Decoding the Planning of Writing for English Language Learners Preparing to Take the Regents

1. Decoding the Planning of Writing for English Language Learners Preparing to Take the Regents Ruth Chasek International High School @ LaGuardia

2. Context • I work at International High School @ LaGuardia, a school for recent immigrants. All of our students are learning English, and they come to us with varying backgrounds in formal education -- some are very well-educated in their home countries, some come with scant formal education. • I worked on the “Decoding the Disciplines” project in the context of a Regent’s Preparation weekly class I have been teaching this year, to prepare students to pass the ELA Regents Test. All of the students have taken and failed the test at least once; some multiple times.

3. Focus A focus of the Regent’s Prep Class has been to teach students to plan their writing before starting to write, with an emphasis on teaching them the structure of an essay. However, after going through the Decoding the Disciplines process, I was left with this question…..

4. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, the reluctance to plan writing, or difficulties with reading comprehension?

5. Cause and Effect? Close reading Planning Your Writing You need to understand content to organize it.

6. Let’s start with Alexander’s writing... This is from the January 2019 ELA Part 3 Literary Essay

7. Background • Alexander’s native language is Spanish. • He has been in the United States for almost 3 years. • He has finished all high school graduation requirements except the ELA Regents. • Alexander has struggled with writing throughout high school. • He is a talented artist.

8. Now... Let’s move through the Decoding the Disciplines process, as I experienced it this semester, under the leadership of Tricia Clarke of CUNY.

9. Using the Decoding the Disciplines Model…. Step 1: Identifying the bottleneck…. The Planning of Writing

10. Without sufficient planning…. Student writing is disjointed and lacks clarity, flow, and logic.

11. Step 2: How do the experts handle this? • We don’t always or almost never outline; • We annotate readings and then... • Look for patterns in the readings; • Sometimes color code the patterns into categories; • Derive distinct sections from these categories…. • In an organic process that arises from close reading.

12. Step 3: How do we model this? Question: Do we totally abandon outlining? Or have the experts, as lifelong readers, internalized text structure, while our students may not have? Answer: We don’t know, but perhaps we should try both approaches with students -- focusing on outlining and close reading with annotation.

13. Model with…. • Lots of visuals • Colors • Concrete analogies, that students have some experience with

14. When you read... Decide what you will REMEMBERand what you willforget. It is impossible to remember everything. Annotate -- write down any thoughts you have while you read

15. Use analogies…. Your brain is like a big net... Catch only what you need.

16. Connect the dots…. love? This is also called inference.

17. Writing an essay is like building a house…. • What are the parts of a house? • What are the steps to building a house?

18. How is building a house similar to writing an essay? Same Work this out with a partner on a piece of paper.

19. What is a scaffold? What is the purpose? Is a scaffold permanent or temporary? Why?

20. What are the scaffolds we use in writing? Discuss this with a partner. Write down your ideas. for

21. Use your writing tools

22. David Pace’s method of helping students pull out important information Model your own thinking by enlarging the words you think are most important, and showing the students. (I have renamed this Pop Up Reading.)

23. Pop Up Reading -- What pops up for you? Jan ̇Zabiński and his wife Antonina managed the Warsaw Zoo, which was home to some 1,500 animals.... For years, Polish scientists dreamt of a big zoo in the capital to rival any in Europe, especially those in Germany, whose majestic zoos were famous worldwide. Polish children clamored for a zoo, too. Europe enjoyed a heritage of fairy tales alive with talking animals—some almost real, others deliciously bogus—to spark a child’s fantasies and gallop grown-ups to the cherished haunts of childhood. It pleased Antonina that her zoo offered an orient of fabled creatures, where book pages sprang alive and people could parley1 with ferocious animals. Few would ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pinecones, and she believed that meeting them at the zoo widened a visitor’s view of nature, personalized it, gave it habits and names. Here lived the wild, that fierce beautiful monster, caged and befriended

24. Students practice this with teacher support Students practice this with teacher feedback in small groups.

25. Alexander’s Pop-Ups

26. Basic outline for Part 3 (Literary Essay) of Regents

27. Fill in your outline as you read Central idea: -- love (quote on line ____) Literary element: -- setting (quote on line ____)

28. Step 4: Practice Skills

29. Practice Pop-Up Reading Small groups of students each get an enlarged paragraph from the text. They find and underline the phrases that “pop up” for them as being clear, understandable, and important. They introduce and explain their choices to the class.

30. Alexander’s “yellow paper” outline Add picture

31. Students write group paragraphs using outlines Add picture

32. Step 5: Motivate students • Link to what they know • Connect to their culture • Start with speaking, then move into writing

33. In Alexander’s case... We discussed literary elements such as setting and symbolism that he uses in his artwork.

34. Step 6: Assess progress Grading Assessment -- the big class paper or project Learning Assessment -- ongoing smaller activities that show understanding, often multisensory

35. Learning Assessment -- Pop-Up Reading Add picture

36. Learning Assessment-- “yellow paper” outlines Add picture

37. Learning Assessment -- paragraph posters Add picture

38. Alexander’s next try at the Part 3 essay Alexander has practiced Pop-Up Reading with me, and gone through the outlining process with teacher support. This is the latest version of his essay:

39. Alexander’s finished Part 3 Literary Essay Add picture

40. Final thoughts on CCRP Project • It is good for high school teachers to collaborate with college teachers to share information and examine practices together -- otherwise we never speak to one another. • Thank you to our leader, Tricia Clarke, and my team mates, Heather Lester, Julie Edmonds, and Nilo Bermeo.

41. Future ideas... • In the future, it would help if more college teachers participated. • It might be helpful to include college administrators to be able to discuss the obstacles of college testing for some capable high school students. Testing is only one narrow area of college readiness -- it does not assess for motivation, determination, and ambition.

42. Thank you!