on such a harsh “canvas” with the simplest of materials. Maybe this is one of the connections between landscape and imagination – the idea/dream/illusion far exceeds what can usually be created by man.

This blog is meant to be a showcase for work done by the teacher (as a model for her students) and as venue for generating discussion.  I will be following the development of the blog to see whether this written conversation does eventuate, I hope it does! 

Teachers writing for their students, with their students and in front of them has interested me since I wrote my diary/story about the 2nd Israel-Lebanon war as an assignment in Graham Parr’s course. At that time I read quite a few articles on whether teachers who write make better literacy / writing teachers – the answers to this question aren’t hard and fast.

For most of my teaching years I have felt very self conscious about my writing skills and until recently hadn’t dared to bring any of my texts to the classroom. I admire Mrs H and her initiative, what better way is there for a teacher to explain what a “context scrapbook” is and to set her pupils off exploring landscapes of their own?

In chapter 1 of ”Learning how to teach writing”, Atwell (1998) writes about the importance of presenting her own writing in the classroom, she also relates to the difficulty in doing this.

“I have almost overcome my anxiety about revealing to the world how hard and slow writing is for me, and how wildly off-base my first attempts can be. I learned that I only have to write a little bit better than my students for them to learn from my demonstrations…I can only become their mentor, someone whose advice carries weight and truth, because I know writing from the inside, and I’ve shown them I do” (p. 26).

Atwell encourages teachers to write composition tasks they give to their students. From my own experience I know that this is the best way of really knowing what I am demanding of my pupils, discovering where different pupils are likely to experience difficulty and determining what kind of instructions and explicit instruction are neccessary. I am sure that Mrs H will be well prepared to support her students in their journey if she maintains her personal blog along the way.

I’ll try my hand too:

An imaginary landscape which accompanies me in my teaching and in my personal life while facing challenges (like now starting my thesis), appears in Dr Seuss’s brilliant book  Oh, the places you’ll go!

 There are so many inspiring quotes in this little book which can be particularly motivating for students daunted by a big project or challenge. Each page presents a different colourful imaginary landscape as the reader joins the main character who is simply (and cleverly) called “you” on the way to realizing personal aspirations. On You-Tube some of the landscapes have been animated.

Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading and learning.Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

http://www.bubbl.us/

Yesterday I reread Laurel Richardson’s chapter in the Handbook of Qualitative Research and it imbued me with a burning desire to finalise my thesis direction and get going. I have several options open and I really need to decide. The chapter helped me realise (yet again!) that until I begin writing I won’t know what I really know and won’t be able to grasp how able I am to do the job.

The reading I have done in the past two months have convinced me that narrative will be a central feature of my work (my narratives? teacher narratives?). Writing from an involved position seems natural to me now – I can’t believe that a year ago I was looking up the rules of “don’t dare to use the personal “I” in your academic writing”.

During the past weeks I have expressed my concerns about the validity of the work I will be doing and about my claim to authority (How will anyone ever take my work seriously? Who am I to produce an academic text?). Reading Kamler & Thomson (2006), Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision (thank goodness for ebooks) boosted my confidence as did Parr’s article (2007), “Writing and practitioner inquiry: Thinking relationally”.

Laurel Richardson’s discussion of the post modernist view of authoritative knowledge took me one step further.

“The postmodernist context of doubt, then, distrusts all methods equally. No method has a privileged status…a postmodernist position does allow us to know “something” without claiming to know everything. Having a partial, local, historical knowledge is still knowing” (p. 928). Richardson reassuringly reminds us that we don’t need to “write a single text in which we say everything at once to everyone” (p. 929).

I am grateful to Laurel Richardson for these encouraging words. Work like that I CAN DO! I do know something, I even know quite a bit! Yes, my knowledge is “partial” (but involves up to  20 years of teaching, school administration and teacher mentoring), it is “local” (I can relate to my own education in Melbourne, Australia and to my work experience in the north of Israel), and it is “historical” (My personal experiences as a pupil go back 30+ years and my professional experience spans several upheavals in the battle over teaching literacy). I do know, all teachers know. My task will be to critically examine that knowledge in order to personally grow from it and maybe also interest others on the way.

I am hoping to succeed in writing a readable and interesting report, one Richardson would call “vital” (p. 924), a text which would “make a difference” (p. 924). I aim to write for my colleagues, literacy teachers and teacher educators – real people in a real world, not necessarily for the university library.

I can’t see myself experimenting with fictional or poetic genres although I found the fictional story-diary I wrote in Graham Parr’s unit challenging and stimulating. Richardson explains the use of the metaphor in social-science writing and gives an exercise on it at the end of the chapter. I want to devote some time to this. What metaphor would I chose for the teaching of writing? What metaphors would upper primary school pupils choose to describe the task of composition?

What are my thesis options as I see them at this time?

• Autoethnography – examining my personal experiences of learning and teaching writing in order to discover patterns and themes which may well be relevant to teaching done by others.
• Narrative Inquiry – examining personal teaching experience through field texts gathered from other teachers (I’ll have to find Aussie teachers somehow) – email conversations or blog entries mainly I presume. I’ll have to decide whether I am researching from the sidelines or become personally involved in the process and the content. The involved stance interests me more.

Still more questions than answers…decision time is definitely here!

Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2^nd ed., pp. 923-948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 First thoughts after reading the article:

I was surprised to read how similar the description of the activities of the teachers’ group at Eastern Girls’ School was to the type of PD group that I have been dreaming of setting up here. Almost a year ago I spoke with my colleague who is responsible for literacy education in the north of the country and asked her to consider me running inquiry groups for teachers with emphasis on the teaching of writing in the upper primary grades. In Israel there is almost no culture of professional writing among teachers and most PD courses are built along the lines of the left side of the table, “managerial understandings of effective PD”. There are almost no frameworks for teachers to come together (by choice or by mandate) to discuss classroom practice and the personal experiences of teachers in action.   

In some of the schools I work in I have an hourly session with 2-3 teachers from the same grade level. My day is made up of these meetings and together we plan, build assessment criteria, discuss the curriculum, and create teaching and learning materials. Occasionally we collaboratively examine student drafts and written products. Hardly ever do we take the time to really reflect. The agenda is determined according to teacher needs and content which I suggest – we try to find a balance.  

Despite the fact that time is scarce and teachers are certainly always overloaded, I am aware that almost all of the teachers who take part in these sessions are grateful for the time to sit together, receive help in solving problems and extend their learning on literacy related issues. In each of these schools the principal has definitely “carved out” these hours and organized the timetable accordingly – not an easy task.

 I was surprised to read that reflective writing is expected of teachers in certain areas in Australia. In in-service PD seminars, if I ask language teachers to write for 10-15 minutes on a certain topic they look at me in horror. I also meet many teachers who feel extremely threatened when they have to write or respond in a virtual campus connected to a seminar or course.

 I know that there is a centre for PD in Jerusalem called “Ovnayim” –  http://www.ovnayim.org/site/?lang=english – they work with teacher narratives and I have already made contact with them. I believe that if I mentioned practitioner inquiry most of the teachers in this country would have no idea of what I’m talking about. 

An important point I have taken from the article is the distinction between “public texts” and “other texts”. I think the division is useful for teacher researchers involved in professional writing as it takes the pressure out of writing for a public platform, the option of gradually developing narratives, journal/blog entries or email correspondence into an article or other “public text” may be easier.

Parr, G. (2007). Writing and practitioner inquiry: Thinking relationally. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3), 22-47. Retrieved from http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/2007v6n3art2.pdf   

After a week battling in bed with the flu I’m trying to get back into my work. Yesterday I spent a frustrating few hours in the library catalogue and didn’t get too far.

This morning I reread “Writing in primary classrooms: A teacher’s story” by Roser and Bomer. The chapter paints a very idyllic picture of a primary school classroom in which writing is central to all activities. It is a pleasure to read the descriptions of enthusiasm, creativity and growth . The pressures and difficulties of teaching writing are minimized and appear only at the end of the chapter.

“In Katherine’s schools (and she has taught in many), sooner or later demands for accountability on particular types of writing begin to take sway  over the legitimate, authentic writing her students are doing. The demands for scores on benchmark assessments and standardized tests are evidence of distrust of teachers to achieve those scores without installing artificial practice materials and mandating days devoted to ‘benchmarking’ students’ progress” (p. 38).

In the chapter, six of Katherine’s central beliefs are highlighted:

1. All children can write
2. Primary children’s writing should be purpose filled (and all day)
3. Writing develops readers
4. Writing is a social act in primary classrooms
5. Writers must be both fed and instructed
6. Writers can be fragile beings

I believe that teachers who have extensive knowledge on writing pedagogy are constantly compromising as they know that in today’s reality with over-sized classes, time restraints and external curricular pressures, they cannot teach the way they know is effective and right.

As I reread the 6 beliefs I could hear the teachers I coach protesting and complaining:

“I have at least two pupils who will never know how to write”, “How can writing be purposeful when we have to fill in the workbook the pupils have paid for?”, “All day? The timetable determines most of what happens here”, “The children are so noisy, there is no way that I could let them work together” etc etc… 

An important exercise for myself (and writing teachers I will work with ) is to write down my/our central beliefs about writing in the classroom. It is useful to separate the ideal from the problems and frustrations as done in this chapter.

Roser, N. L., & Bomer, K. (2005). Writing in primary classrooms: A teacher’s story. In R. Indrisano, & J. R. Paratore (Eds.), Learning to write, writing to learn: Theory and research in practice (pp. 26-39). International Reading Association.