Getting Students to Respond to Failure Like Olympians

by Lauren Nizol Notes from the Classroom

While I watched the Women’s Moguls event during the Olympics, an Australian skier had a particularly bumpy performance (insert groan here), blasting through the orange flags. Yet as she stopped at the finish line, she gestured “oh well” with an unflappable grace, adjusted her goggles, and gave the camera a thumbs up.

So, how do we get our student to respond to failure like Olympians?

Model Live, Unprepared Writing

Imagine my fear when I wrote live in front of my middle school students for the first time. It felt like a daring move in my first year of teaching–to share raw writing with a crowd of thirteen-year-olds. Yet, to my surprise, these students were completely tuned into what I needed as a writer.

When I modeled, students were quick to throw out a word, phrase, or question that prompted me when I was stuck. I scribbled all over the overhead. There was a tremble as I wrote those first few times, and it was a tremble that showed my students that writing has fits of balance and chaos.

In being open to moments where I choked out words, I was able to show my students how a writer gets back up after tripping over words and how a supportive writing community can move a writer.

Resist the Urge to “Red Pen” Their Writing

The godfather of the writing process, Donald Murray, says that the standard approach to teaching writing is a form of “repetitive autopsying,” one that “doesn’t give birth to live writing.” For Murray, live writing is authentic and process based. It allows for growth.

The red pen, on the other hand, leads a student to identify as a poor writer rather than a developing writer–even though writing only gets better when students can take risks and not fear a punishing grade or comment.

Moving away from a deficit model of teaching, then, leads students to not fear feedback from their teachers and peers.

Provide Empathetic Feedback

What can help our students to get back up after a fall? The place to start is to help them recognize that all writers will hit a bumpy stretch at some point in the writing process.

For many students, this vulnerability is scary and paralyzing. And it’s even worse when the feedback is given postmortem–after they submit a composition for a grade. Yet, it’s those moments of moments of vulnerability, Brené Brown reminds us, that can lead a student to deep learning.

One solution is to offer multiple times to confer with a student in a low-stakes way. No grades. No red pen. Just a conversation between teacher and student. This formative feedback is essential to their growth.

All students will find an aspect of the process challenging–make that transparent to them. They will try ideas that may not work. They may delete passages that took time to compose. And they may feel a deep sense of frustration and tell themselves that they are not a “good writer.”

But always bear in mind how challenging writing can be.

When we really know the writer, and we know how much effort has gone into their writing, we will know how to respond generously. We will know that recognizing the strength in the risk they took as a writer will eventually lead them to growth.

Lauren Nizol (@CoachNizol) is an MTSS Student Support Coach and Interventionist at Novi High School. She has eleven years of classroom experience, teaching English, IB Theory of Knowledge and English Lab. Lauren completed her undergraduate degree in History, English and Secondary Education at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and her Masters in English Education from Eastern Michigan University. She is a National Writing Project Teacher Consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project and an advocate for underperforming students and literacy interventions. When she’s not teaching, Lauren often runs for the woods with her husband and their three sons/Jedi in training and posts many stylized pictures of trees on Instagram.

How To Use Talk as an Entry Point for Literacy

by Lauren Nizol Notes from the Classroom

Many students need a temporary on-ramp to accelerate them through a literacy task.

For teachers of resistant readers and writers, creating this on-ramp can be a daunting task. Yet, I have discovered how talk is an effective entry point for students who are easily overwhelmed by a challenging reading or a complex writing composition, because it leads teachers and students to co-construct meaning.

Talk also reveals to students what they already know.

Over the holiday break, I worked with my son, a third grader, on paragraph writing. Though his composition was definitely different than my high school students’ writing, the process was familiar to me.

When I asked him to write a paragraph, I got one of those “I dunno” shoulder shrugs I often get from my students. When I asked him to tell me about something interesting he learned over break, I got one of those “I kinda know” pauses. Then when I asked him to tell me about seeing his uncle’s fencing equipment, I knew I had him.

Dylan started to rattle off a series of details about fencing–both European and Japanese. As he rattled, I wrote. And by the end of our conversation, what I had recorded became a piece of evidence for him that he did indeed have ideas that he could develop.

Yet I cannot be Dylan’s or my students’ Johnny-on-the-Spot stenographer every time they write.

And that’s why framing this exercise as an entry point works best. It should be used as a way to show students what they have rattling around in their minds. Talk should be used to help students to get comfortable with using their voices, and to see that they really do have something to say. Sometimes providing a space and a simple affirmation can encourage even the most resistant student.

Talk can also help students puzzle through an idea.

Recently I’ve been working with freshmen on writing a research essay that explains how an element of our world today is dystopian. One student I worked with had a hard time understanding a part of an article about China’s protectionist censoring of sites like Facebook and Google. I knew that in her U.S. History class, she had just studied isolationism and the U.S.’s closed-door policy, and as I brought up these terms, she was easily able to make meaning, and to interpret the significance of the evidence to her argument.

This is another area in which talk is important. A lot of students want to jump right into the writing before carefully thinking about the research. And that leads to a lot of out-of-context quotes and disjointed analysis!

But talk can create a space to puzzle through ideas first. This was true of my student who wrote about China–and it shows again why conversation is a necessary part of any writer’s process.

Another benefit of talk is this: it can offer students a path toward revision.

When recently conferencing with a student about a research paper, she remarked, “I have this paragraph, but I dunno–it just seems like a bunch of facts.” Something wasn’t sitting right with her, but she didn’t know how to process it.

This is the messiest stage of writing, and some of our students don’t know how to work through it without intentional conferencing during workshop time. So how did conversation help my student here?

We talked through her sources–articles about gun violence in school–and she pointed out an intriguing line from one of the articles. The line noted that violence seemed to be a familiar story. My student didn’t know what to do with the line, but when we looked closer together at the article, we noticed that it was written in 1999–after the Columbine Massacre.

Our reaction was the same–shivers. It made both of us jump because the story around school shootings has gotten worse, not better, even though it was “familiar” almost twenty years ago. Our astonishment led her to make a careful revision. She looked back at her paragraph that was just a “bunch of facts,” and decided to put it aside while she wrote a paragraph on violence in schools, because she could see how the impact was stronger on her audience.

I praised her for doing the hardest thing a writer can do–letting go of her writing when it just doesn’t fit. Because we had talked through her new ideas, it was easy to let go of what wasn’t working. And by talking, she was able to make a purposeful revision that considered her audience and purpose.

Life Lesson: Practice What You Teach

by Beth Rogers Notes from the Classroom

shutterstock_275161592 As 2015 came to a close and winter break was upon us, I had some time to reflect upon my teaching practice, as I planned for my next units of study. I remembered how, at the beginning of the year, we received from our Literacy Specialist an immersion packet. The packet suggested several teacher-written pieces, which would go along with the units from Atlas.

The assignment was overwhelming to say the least. Several colleagues remarked that there was no way they were going to do that much writing, on top of everything else that had to be done.

But once we dug into the units with our students, we remembered quickly the importance of writing for—and with—our learners.

When students see me engaging in the writing I am asking them to do, they immediately view it as authentic. I always choose my stories carefully to avoid students’ copying my subject matter (a lesson learned in previous years). And I never do just one draft and call it good.

I have found that if I allow them to see my struggles and imperfections, they are more open to our revising and editing sessions with their work. I will intentionally write stories that I know need revision, allowing my students to see that even adult writing needs work. I write for them and use my pieces to write with them. We even do shared pieces based on shared experiences. Once, for instance, we brought a microwave into the classroom and popped popcorn so that we could all write a descriptive paragraph together. That was a lesson they never forgot!

The Conversation with Editing

Probably the best lesson for me with editing and revision has come through the writing of this blog. shutterstock_266285486 After I submit my pieces, our editor does his thing, which means inevitable changes to sentence structure, word choice, and sometimes even titles. I have to admit, it can be hard to take at times. This made me realize that I need to be more gentle in my approach with my students; more conversation needs to happen as I go through their pieces. It also made me realize how shared writing, revising and editing can help my students achieve better results.

So as I sat in my very quiet classroom planning our launch for our next unit, I decided I would try writing the assignments that I give students, lesson by lesson. I’ll find what fits, what doesn’t, and what I need to move around. I’ll analyze my points of frustration and do my best to anticipate what will be stumbling points for my students. Will it be perfect? No, of course not. But I’m sure I’ll learn a few things along the way that will make it better than if I taught it without trying it.

When it comes to writing, I’m not sure that practice ever makes perfect. But it certainly makes me a better teacher.

Beth Rogers is a fifth grade teacher for Clarkston Community Schools, where she has been teaching full time since 2006. She is blessed to teach Language Arts and Social Studies for her class and her teaching partner’s class, while her partner teaches all of their math and science. This enables them to focus on their passions and do the best they can for kids. Beth was chosen as Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014 in her district. She earned a B.S. in Education at Kent State University and a Master’s in Educational Technology at Michigan State University.

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