Receptive vs Expressive

Have been trying to post this but the html went all haywire whenever I clicked "publish post."/

A whirlwind trip to a Reading Institute, put on by the U.S. Department of Education, in Anaheim, CA. While it is tempting to write about what I am rediscovering about reading and school reforms, I steer myself toward writing about writing, and “stay on topic” like I tell my students to do! On the contrary, Is it really possible to discuss one without the other?

I always tell teachers and parents that there are plenty of good readers who are not writing-proficient, but there are no good writers who are not proficient readers.

What I took on the plane to read, along with the scandalous US magazine article about Bristol Palin and her bipolar-behaving boyfriend was:

Writing To Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading

http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/WritingToRead_01.pdf

This study shows that students’ reading abilities improve by writing about texts they have read.

It also describes the value of (duh) explicit instruction in:

• spelling
• text structure
• writing sentences
• writing paragraphs
• the basic processes of composition

The creative writers, bloggers, journalists, and researchers I know, or read regularly, frequently write in response to what they have just read – it is often a ‘thinking aloud’ process that provides a synthesis of the topic, thus entertaining or educating us, the readers.

Kids are more comfortable taking in words, or information, from the page, than putting it down on paper. In fact, most of us are!. The academic terms for these processes are Receptive and Expressive Language Skills. The gap between them is generally wider in kids with learning disabilities. They finally grasp reading, and the transfer to writing takes more time. Many students I work with in reading come back a few years later to work on writing.

Schools have limited time to teach writing in the way that the research says to teach it. The one-on-one time required; the time to read aloud what you have written, then revise, revise, revise, and read aloud again, is very time-intensive.

I believe we were more balanced in teaching the integration of reading and writing in the days of the Little Red Schoolhouse. How do I know this? From my own reading of what education was in the early 20^th Century, and my grandmother who taught then. There was a lot of presenting out loud, and speaking clearly, and little wiggle room for unclear writing, since much of it was going to be spoken aloud. Now we have Power Point with fragments embedded in bullet points, and kids do not learn sentence-construction deeply.

Organizers

http://www.wordsift.com/

This is a writer's tool for:
~ brainstorming words to include in a piece
~ searching word lists to find synonyms for "tired" words
~ a reality check for those of us who get repetitive

The visual "cloud" presented is ideal for my visual learners, who see charts, graphs, outlines, and organizers as making a lot more sense than multiple paragraphs. I think of these kinds of minds as defaulting to an architectural world-view. A 5-paragraph essay outline written in pictures, with sentence fragments masquerading as captions, and some boxes with main points inside them is accessible and comfortable. And, I might add, prevents shut-down.

http://elpweb.com/materials/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/L2%20W%20task1%20activity1.pdf

http://www.graphic.org/desmap.html

GIST

The fireball 15-year old "spectrum" student I worked with today illuminated why writing is so difficult for kids like her. She gets caught up in one or two single sentences in laborious detail, while forgetting about holding the big picture in mind. This is a classic roadblock of certain kinds of brains and I have seen it over and over - the struggle of a mind on the ADHD or Autistic spectrum trying to tell you the essence of a movie they just saw, summarize their trip to the waterpark, or write the theme of a book they just read.

So again, graphic organizers can be the magic ticket. I use many versions of organizers for summarizing with students, and yet it is still necessary to provide "mini lessons" on:

Interesting versus Important

Know what I mean?

Rubrics

While surfing on topics related to writing instruction, you've probably encountered the 6 Traits.

These sites have lots of tips about "scoring" writing, which as a parent you may have heard of through your child's teachers. They were originally designed as checklists for state tests, for the scoring committee to rate student papers.

In my opinion, they can get too "busy" and have too much verbiage. These are more useful for district-wide use, and teacher-talk, but if written clearly, can be useful to kids. They provide ladder steps to hold on to while writing a piece, plus a way to "check one's work" when kids think they are done.

These have definitions and examples:

http://senior.billings.k12.mt.us/6traits/

http://educationnorthwest.org/resource/502

While 6 Trait Rubrics are helpful, I break them down even more, and customize them to each student when needed. For example, I use one with a minimalist student that asks how many "how phrases" they have used in their piece. Another one I have asks if the student has checked each verb to make sure it is the correct tense. I have a checklist for book summaries that has 11 items to score oneself on, such as Did you use a good sentence with the word because in it?

Good writers keep these rubrics inside their mind while writing. Kids need to learn how to think their way through, and ask themselves certain questions while writing.

Am I on track with the prompt? Do I have paragraph breaks at the right places? What do I need to make sure to add? Oh yeah, I am supposed to be supporting my topic sentence, and I got off track.

LD Writers need lots of guidance in clarifying their thinking. They THINK they are writing clearly. Without turning off their creativity faucet, I give them them scoring rubrics (gradient of 1 - 4) or checklists (yes or no) to keep them engaged and reading their own writing with an editor's eye.

Receiving feedback: a muscle that develops over time

After getting feedback on my blog about how to improve it I am ready to throw in the towel! Okay, that is my drama queen self talking.

I felt like I had let my audience down. Just like my students, who are crushed when they get such feedback. Like when they find out that they wrote an expository paragraph more like a story. [Oh my. I would never let them get away with that previous "Like..." sentence].

Course correction time: I simply did a search for tips on blog writing. I felt so hemmed in by parameters and "rules", much like my students must feel.

I am taking to heart 60% of the tips, from sites such as these:

http://website101.com/social-media/how-write-blog-writing/

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/30/tens-tips-for-writing-a-blog-post/

I wrote a blog in the same manner I would write a long letter to a friend. I did not include any links. It was not "skim-able." I had no bullets. And for shame....no bolded keywords. Sound byte writing is not an aspiration of mine, or a habit I want to slide into, so I may stick to the length.

Those types of lists are just what our kids need, when writing, which I have forever told parents and teachers. I call them checklists, not rubrics, because I want them to follow them all the way through the writing process.

I have developed many of my own, some specific to the needs of the student, and others just deeper than the average rubric. Many rubrics for writing assignments I have seen from teachers look a lot like this:

www.sites4teachers.com/links/redirect.php?url=http://www.sandi.net/depts/literacy/rubrics/6_ondemand.pdf

I drill down with kids and take each box apart, so that they are following a guideline/checklist with details such as:

• Did I use a strong verb in the concluding sentence? (if it is persuasive)

• Was I careful to limit my short sentences?

• Did I have at least two good "because" sentences?

Okay, now I have morphed this blog topic into checklists, which does not quite correlate to the title, about feedback. What I can say is that using these checklists helps the feedback session with a student stay more neutral, and more concrete.

Walking My Talk

Do you have children who finish a summary, or report, or creative piece, and are even proud of it, but when you read it you have to work hard to fill in the missing parts? Then when you point out that they used "telling" language, instead of "showing" language, they insist that all that should be there is there. In their minds all the details, or main points, or both, were crystal clear. But transferring it to paper, and stepping into the reader's viewpoint for some of that time, lost their intricacies in translation.

For over a decade I have contributed to listservs about reading and writing, and have decided to practice what i pr(t)each, which is to write frequently, in a way that goes against the culture of txting, sound bytes, and abbreviations. No wonder our kids have writing struggles. Teen communications are in the form of sentence fragments on facebook, which I call "poem wanna-be's." Okay, at least they are writing, some opinionators say. I can't align with that, only because the kids I tutor who have trouble coming up with rich vocabulary are often immersed in simplistic reading material such as books with a lot of slapstick to carry the plot (aka The Wimpy Kid).

The more I dig down with each student, I uncover roadblocks prevent kids from writing well, which the truth of Mel Levine's treatise, which is that writing has the most sub-components of any academic task. This results in overwhelm, shut-down, or just plain avoidance. We forget that novice writers have to hold so many skills - and self-talk - in their heads at once.

When proficient writers produce a piece of writing, they cannot necessarily feel themselves performing such components of the process: moving into the reader's mind, constantly re-reading what they have written, asking themselves if this make sense, practicing verb agreement, staying on the topic and reining in other thoughts, paying attention to possible repetitive language, or repeated points, accessing the imaginary "rolodex" of synonyms in their own mind, and remembering the dozen or more comma rules.

So that is how I came up with Taming the Octopus. Writing and reading are about taking things apart and putting them together, but most of that occurs in the mind. To some children this feels mysterious and invisible, and they think there is a secret to writing that maybe they have not stumbled upon yet. My concrete, spatially-oriented students need explicit instruction in how to use words that make a distinct movie occur for the reader.

I would love to know what topics you want to hear about. I am just getting my feet wet, and hope to get some helpful posts up here, with comments from parents with a wide variety of inquiries about writing instruction.