SOME OF MY OUT OF THE BOX THINKING FOR THIS WEEK

On Friday, Mary Lee had an amazing post about thinking out of the box. If you haven't read it, hop right over to Year of Reading and do it now. Really. Be sure to take the six minutes to watch the video. It's amazing.

Mary Lee's video and the accompanying poem gave me a new lens for thinking about an event that had occurred on Thursday in a class that I was working in:

I've been fussing a lot lately about how important it is to have a solidly grounded, theoretically based teaching philosophy and to make curricular and pedagogical decisions based on those beliefs. In a few less words, "I believe X, so I do Y." When I do that in my own teaching life, that's when kids learn best. Take this situation from last Thursday, for example.

I am working with the fourth graders on writing fiction, specifically, writing fiction to a prompt. Many of my students come from homes where lots of stories are told, but few come from homes where many stories are read aloud. I try, then, when I write narrative, and particularly fictional narrative with kids to read them lots of great stories. One of my favorite authors for this is Robert Munsch. Munsch was an oral storyteller before he was a writer. Munsch's work is sophisticated enough that older kids enjoy the content, and his writing style is easy for them to imitate. Munsch draws heavily on the the traditions of oral storytelling, e.g. things that happen in threes, events that repeat three times, repeating phrases. Because he uses these tools so masterfully, they are easy for kids to recognize and duplicate.

A. approaches at the end of independent writing time. He is a sweet, sweet guy, an English Language Learner, who is super eager to please. When he came to fourth grade, A rarely wrote more than a paragraph. The writing was simple, the language was simple, and his use of conventions was simple. A is a kid who has really taken off as a writer, however, in the past few month. He regularly writes two, and occasionally even three well-developed pages during writing time. He knows how to use several different leads, including a question, a sound effect and what we call "setting the scene." He uses what we call "rule of three" (have three events, add three details to make a picture in the writers' head/give three examples to support your thinking). He can write dialogue, and punctuate it pretty close to correctly. He knows how to end a piece without saying, "And that's the end of my story." Most importantly, he can evaluate his own work, and tell you what he has done well, and what he wants to do on the next piece of writing.

One thing I know about A, however, is that he is not usually a writer or learner that grasps a concept or technique on the first try, or often not even the second, or third. Usually A needs to approximate, get feedback, approximate again, get more feedback, approximate, and get more feedback. It takes him four or five or ten tries. A is persistent, however, and eventually, he gets the hang of whatever we are working on.

Today, A can't wait to show me what he has done during writing time. The prompt was to imagine you woke up with a new body part, e.g. antlers, or a giraffe neck, or wings. A. has taken Robert Munsch's story, PURPLE, YELLOW, GREEN, about a little girl who begs her mom to buy her markers, first washable markers, then smelly markers, then indelible, never wash off until you're dead and maybe even longer markers, and basically inserted his own name into it. He's used Munsch's details and even his language. He tells me that he is going to have himself draw bunny ears on his head, but at this point, he is almost two pages in, and has not yet reached the prompt. That's a teeny bit of a problem given that the assigned length for this story cannot be any more than four pages.

We are at the point in the year where we have four teaching days until kids have to be able to show that they are proficient writers. And when I look at A's piece, my heart jumps into my throat. A four page piece that has not hit the prompt after two pages is probably not going to cut it. I take a deep breath. I remember what I believe. I try to practice what I have preached.

First, I acknowledge what A has done. "Wow, A, you really loved that Robert Munsch story that we read today, huh? And you have used his ideas and his words in even your own work." A beams from ear to ear and has to read the piece aloud to me again, just so I can get the full effect of Munsch's words in his story. I make myself breathe deeply again, then I try to honor A's approximation, "I love how you listened during the mini-lesson and how you used Robert Munsch's thinking to help you write your own story." A is still beaming, and again has to read me several lines lifted pretty much directly from Munsch.

Then I provide feedback to push A forward. I gently remind him about the prompt we are writing to. He tells me that he is going to use Robert Munsch's markers to draw bunny ears on his own head and talk about what a day would be like with bunny ears. "Ohh, I get it," I say. "That's a great idea." We talk a little about balance, and about how the beginning probably can't be quite as long as Alex has made it, and about how the people who grade prompted writing need to know pretty quickly that you are writing to their prompt, and then A., still smiling goes back to work some more on the piece. He is still incredibly pleased with his efforts, and I'm not totally sure he has heard anything I have said. I'm thinking he will draw the bunny ears on himself pretty soon, but either the piece will be four pages and be totally beginning heavy, or he will have a six or seven page story, that's way too long for a prompted writing.

I make myself take a a few more deep breaths. And try not to think about how much more teaching will need to go on before A. is proficient at using this technique vs. how many days we have left before he needs to be proficient. A is becoming a proficient writer. Whether it takes three more days or three more weeks or three more months, I need to keep doing the same things Don Graves taught me to do a hundred years ago. Listen to the writer. Celebrate the message. Honor the approximations. Think about the one thing that will help the writer move forward. Teach that one thing. And then send the writer back to learn from his/her writing.

Teaching should not be about trying to cram children into little boxes. Teaching should be about celebrating who children are as learners, and honoring who they are becoming. However long it takes.

In Memoriam- Don Graves

Everything I need to know about teaching and writing (and a lot about life) I learned from Don Graves

From 1991-1995, I attended the University of New Hampshire, where I had the enormous privilege of learning from Don Graves, Jane Hansen, and Tom Newkirk. Don is, without a doubt, the most significant teaching and writing mentor I have ever had. I have often joked that I was going to get a little plastic bracelet that said WWDGD?

About ten days ago, I got an email that Don had passed away. Over the past week or so, I have attempted to capture a little of who Don was to me, and some of the significant lessons I learned from him. I don't think this piece is done, and maybe I will rework it, but I'm afraid that if I don't post it now, I never will. So here are a few of the lessons I learned from Don…

• Be real.
I met Don Graves when I interviewed for the doctoral program at UNH. At that time, folks in UNH- Don Graves, Don Murray, Jane Hansen, and Tom Newkirk were doing some of the most important literacy work in the United States and I felt a little like Dorothy on her way to meet the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, as I slogged across campus dodging puddles in my high heels on that cold rainy late March day. First I met with Jane, then she took me down the hall. When Jane and I rounded the corner into Don’s office, I expected grandeur- maybe a heavy mahogany desk and oriental rug, certainly a secretary and a dark suit. Instead, we rounded a corner and were greeted by Don, who was sitting at a scratched wooden teacher desk, not unlike a million I have sat at during my career. He wore a plaid flannel shirt, levis, and tennis shoes, and was probably one of the most down to earth people I have ever met. When I got back to Denver, and people asked what Don was like, I replied, “He wore tennis shoes.”


• Stay close to your center.
Don was a famous man who did incredibly important work. He wrote more than twenty books. He traveled the world speaking about writing. He filled hotel ballrooms and mesmerized huge audiences at writing conferences for more than 25 years. Despite his popularity and fame, there was never any doubt about where Don was happiest and where he really wanted to be. And that was with Betty, always with Betty, his wife of more than fifty years. She was his best friend, his first reader, his travel companion, his anchor, the center of his universe. How I admired that relationship.


• Be true to your friends.
The Dons- Don Murray and Donald Graves were legends. But they were also best friends. They met at the Bagelry. They talked on the phone every single day. They responded each other’s writing. They walked through each other's dark times.


• Nulla dies sine linea.
Don began every day in his study. Books. Articles. One pagers. Keynotes. Sermons. Poems. Never a day without a line. This week, I’ve thought a lot about how far I have gotten from that in my own life.


• Be clear about your purpose.
Don was a practitioner, a pragmatist, a realist. When presented with an instructional innovation or practice, his first question was always,
“What’s it for?”That question, more than any other, has guided my practice for the past fifteen years.



• Teaching is about relationships.
If I had to describe Don in one sentence, I think I’d say, “Don understood the importance of relationships,” or maybe I’d say, “Every single person who knew Don believed they were important to him." If you asked me, I’d say I was one of Don’s favorite students. But I think JoAnn Portalupi would say the same thing. As would Cyrene Wells. Or Donna Qualley. Or any of the twenty other students who went through the doctoral program with me.

Don showed that he cared in so, so, so many ways. When my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer the summer before I was scheduled to start my dissertation, and I flew home to be with my family, Don called every two or three days, just to check on me. I pretty much decided that I was going to stay home and not finish the doctoral program and then Don called to ask if he could be on my doctoral committee. He came out of retirement, and drove from Jackson two or three times that year to support my work.

It wasn't, however, just the people in his UNH world that he knew and cared for. At conferences, people regularly approached Don. "I don't know if you remember me…" they would start. He always did. He always knew their names. He knew where they lived. How many children they had. What they taught. What they had talked about the last time they had been together.

People, more than anything else, mattered to Don.


• Community matters.
When I came to UNH, I expected that the program would be competitive, because every academic program I had ever been in, from the time I was very young, worked that way. Compete, compete, compete, compete, compete. Be better, be faster, be smarter than the guy next to you. I was surprised, then, to discover that the doctoral program at UNH was very different. For Don, community mattered more than anything. He held all of his classes in his study at his house, as opposed to a sterile room on campus. Because community mattered. He devoted large parts of his early classes to learning names and sharing stories. Because community mattered. We spent most of each class in pairs and small groups. Because community mattered. We knew and valued and responded to our classmates' writing and research. Because community mattered. Competition simply wasn’t part of the game. Because community mattered.



• Write with your students.
Don never asked students to do what he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself. If we wrote a one pager, Don wrote a one pager. Many weeks, he started class by reading aloud his work. More than a decade later, Don and Penny Kittle wrote a book, INSIDE WRITING, about this topic. I suspect it was an easy book for Don to write because he drew on years and years and years of experience of writing with his students.



• Focus on strengths.
Don asked his graduate students to write one-page responses to reading (the dreaded UNH “one pager”) every single week. Like many students of my generation, I had endured many traumatic “red pen” writing experiences and am, at best, a reluctant writer. At first, Don (and Jane Hansen and Tom Newkirk’s) one pagers were tortuous experiences for me. Don read and responded to every one pager. His responses always addressed the content and thinking of the paper. He also usually included a line or two of comment about the craft. “You had such a powerful lead, Carol. I wonder how you might have circled around to that lead again in your conclusion” OR “I have never met anyone who can capture a child like you can. Be sure you include those vignettes in everything you write.” Knowing that I had strengths and tools I could use gave me the courage to step out and try other things.

Now fifteen years later, I hear Don’s voice every single time I sit down with a writer. “Respond to the message first, Carol. Find the strengths in the writing. Point out what’s good and ask the writer if they can do it again.” Aside from writing with and in front of kids, this is the most important tool I have for teaching kids (and adults) to write well.



• Students can accept big challenges as long as you place big safety nets below them.
In its earliest days and maybe even more so now, people have often said that writing workshop lacked rigor. That was not at all the way that Don intended it to be. His classes were tough, tough, tough. I remember, in particular, a class on research in writing. We had to select a topic, design a research study, carry it out, and then present the findings. My finished document was 75 pages. In January, when the semester began, the task appeared insurmountable. But Don broke it down. Spent two weeks helping us construct good questions. Had us repeat our questions over and over and over again. Spent another couple of weeks on how to gather research. Asked us to write one pagers about our findings almost every single week. The last week of class, we all marveled at how we had climbed Mount Everest. Don was not surprised. “Students can take on any challenge,” he said, “as long as you place big safety nets below them.”


• The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.
People came to UNH to learn from Don Graves. Don knew a lot and could have easily filled our three hours graduate classes each week. But Don believed that people learn by talking to each other. And he lived that belief in his teaching. Don was prepared for classes, and he always did a little talking, but mostly he expected students to talk to and learn from each other. His classes were rich with conversation.



• Never stop learning.
o During my initial interview for the UNH program, I made a comment about Don having "completed" his work on the writing process. Don graciously informed me that that was not the case at all, that actually he had just begun. "The day I stop learning," he said, "will be the day I stop teaching." Don was a learner. Whether it be studying children's writing, or crafting poetry, or birding, or preparing to visit a new place with Betty, Don was a learner. He was always a learner.

Travel well, dear friend. Travel well!