Last night began the first of six sessions preparing the teachers who will pilot the writing assessment in progress. We had good attendance, in fact, we almost ran out of binders! The group of teachers and oaches attending is very diverse but they have one thing in common: Thay are all very interested in teaching writing with a variety of resources, in order to meet their students' needs.

These are the dates and themes for the next sessions:

January 11 - (Note date change)The writing process

February 1st - 4-5 Summaries, 2-3 Expository, K-1 Expository

March 1st - Formative assessment (bring samples)

April 5th - 4-5 Response to Literature, 2-3 Procedural Writing, K-1 Narrative

May 3rd - Long term planning

One of the most useful skills you can have if you are writing a piece longer than a page, the creation of outlines is unfairly relegated to middle and high school. Upper grade elementary students can prepare and understand simple outlines with the right instruction.

For second language learners, the “right instruction” involves breaking down the concepts in chunks that do not overwhelm, following up with individual conferences, and including short periods of guided practice in each lesson. All students are expected to prepare an outline of their topic, with varying degrees of support.

Lesson 1: Narrowing Down Your Topic A topic narrow enough is a requirement for success in the creation of an outline. Topics that are too broad are confusing and exhausting for teacher and student. They force the writer to narrow it down later on, or ask to be discarded. Don’t let your students build an outline with broad topics, or you will be setting them up for failure. Please see the “How Long Does It Have To Be” handout for an explanation of how to introduce the idea of size in topics. Using the examples on this handout, prepare a chart on butcher paper showing how a topic can be progressively narrowed down.

Even after you explain what the handout says, your students will still come up with topics that are too broad. Individual conferences should correct this. You use them to get all the kids on the same page. Emphasize understanding the concept of a “narrow enough” topic over anything else. Here’s an example of the dialogue you might carry out during a conference:

Ms. Koons: So what do we have here?

Anthony: My topic.

Ms. Koons: Read it please.

Anthony: The sun.

Ms. Koons: (pauses) That’s it? Isn’t there a part of the sun that’s really interesting to you?

Anthony: Not really. Well… actually, I liked the flares.

Ms. Koons: How can we make flares part of the topic? Your topic is a little too broad still. You’d have to write many pages to say everything that needs to be said about the sun. You’ll have to write about the sun’s characteristics, about UV rays, about sunspots, about skin cancer, about flares, about its corona…

Anthony: Oh. Flares on the sun? or of the sun?

Ms. Koons: How about “Solar Flares”?

Anthony: Ok.

Ms. Koons: If you add flares to it, your be making it more specific, and you’ll be writing a much shorter report. You’ll only have to write about the flares. If you write “the sun” we’re looking at more than twenty pages.

Because almost half the class did not understand the role that details play in a literary piece, we decided to go back to the concept. I designed a lesson that would showcase the role of these details. Whenever students are having trouble visualizing the role of a literary device, there’s two things you can do. You can pinpoint their presence in a text and talk about what they do, or you can take them out of the text to have the students experience their absence. Having seen how the “close” reading had reached only half of our children, I opted for the second alternative.

I took a dramatic passage out of the book Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink to use as a “mentor text.” The first few chapters of this Newberry winner are not very descriptive, but as we approach the culminating point there is a moment where she carefully describes how the girl crosses the icy river with her horse to meet the Indians. I chose the first two paragraphs of this chapter as a mentor text.

Mentor texts help students understand the role that various writing conventions, skills, and processes have in the overall quality of the text. They are normally quite short. Teachers usually select mentor texts that showcase only one or two of these aspects at a time. So my Caddie Woodlawn passage was perfect, because I didn’t have to explain the whole story to get the kids into it. Not a lot happens in this passage, so it can be summarized easily. With comprehension out of our way, struggling readers can “get the gist” and concentrate on the task of understanding the role of a literary element.

I made a list of the descriptive details used by the author in this short passage. Foremost in my mind was the need to show teachers how authors do not limit themselves to sensory details when crafting great descriptions. By tallying the details, I discovered that the bulk of those details pertained to movement. Carol Ryrie Brink did not use a lot of details to describe color or sound or taste, but she used no less than 17 different words to show exactly how the girl’s horse avoided death while crossing the icy river. This analysis gave me a very good sense of how to explain the role of details in this passage. I was ready for the lesson.

What would happen if you had a machine that could “squeeze out” all of the descriptive details from a text? What would you be left with? That’s what I did. I re-wrote the passage without its descriptive details and ended up with a very succinct summary, which I gave to the kids as a handout. We used it for a few purposes: We read it to get the gist of the story, to use as a contrasting text to the original, and to ask ourselves revision questions. The students drew a diagram of the action, and a few struggled because of the lack of details.

After we read and discussed this pared down version, I divided the class into two groups. The two groups did the same thing, but one worked independently while the other gathered on the rug with me to review the concept of descriptive details. Both groups were to use the tallied list of details to locate them on the original version. During this time, I asked them to concentrate on only one question: Why would the author use so many great and different words to describe movement in this passage? After ten minutes of this exercise, they wrote down their one-sentence answer.

I recruited their teacher’s help for the next part. My intention was to have her model the language used for literary analysis, so she answered the question out loud. She explained the author needed the reader to see it all in slow motion, like a slow movie, because it was dramatic. Then I said, “but why wouldn’t the author use taste, sound, color details?” I had them put their heads down and close their eyes in order to listen to a “taste-centered” version of the text. When we were done, some were laughing.

“This has nothing to do with the story!”
“That was ridiculous, getting her to taste the ice and the river water.”
“Exactly, now you know that the story demanded attention placed on movement because without it, you couldn’t have seen how the horse crossed the river safely.”

I collected their written responses for later analysis and left the room. 

I am coaching a teacher who wanted her students to do better revision, so we decided to use the genre the class is presently studying, a narrative. Originally, we were using the story to teach students how to combine sentences, but as we did this, we discovered it could also be used as an assessment of how well our students understand and apply the concept of descriptive details.

So the following day, the teacher reviewed the type of details we could include in this type of story. Then individual students “revised” it to make it more vivid. They were instructed to use their imagination without making it “too gory:”

The Berkeley Accident

Two years ago I saw an accident. It was on Addison St. There was a woman in a car. She was going too fast! She didn’t stop at the stop sign. A big man was crossing the street. He was using the crosswalk and carrying a backpack. The woman hit the man with her car. I heard the car hit and drag him. The man was screaming in pain. I had my cell phone and dialed 911 but it was busy. The police arrived and took my story. I waited until the ambulance came.

We collected the samples to get a better understanding of the issues our students confront trying to complete such a task. We used color-coded highlighters to mark the descriptive details added by each students. This allowed us to quickly see the amount and type of detail in each piece.

Right away, we saw that less than half of the students understood what was required. More than half limited themselves to either copying the story, or adding just one or two additional details, typically about color. But five students had done an outstanding job. They used literary devices such as similes “as if she was a flash,” onomatopoeia “I had my phone and called 911 ring ring ring,” superlatives “it was two very horrible years ago,” transitional words “the police finally arrived, and dialogue “I’m sorry all the lines are busy, said the person.” We also discovered that these same students had assimilated the previous day’s lessons and had combined several of the short sentences found in the original piece, using the conjunctions we had taught (and & but).

By then we were asking ourselves, how can we get the rest of the class to follow suit? The samples of students who had done ok were not very creative. It was clear that these students had not used their imagination, or more precisely, that the students did not have a repertory of “literary tricks” to enliven the otherwise drab original story. Original details were limited to color, quality or size; while other students just copied the examples given by the teacher. We gathered that the review had not been enough for the vast majority of the students, and that simply reading the anthology pieces was not enough exposure for them to build a repertoire.

The strategy to use in this case, is to do a “close” reading (not to be confused with cloze). In a “close “ reading, the teacher reads out loud while pointing out the devices used in a particularly effective passage. It is very important that the students have their own copy of the text. This could be a mini lesson, as the passages can never be longer than half a page so as not to lose the students’ attention. Not only does the teacher point out these devices, she explains why the author uses them. The lesson concludes with the opportunity to “try out” a couple of these devices in an exercise, before the students are to apply what they have learned to their own drafts.

What is the difference between developmental continuum and developmental expectations? The developmental continuum is the group of skills, interests, strategies and processes most children master at each grade level to communicate in writing. Developmental expectations are the activities most of your children can be expected to complete without frustration at each grade level. For example, writing complete sentences is not part of the developmental continuum for most five year olds, therefore it cannot become an expectation for this population until a couple of years later. More information on the formal stages can be found here.

Why do we need to understand the developmental continuum? We need to understand the developmental continuum for various important reasons: We need to learn what’s reasonable to expect from each population and assess the development of their writing over time. We also need to plan age-appropriate writing instruction and viable intervention strategies.

How can a teacher use his knowledge of the developmental continuum to help students acquire an intrinsic sense of purpose? This can be done at any age. At the beginning of the year, a teacher can find out the developmental expectations a student’s independent writing meets. Soon after, the teacher assesses how much farther can the student go with assistance. During an individual conference, the teacher helps the student set one or two simple, reasonable goals for the next month:

Mr. Ka:  Hmm, so what do we have here? (opens student’s writing folder and glancing at his assessment notebook). You can come up with your own ideas, you can begin writing without help, you can develop an idea. You can do a lot.
Jay:  Yeah.
Mr. Ka:  I also have In my notes that you write a lot for a third grader, and it shows right here (looking through his writer’s folder. How do you get to write so much?
Jay:  I don’t know, I just do it.
Mr. Ka:  How can you tell what to leave and what to get rid of?
Jay:  I don’t, I just leave everything.
Mr. Ka: Even if it doesn’t make sense?
Jay: Everything makes sense.
Mr. Ka:  Hmm. Ok. Do you ever read the piece after you finish?
Jay:  (Shrugs). No.
Mr. Ka:  Well this is the next step for you, revising is what is going to turn you into a much better writer, Jay. Revising means going over what you wrote. The best writers revise, so we’re going to help you revise. There’s a lot that you can do already, and this is the next step, you got that? (smiles).
Jay:  Yeah.
Mr. Ka:  So let’s start with this as a goal for next time we meet. When we are writing, I want you to read the whole thing over after you finish writing. I’m going to write this goal in my notebook, and I want you to write it in this sheet with the date. Next to it you write what you noticed about your writing after you finish reading.

The teacher can use the developmental continuum as a tool for metacognitive reflection on the student’s part. For this to work, the teacher must pledge specific support for the student. A chart, list, or at least clearly formulated, doable goals can help keep most students accountable and aware of the direction in which they want to go in their writing development. At the beginning of every new conference, the teacher and student reflect on what they did to meet these goals.

What are the types of development a writing teacher should monitor?

Progress over time
Genre knowledge, grammar, organization, planning, fluency, voice

Language acquisition (English Language Learners, African-American writers) Knowledge of standard English functions, structure, grammar, usage

The process of writing
Understanding purpose, audience, its stages

Ourselves as writers
Writing interests, writing proficiency, metacognition

It's been a wonderful summer and now it's over, suddenly. I took the car to the shop, did as many household projects as I could, and made sure to exercise, but now the great river of education is about to sweep us off our feet once more. Do I feel energized? Sure, and more so knowing I will be working with a new school this year, Sequoia Elementary, in Oakland.

There are a few BAWP TCs at Sequoia, which makes it a great place to visit and a great place to learn.

I will also continue my work twice a week at Dover Elementary, in San Pablo. I just did a workshop on classroom environment yesterday over there, with four of Dover's own teachers bringing in their experience and expertise. Angelica Perez and Mary Lugton shared tips and ways in which they have improved their classroom environment to get the kids to write better. The evaluations proved everyone was very appreciative of this structure. I think we should keep it for future workshops. It was Matt Wayne's idea (he's the principal), and it was a success!

I have spent some time away, primarily because I've had a carpal tunnel flare-up and must be very careful about the amount of time I spend typing these days. But over the next two months I will be posting  all of the new material I've developed since January, so I'll keep you posted!

I've been meaning to write about this for some time. Is it fair to ask seven-year olds to write all of the steps to a process using time order words in complete sentences? Never mind that this is a difficult task for many adults, as the ability to "play back" the process and antiocipate problems is required. As if this was not enough, one of the writing assessments teachers are required to complete requires that students describe a process in a complete paragraph.

Several second grade teachers have asked for help. While working with one of Dover's coaches and listening to what the teachers were asking, we decided that the emphasis should be placed on building language that would enable our second graders to describe the process in the first place. We had noticed that the teachers despaired when they found many incomplete accounts for a process that they thought was familiar to the students. But we operated from the premise that if the students were able to write with less effort, they might have more energy for the more cognitively demanding tasks.

I went to their rooms and did demos. I showed several books "that teach you how to do something." Then I pulled out and discussed a chart with the characteristics of procedural books:

• They teach you how to do something
• There is usually one step of each sentence
• In the beginning, you tell the reader what the instructions are for
• You let the reader know when it's over
• Time order words are used to know what goes first

I looked up a "magic trick" involving a strip of paper and proceeded to follow the steps in front of the room. I wrote the steps on butcher paper, making sure to point out the need to keep only one step on each sentence. We read those together, and I asked them to tell the steps to a buddy using the sentence frames I has posted on the wall.

Using those frames was very difficult for them as many don't yet have the kind of fluency that enables one to read and converse at the same time. They did, however, want to learn the steps to show the trick to siblings and friends, so I performed it a second time, but with a glaring omission. We discussed how important it was to try to "go back" to the process in our minds in order to remember all of the important steps.

After this, they were ready to write the steps on their own, or so we thought. In actuality, the guided practice session that followed was the most eye opening for the teachers and me. All that modeling, oral rehearsal, the sentence frames and discussion was not enoough to help them build complete sentences. They needed more exposure to the terms we had used orally. Also, their memories were short compared to those of older children, so we stood my each child at one time or another, reassuring them that the sentence they were building in their minds was the one they should put on paper. Even with a graphic organizer, they needed help with those sentences, but what better place and moment than that guided practice?

The teachers saw how important it is to use everything you've got in helping your second language learners to acquire the language they need. And I believe that with more of this type of practice, they will progressively be able to remember more and more of the key steps.

While helping second, third, fourth and fifth grade teachers evaluate their students whole class writing samples, I came upon a realization: Our second language learners desperately need explicit instruction on building what I call "reasoning structures." I call them structures and not sentences because I am talking both sentence and whole piece level. It all started while I was reviewing the summaries fourth graders had written. Then I discovered similar difficulties in the procedural pieces of second graders, in the responses to literature of fifth graders, and in some persuasive pieces third graders had finished. I have written about this before:

These types of sentences are made of two clauses, the main clause (the effect) and the subordinate clause (the cause). The subordinate clause, as its name implies, cannot stand alone as a complete sentence. Punctuation will change depending on where you place the adverbs because, since, or as long as, all of which are used the same way: These adverbs are transitional words that signal a cause-and-effect relationship.

I hadn't, until now, seen the phenomenon accross grade levels. I am seeing simple sentences which discuss one item each. Check out this summary of Oliver Button Is A Sissy, by Tommie De Paola:

There is one boy, Oliver. He likes to dance and do arts and crafts. He doesn't like to play ball. The other kids tease him at school. His dad calls him a sissy. He is sad. His mom sends him to dance class. He learns to tap dance, then there is a talent show and Oliver tap dances. He becomes a star.

I am looking for evidence that the students understand how the key events are linked, that there are causes and consequences, so I show them how to link events in a way that show these relationships. As a second language learner myself, and because I am a native Spanish speaker, this is very much how my own reasoning comes out during my first draft. But I have learned to insert such words during the process of revision:

There is one boy, Oliver. He likes to dance and do arts and crafts, but he doesn't like to play ball. As a result, the other kids tease him at school and his dad calls him a sissy. Because he is sad, his mom sends him to dance class. He learns to tap dance, then there is a talent show and Oliver tap dances. He becomes a star.

I have shown you a paragraph long example because I also believe that modeling sentence transformation exercises in isolation does not really help students see the purpose of this type of revision. The problem is that students need to learn to revise using transitional words and adverbial clauses to identify the relationship between key ideas.

"Transitional words, adverbial clauses?" you'll say. "I'm a primary grades teacher and this is an upper grades issue." Not so fast! My theory is that if we model how to build such sentences in first, second and third grade, there will not be a need to address it explicitly in fourth and fifth grade. We will need to share examples first, but we also need to know where to look for them. Read picture books and you'll find few if any examples of these clauses in action because they are written with the intention of getting the young reader to infer these relationships. In other words, you won't find many in "show-don't-tell" writing. In order for students in grades 1-3 to understand how and when to use these words, they'll have to hear passages from chapter books, or watch their teacher write a summary or literature response:

I loved Oliver Button Is A Sissy. My favorite part is when he is so happy at the dance school because that's how I would have felt. I love to dance too. I don't like to play ball and I would feel like Oliver if those kids where at my school.

Asking question after question in search for a correct answer detailing the cause and effect relationship is not the way to go with second language learners who are already struggling with fluency and comprehension. Instead, once you start encouraging them to orally develop their own ideas about the text, do everything you can to validate what they say, even if they err a little. During the oral stage, get them to practice using the new structure by posting appropriate language frames to choose from:

Teacher: Ok, Hassan, tell us why you think this is an exaggeration.

Hassan: Because his hair can never grow so long to make him trip!

Teacher: Ooops, use the sentence!(points to frame).

Hassan:(reading) This could have never happened, because no one can grow hair so long.

Teacher: Excellent! Who else found an exaggeration?

It is only then that their reasoning will transfer onto paper. Then we can work on getting them to build a persuasive piece, summary, response to lit, that truly shows how well they understand.

Once upon a time two grade level teams were tackling the same genre at the same school. The fourth and fifth grade teachers were helping their students to draft responses to literature. Responses that should include an opinion, preferably one that discusses some of the elements in that literature piece and supports them with evidence. But the students had not been exposed to a lot of quality reviews, and many were struggling with unwieldy, extra long, awkward sentences. These sentences refused to do what they were told. Enter charming Princess Writing Coach, on a white mare and wearing a long sable coat.

All of a sudden I remembered I'm supposed to be here and not daydreaming. Yet this is the situation: The fourth grade teachers are focusing on getting their students to identify the main events in a fiction piece. They use those events to build a coherent summary, which is part of their literature response. But in fifth grade our focus is to identify figurative language that can be incorporated into the response. What to do?

In fourth grade, it was not possible (as is our practice) to find a short literature piece exemplifying the writing concept or skill we'll teach. Pieces that are too brief tend to be "short" on the literary elements that we are looking for. In fourth grade, those elements are contained in the Rules of Notice. We use the rules of notice as clues that help us find out what is important in fictional texts. Short pieces simply do not have much to go on if what we want is to write a quality literature response. So we decided to first try to find an Open Court selection that would provide thick descriptions, surprises, repetition... all of the features of quality literature. All of the stories in the fourth grade anthology are long enough, but not all fit this description. Some are expository texts, and others are just not a treasure trove of these clues. When we could not find what we needed in OCR, we turned to chapters from trade books. These chapters are as long as the OCR selections which poses a new problem: now we need enough time to get the students to read and comprehend these long pieces, for them to be able to write a coherent reponse. Our previous four-day teaching cycle is not working. The cycle will need to be extended to a six-day affair:

Days 1 & 2: Read selection and find examples of the Rules of Notice

Day 3: Discuss the role of these clues in making the narrative more understandable and enjoyable

Day 4: Complete a triple entry literature journal where you document these clues

Day 5: Draft the response to literature, using evidence from the triple entry journal

Day 6: Revise response to literature

The fifth grade teachers face a different dilemma. They are able to teach a four-day cycle and discuss, in each, one literary element. The students, so far, have been able to identify the elements in the context of the stories they have been shown. Reading a story of OCR length during the writing period would mean no time for the students to write, so we use chapters from trade books to illustrate these figurative language elements. With a short selection, we can discuss the element immediately, and even do a little writing on the first day of the cycle. The students difficulties reside more in the type of sentence they will need to build to show a line of reasoning. Prepositional phrases and adverbial clauses go hand in hand with the speculations and logical constructions they need, in order to discuss the role figurative language plays in a story:

In The Twits there is a lot of exaggeration. But one part that is not exaggerated is the part where Mr. Dahl tells us how Mr. Twit's beard made him feel, "terrifcally grand and wise." This is not a hyperbole, because Mr. Twit's beard can make him feel any way he wants and there is no way to prove that. If this was an exaggeration, they would need to say it in a way that could have never happened. And Mr. Twit could have thought that his beard makes him wise.

Their focus is on helping students acquire the "language of critique." To do this we have devised a four-day cycle:

Day 1: Read selection and identify examples of the element discussed

Day 2: Teacher models using these elements to draft a short piece, students write their own.

Day 3: Draft the response to literature, using evidence from the piece itself

Day 4: Revise response to literature

The 5th grade students are also expected to document their reasoning well with evidence from the story itself. Hence the emphasis on producing their own sample before they are asked to read and pick out an example independently.