Motivating Reluctant Writers Through Community Building in the Classroom

1. Motivating Reluctant Writers Through Community Building in the Classroom with an emphasis on using non-traditional prompts -Austin Baker

2. When you hear the term prompt, most teacher think of the dry, often ambiguous prompt often found on the SAT, such as this one from the June 2009 administration of the test: Prompt 1 Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below. The discovery that someone we admire has done something wrong is always disappointing and disillusioning. Yet even when people we consider heroes have been tarnished by their faults, they are no less valuable than people who appear perfect. When we learn that an admired person, even one who is seemingly perfect, has behaved in less than admirable ways, we discover a complex truth: great ideas and great deeds come from imperfect people like ourselves. Assignment: Do we benefit from learning about the flaws of people we admire and respect? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

3. I will refer to prompts/prompting throughout this presentation, but what I’m talking about are the more non-traditional prompts, in the spirit of this definition: • verb (used with object) • 5. to move or induce to action: What prompted you to say that? • 6. to occasion or incite; inspire: What prompted his resignation? • 7. to assist (a person speaking) by suggesting something to be said.

4. When I talk about non-traditional prompts, I’m talking about using things to inspire students to write, an often arduous task with high school students. But, before we begin talking about building community and motivating students, we have to look at some of the challenges we face in the high school classroom.Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman say in their book A Community of Writers that: • The psychosocial issues facing junior-high and high-school students sometimes seem to make writing instruction harder at this age level. Adolescents are often fearful of exposing themselves, sharing their thoughts and their feelings, or making themselves vulnerable to the prying eyes of peers or adults. (Zemelman & Daniels 10)

5. Zemelman and Daniels go to so say: • Many of the best ways we know to make writing real, largely by creating a close-knit community of writers, seem prohibited. In a sense, the kids are right to be skittish; nothing makes us feel quite so vulnerable as when we release a piece of our writing, a frozen chunk of our self, to the world. • Ironically, it is much easier for a bunch of six-or seven-year-olds, who have little experience in handling the uncertainties of a broader public audience, to risk this than kids fire or ten years older. The adolescents may feel much more threatened by writing, even though they are actually much shrewder about discourse, more experienced with a wide variety of audiences, and much better equipped to protect themselves than the younger kids. (10)

6. More factors working against creating community in the high school classroom: • Junior-high and high-school subjects are usually departmentalized, which among other things means that teachers see each of their students for forty to sixty minutes per day instead of the five hours that elementary teachers usually enjoy. This makes it much harder for the teacher to know each student well. • Each teacher’s total student load [may rise] to 125-150, instead of the 25 or 30 pupils usually found in a self-contained elementary classroom…At best, the teacher has to create not one but five or six communities of writers, • semester-long course are normal in many high schools, and classes may change as often as every six or eight weeks. • curriculum and standards to be met (e.g. certain subjects/content that must be taught • standardized tests (HSAP, SAT, ACT, PLAN, ASSET, etc.) • afterschool activities or work • family life (or lack their of)

7. More problems with community building in the classroom that we as educators need to keep in mind. • writing may reveal your [the students’] weaknesses in a way that a spoken answer or a multiple choice test doesn’t show. If your essay is read aloud in class and heard by your enemies, you may be in for unmerciful razzing or worse, so it often seems wise to play it safe… • most older students feel personally vulnerable about their writing… • and high school students sense deep-seated contradictions in their expectations surrounding their writing… • Highly structured formulae for essays and the intensive marking of grammar errors show that he teacher is the one with the most responsibility. These practices implicitly contradict any assertions the teacher might make about students taking more responsibility for their work and imply that students aren’t really able or allowed to make any of the important decisions.

8. For example, last semester, I had 75 students total in my 3 classes. If I spent 10 minutes per student paper, that’s 750 minutes, or 12.5 hours working on students papers. These are just a few obstacles to creating community in the classroom. But, we owe it to our students to overcome these obstacles.

9. Research shows that language development is a social affair. • As Eric Erickson and others have shown, identity formation is the consuming developmental task for adolescents; and writing comes closer to these kids’ urgent personal concerns than any other school subject. After all, in learning to write, students are invited—compelled, really to make sense of the world, to weigh ideas, to explore values, to find their own connections, to invent voices, styles, personae on a page—and then to test everything out by communicating with others, sharing writing and exchanging responses. (3) • The fact is that writing has been taught so badly in our schools and kids have been compelled to waste their writing on so many trivial and demoralizing purposes that their urge to write has often been stunted. (4)

10. Recent research on the ways people learn to read and write has strongly shown that literacy is socially constructed. Both educators and the general public have suffered for too long under the delusion that reading and writing are essentially solitary skills that develop best through isolated, individualist practice…the research has reminded us, among other things, that most linguistic learning is not solitary at all, but profoundly social, arising out of a rich and complex web of immediate, living needs, purposes, meanings, relationships. (47) • Almost any piece of real writing originates in some real social purpose and, after being composed, is sent to some audience in the real social world to accomplish its purpose…In other words, the social context is not just the setting for language growth, but its cause and its means. (48)

11. One of the things you have to do to establish community within your class room is lay down a foundation that will help foster community. Much of this falls into the realm of classroom management, but it warrants being covered again, as we’re looking establishing community from the ground up. One of the things I stress in all my classes is what we are a community, and to have aneffective community, there has to be respect for all members. Here’s an abbreviated version of one of the points of my classroom rules. BE RESPECTFUL OF OTHERS AT ALL TIMES. The classroom is a community of learners in which ALL members of the community are equal and worthy participants. Therefore all classroom procedures and activities are to be conducted with full respect for each member of the class. All arguments, grudges, beef, and complaints that originate outside the classroom should remain outside the classroom. Moreover, all discussions during class are to be respectful. No “disrespecting,” off-color language, racial or ethnic slurs, or sexual or personal harassment is allowed at any time.

12. It seems simple, but often times we have no idea what students bring to the classroom. We don’t know what was said in the hall on the way to class, who cheated on who, who punked out who, etc. On a good day, you never see any of the beef, and with a decent group of students, even if there is beef, you won’t see it. But, in the classroom environment where the teacher is in control, students who wouldn’t openly confront another student still might try to get back at them through other, more subtle methods, such as ripping them through a critique.

13. The next thing to keep in mind when building community is that you have to understand and be ready for what Zemelman and Daniels define maintenance as the “socioemotional or interpersonal activity that maintains people’s ability to work together.” (52) “Obviously, some groups can get bogged down or sidetracked in certain maintenance behavior, like eating or gossiping, to the degree that no task work gets done…but in group dynamics the category of maintenance isn’t viewed as something bad, something to be…eliminated.” (53) On the contrary, maintenance is normal and necessary whenever humans try to work in groups…in classrooms we rarely honor this reality of human life—in fact, we too often try to quash it…the special sort of trust necessary for sharing serious writing is developed in important ways through maintenance activity—personal talk, laughter, learning about on another’s backgrounds and experiences.” (53)

14. You have to set up guidelines; your tolerance for this “maintenance” is of course a personal preference. I tend to allow a good bit of it, but you have to keep be able to keep it in bounds, because of course they will run with it. But, they can’t be afraid of you and they can’t be afraid of each other. They have to feel comfortable, and the strict and rigid classroom of yore is not where this comfort level is found. While students are sharing, however, I am rather firm. No talking is permitted other than the person sharing. When students are giving feedback, they must raise their hand and let me call of them before they can talk.

15. One thing I do is start of the class, and reiterate throughout the class, that to comment on another’s work, you must first find something you like, something that the author has done well. This is something we as teachers and writers do on a mainly subconscious level, e.g. “I like how you structured your lines, now if we take a look at your word choice here, I think you could strengthen…” We learned a long time ago to temper criticism with praise so that it is typically well received. But students often don’t get this, and have to be trained in how to critique. Often they’ll start of by saying something like “I didn’t like this” or “I think this sucks.” You have to address this at the beginning.

16. Something else to keep in mind is a writing group is something that has to be created; it’s almost never something you will start off with from the beginning. And, while you’re doing everything you can to help them become better writers (and readers), you have to keep in mind they’re just kids too. “Brand-new groups don’t usually get much task work done until they work out interpersonal issues. It will take time for small groups to reach the stage at which they an help each other effectively revise their writing, so don’t expect too much too soon or shuffle groups too often. It will also take time before individual students feel safe enough to share deeply felt, highly personal writing with the whole class in oral reading.” (60)

17. Zemelman and Daniels describe the “life cycle” of a writing community as having 4 main phases. (60) 1) Psychological membership -High maintenance, low task 2) Establishing shared influence -High maintenance, high task 3) Pursuing goals -Low maintenance, high task 4) Self-renewal -High maintenance, low task • This is where students learn about each other, their backgrounds, strengths, weakness, quirks, and where the “pecking order” is established. • Often defined by conflict, this is where students learn how to work with one another • The “sweet spot,” this is where students really put the axe to the grindstone and start growing as writers. They also really get down to helping one another with their writing. • The after-school writing club is a good example of this, this is where these students come back together on good terms; energy is high and they’re excited, but they’re probably not getting work done like they did in the past.

18. The experts on conflict: “Good teachers have many other skills and strategies for making conflict the occasion for students’ growth. They promote listening skills…they help students recapitulate discussions and arguments, in order to analyze just what their disagreement is. They hold back from intervening in every conflict and gently urge the small group or individuals to work on a solution or a compromise…they use humor…not to dismiss or make fun of a problem, but to see it in a larger perspective” (67).

19. Some Basic Guidelines for Building Your Community of Writers 1) Everyone writes. A class that focuses on/promotes writing has to center around writing, and the students need to be writing constantly. This is where the non-traditional prompts I discuss a little later really come into play. Regardless of how you get your students writing, they need to be writing. Don’t let them “take a day off.” Also, let them see you writing. Writing along with your students and showing them “it can be done” is one of the best ways to motivate reluctant writers and foster a sense of community (you’re a part of it too!).

20. 2) Everyone shares. Once again, don’t let them chicken out or take a day off. Start off by sharing what you wrote with them. This tends to break the ice. Ask your students to critique your work; they’ll often surprise you with quality advice. Gently but firmly encourage them to share. Once one shares, almost always more will follow. This is the hardest thing to get going, but once you get them doing it, it gets much, much easier as the class progresses. It doesn’t hurt to have a participation grade that deals with this built into your grading scale.

21. 3) Everyone is part of the community. In the beginning, the teacher is most likely the biggest part of the community. That should gradually change as the students become comfortable and grow into a group. Giving students some freedom of choice and getting their input at the beginning of the class, e.g. letting them choice at least some of the course of study, will help build the new community quicker. Allowing students input in the beginning will help to influence how the community turns out in the end. Students that feel they really have a stake in what they’re doing will produce far better results than if they just show up ever day to be led by the nose. “Teachers who…try to dictate all these factors themselves, are squandering the main resource they have in helping adolescents grow: students’ sense of control, ownership, authority over their own learning.” (78)

22. Some Basic Writing Guidelines 1) Self-sponsored writing. “Every secondary English classroom should have regularly scheduled times when students can work on writing projects of their own choice…students must have predictable, continuous opportunities to develop pieces of writing for which they have selected their own topics, determined their own purposes, chose their own audience, and are working on their own timetable toward a finished product” (71).

23. Some Basic Writing Guidelines 2) Formal Assessments “When designed to offer students real choices and true ownership of the work, formal assignments guided by the teacher are another source of growth for young writers…teacher-directed assignments can profile the sort of inquiry-based, environmental-mode writing practice that is associated with strong growth in writing performance” (71).

24. Some Basic Writing Guidelines 3) Writing to Learn “Students also need frequent opportunities to use writing as a tool of thinking: to use short, spontaneous, unedited, exploratory, personal pieces of writing to help them engage and think about ideas” (71). This is where non-traditional prompts really shine.

25. Sample class model 1) Craft lesson 5-10 min. 2) Class address, round table discussion 5-10 min. 3) Writing time 30-40 min 4) Conferences 5-10 min 5) Sharing 10-20 min 6) Lesson 30-40 Adjust according to lesson/content being taught each day.

26. Some examples of various types of prompts I have used in my own classroom. This is just a small sampling.

27. Bottoms Up, Socrates Hangin on the words of a madman, Islands in the abyss, No use for the poet, when the hopeless seek no bliss. From Pitchforks and Lost Needles by Clutch Lyrical Prompts Arcadia Captain America , where are you now? Minutemen, please show me how To wash this blood from my hands, make it go away The evils of my forefathers pale to those today Juggernaut American dream Turns to dust So give us a god That does not rust

28. The Soapmakers Behind the Cliffside Inn, I heard a fiddle and a mandolin,keeping rhythm on an old washboard and stomping on the floor.Saw people of all sorts dancing 'round in twos and fours,caroling about days of old, and what the future holds. In the middle was a big cauldron that they were stirring, stirring,and there were trees around that they kept burning, burning.I asked a toothless man who all these people were, andhe said, "The soapmakers, and we are working, working." The Yeti Across the plain I see a figure, every instant growing bigger.Instinct tells me to run away while faith proposes that I wave. From The Elephant Riders by Clutch

29. The Soapmakers Behind the Cliffside Inn, I heard a fiddle and a mandolin, keeping rhythm on an old washboard and stomping on the floor. Saw people of all sorts dancing 'round in twos and fours, caroling about days of old, and what the future holds. In the middle was a big cauldron that they were stirring, stirring, and there were trees around that they kept burning, burning. I asked a toothless man who all these people were, and he said, "The soapmakers, and we are working, working." . from The Elephant Riders By Clutch Green Buckets Here in my neighborhood there is the strangest thing – green buckets every Friday at every driveway. They're filled with glasses, plastics, and newspapers, too. They say they recycle and bring them back to you. I would like to love you, I sure would treat you right. We could take the trash out every Thursday night. We could be a family, consume many goods. We could be the pillars of the neighborhood.

30. I Have the Body of John Wilkes Booth Wash of the Chesapeake and Appalachian Blue Range, I have discovered the body of John Wilkes Booth. Yes, it's true, I have Mr. Booth. Everybody got to make a living somehow. Do I hear a million? From Clutch By Clutch Basket of Eggs Sure you want go walking, on a night like this? Look there goes another one, I swear one day they will not miss

31. Tabloid Tone Prompts Computer Understands Barking Dogs • Dozens in Texas Town Report Seeing UFO • Ear-Piercing Sirens Used to Drive Teens Away • F-16s in Area Where UFO Reported • Fish Accused of Sexual Harassment • Fluorescent Pig has Glowing Piglets • Glow-in-the Dark Cats Created • Implants Create Insect Cyborgs • “Kinship Detectors” Prevent Incest…In Some Cases • Lab Sheep are 15% Human • Man Catches Shark, Shark Bites Man • Massive Self-Destructive Palm Tree Found on Madagascar • Mississippi Law Would Ban Severing Obese Diners • Mummified Body Found in Phoenix Tub • Nurse Steals 244 Body Parts • Raining Iguanas in Florida • Twins Unwittingly Got Married in Britain • Well-fed Crickets Seek Sex Incessantly, Die Young

32. Famous Last Words prompts • Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose.Said by:Queen Marie Antoinette after she accidentally stepped on the foot of her executioner as she went to the guillotine. • I can’t sleepSaid by:J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan • I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.Said by:Humphrey Bogart • I am about to — or I am going to — die: either expression is correct.Said by:Dominique Bouhours, famous French grammarian • I live!Said by: Roman Emperor, as he was being murdered by his own soldiers. • I die hard but am not afraid to go.Said by: George Washington, US President, d. December 14, 1799 • I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.Said by: Thomas Hobbes, writer, d. 1679

33. I feel ill. Call the doctors.Said by:Mao Zedong (Chairman of China) • Tomorrow, I shall no longer be hereSaid by: Nostradamus • Put out the bloody cigarette!Said by:Saki, to a fellow officer while in a trench during World War One, for fear the smoke would give away their positions. He was then shot by a German sniper who had heard the remark. • Why do you weep. Did you think I was immortal?Said by: Louis XIV, King of France, d. 1715 • Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough.Said by: Karl Marx, revolutionary, d. 1883 • A dying man can do nothing easy.Said by: Benjamin Franklin, statesman, d. April 17, 1790 • I have tried so hard to do the right.Said by: Grover Cleveland, US President, d. 1908 • Et tu, Brute?Said by: Gaius Julius Caesar, Roman Emperor, d. 44 BC

34. Perspective Try writing from either the perspective of the person taking the picture, or who/what is being photographed.

40. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Creating Your Own Ship’s Log A ship’s log records major events that happen on the ship, typically in a day-by-day fashion. Here’s an example of a ship’s log from the TV series Star Trek: Star Date 2364 "Ship's Log, First Officer Riker. Enterprise will be destroyed unless it can be moved out of the path of the star material hurtling towards us. Our only hope is for Lieutenant Commander Data, in the time we have left, to regain his senses and reconnect engine power to the bridge." "Ship's Log, First Officer Riker reporting. We've been informed of the challenge to Lieutenant Yar and are maintaining combat readiness around the clock. We are probing Lutan’s compound deeply with our sensors now still unnoticed." "Ship's Log, Commander William Riker reporting. Continuing our appraisal of Ligion technology the Captain has made it clear he wants Lieutenant Yar beamed immediately to safety if her life should become endangered. I fervently hope the rules of that contest make it possible." "Ship's Log, supplemental, this is Lieutenant Commander Data. I have put the ship on automated departure and ordered the complete evacuation of the Enterprise. Everyone remaining is leaving on foot or beaming off." "Ship's Log, supplemental. Lieutenant La Forge in command of the stardrive section. After separation from the saucer, we have returned to Minos to rescue the away team. Unfortunately I've only one option left and it's a long shot."

41. It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din.“ He holds him with his skinny hand, "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

42. "God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus! -- Why look'st thou so?" -- With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross. The sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. And the good south wind still blew behind But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariners' hollo!

43. Resources Daniels, Harvey, and Zemelman, Steven. A Community of Writers. Portsmouth, NH. Heinemann, 1988. Clutch. Clutch. Clutch. Pitchforks and Lost Needles. Clutch. The Elephant Riders.