Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices by Ralph Fletcher

We hear anecdotes and read news articles sounding the alarm for boys in our schools. Are they being left behind? Why do their scores drop in middle school, especially their writing scores, when compared to girls. A recent book by Ralph Fletcher tries to address these questions and offer some tools and tips for helping boys as writers.

Fletcher is a respected staff developer and children's book author. His books on teaching writing and using the writing workshop, such as Live Writing: Breathing Life Into Your Words and What a Writer Needs, are widely read and valued by teachers of writing. In Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices, he tries to show teachers what the classroom and writing workshop are like from the perspective of boys. And it's not good. Boy writers often feel rejected by teachers when the topics they choose or like most, such as war or bathroom humor, are disapproved of or received with no enthusiasm. Some teachers emphasize handwriting which hampers some boys (and girls) and makes writing a chore at which they are sure to fail. Regardless of the exact whys, many teachers find themselves struggling to reach boys and help them develop as writers, especially as they move into the middle school grades.

The chapters discuss various topics like "The Gender Filter," "Rules of (Dis)Engagement," "Drawn to the Page," and "Boy-Friendly Territory." Each chapter ends with a section called "What can I do in my classroom?" with practical tips and options to try with male students. At the Stenhouse Publishers' website, you can see the table of contents and read the first chapter, "The Trouble with Boys," in PDF format.

In that chapter, Fletcher discusses what he's seen as a writing workshop consultant and what he has heard from some writing teachers. He also outlines what he learned from Tom Newkirk's book Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, published in 2002. What Fletcher got from Newkirk is that "we don't really understand the boys in our classrooms. We misunderstand their crude humor. Especially after the tragic shootings at Columbine High School, we fear their apparent thirst for violence, which is reflected in what they choose to read and write. Instead of trying to understand these boys we treat them as a problem to be managed." No wonder some boys are sullenly disengaged from the classroom.

Fletcher hopes that his book will help break down the barriers between boys, their writing voices and their teachers. Hopefully, with his guidance, we can inspire boys and "widen the circle" of writing workshop to make them feel welcome and ready to take a chance and participate at all ages.

SOURCE: "Stenhouse Publishers: Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices" 2008
photo courtesy of GypsyRock, used under this Creative Commons license

Writing Matters for Middle School

There's been recent concern about middle schoolers and writing, especially boys, and what schools can do under some of the real and difficult conditions they face. One nonprofit has created a program it thinks will help middle schoolers, especially boys, with writing and teachers with the teaching of writing. Writing Matters promises an engaging interactive curriculum that uses humor and models to help middle schoolers with their writing and professional development for teachers to help schools keep up a consistent program of best practices even under difficult conditions.

At the Writing Matters website, you can take a guided tour through the features. The program is based on three specific challenges in education: how to engage middle schoolers at a time when performance tends to drop; how to engage boys in writing, especially as boys continue to be less likely to meet state writing standards than girls; and how to prepare teachers to effectively teach writing especially as schools experience rapid teacher turnover. An important part of using Writing Matters is the professional development offered. Teachers are offered a one-day workshop that addresses the writing process and the most effective use of Writing Matters in the classroom. Literacy specialists and coaches take a multi-day workshop.

Writing Matters basically has four components:

• Eight writing genre study units that are research-based and address specific genres of writing, like editorials, test prep, and responding to literature. The units are "developed by nationally-recognized author-educators," like Georgia Heard for poetry and Heather Latimer for short fiction and memoir. Each genre contains multiple mini-lessons on craft and mechanics specific to the genre and the writing process in general.

• Animated Story-Based Lessons are a second component. These are meant to make the abstractions of the writing process more concrete through modeling and humor. Two students, DD and JT, model the thinking process and ways to approach writing projects, specific challenges and concepts.

• The Interactive Online Writing Room is a place where student writers at any part of their process can get peer and teacher feedback. Each student can develop a portfolio that can be accessed from any computer with Internet access. It's a collaborative environment also and includes tools for teachers to track student progress.

• The Class Publishing Tool is a class e-zine where student writing can be published. Teachers design the e-zine and decide whether to keep it private or allow other classes to also access the e-zine.

There's a guided tour at the Writing Matters website but it has no controls, so you can't pause, rewind or fast forward. The Program Overview page is pretty informative and has links to demo lessons and clips of animated lessons.

I'd love to hear from teachers using Writing Matters or who have experience with it.

SOURCE: "Program Overview" 2007
SOURCE: "Guided Tour" 2007
photo: screencapture from the Writing Matter's Guided Tour

Using VoiceThreads with Bill Ferriter

Laila Weir writes in Edutopia on sixth-grade language arts and social studies teacher Bill Ferriter and his use of VoiceThreads with his students at Salem Middle School in North Carolina. Ferriter had a hunch it would work since his students already spent time online outside the classroom. With VoiceThreads, he has been able to extend learning and interaction beyond the classroom walls and regular school hours.

VoiceThreads are "interactive media albums" that contain images, documents or videos that viewers can comment on in one of three ways: by typing a comment, recording an audio or video response, or drawing directly on the image, document or video. VoiceThread is easy to learn and use, a boon for teachers new to Web 2.0 tools and for students who may have varying levels of experience with technology. (A secure site for teachers and students, Ed.VoiceThread, has a fee-based service but one that "should pass even stringent school Web filters.")

Ferriter started small, posting VoiceThreads on a number of topics connected to classroom work and letting students respond voluntarily. He got so many responses, he knew he was onto something. Students are more likely to participate in a digital discussion where shyness and fears of embarrassment, very strong in middle school, are eliminated by nature. Students can also think ahead of time about their responses, something that isn't usually possible in an in-class discussion.

Students can participate in multiple conversations, eliminating another in-class discussion problem according to Ferriter: "In a classroom conversation, there's generally one strand of conversation going at any one time, and if you're bored by that particular strand, you're completely disengaged." One VoiceThread on Darfur elicited thoughtful responses and a lot of participation--Ferriter got over 60 comments from 36 of his 53 students.

The VoiceThread site has great tutorials to get you and students started. VoiceThreads can be private or published and can be embedded in a class or teacher website. Because you can use a telephone to leave an audio response, the need for microphones or webcams are eliminated for students or schools that don't have them. And this also makes the discussion accessible to students of varying levels of ability and technological experience. Ferriter has a wiki that has examples of VoiceThreads and lots of great tips for getting started.

SOURCE: "VoiceThreads: Extending the Classroom with Interactive Multimedia Albums" 04/16/08
photo: screencapture of a VoiceThread tutorial

Maile Peachey: The Boalsburg Grant Project

In another great Education World profile, Cara Bafile introduces us to Maile Peachey and Corl Street Elementary School's Boalsburg Grant Project. The fifth grade students study history in a way that belies the usual "nothing exciting every happens where I live" mantra you can often hear from middle schoolers. Though the project has not been updated in a few years, it is still a great model for similar projects and the webpages produced are still available on the Web.

decided to center their project around As Peachey and fellow teacher Loretta Jeffreys (now retired) talked about creating a project, they knew they wanted to avoid just looking at Penn State and State College, Pennsylvania, as a college town. With lots of historical sites all around the State College area, Peachey and JeffreysBoalsburg, PA, the birthplace of Memorial Day.

A Pennsylvania Digital Grassroots grant supplied the computers and digital video cameras needed and the project was off and running. To get students involved in "documenting the past, present, and future of historic Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, on the Internet," Peachey explained, they had to learn "such skills in technology as designing Web pages, creating and editing movies using digital cameras and iMovie software on Mac computers, using scanners, exporting photos in jpeg format to the Internet, and linking other related Web sites."

The fifth graders at Corl Street have no American History or language arts textbooks. Articles, simulations, discussions, videos, guest speakers, and projects are used instead. Students also visit local historical sites. Two fifth grade classes discuss the project as a whole then break into smaller groups to work on specific topics and projects as part of the overall Boalsburg Grant Project. Multiple web pages were produced each year. Those pages and updates are available at this website.

Peachey told Bafile that she especially liked that the bulk of the work on over 100 webpages was done by the fifth graders themselves: "They took ownership of the project and felt great pride about what they accomplished. Each student came away feeling that important people and events really are located near them, not just in places typically discussed in history textbooks." Her advice to other teachers is to not shy away from a big idea or big project. Projects like the Boalsburg Grant Project excite all students regardless of learning style or even ability level. Plus, "it creates fun, happy memories and learning that lasts!" This project is a great model for integrating middle school social studies, local history, language arts, and many Web 2.0 tools.

SOURCE: "Teacher Feature Starring: Maile Peachey" 5/16/05
photo courtesy of Jeff Kubina, used under this Creative Commons license

Poetry and Poets Online

I agree with Ian Ruderman, in his post at Media Infusion, that one of the joys of teaching English at any level is teaching students to read, interpret and experience literature, whether it is a novel chapter, play or memoir. Poetry, though, can always be a challenge, especially when loud sighs, looks of despair or folded arms follow your cheery distribution or out loud reading of a poem you personally love. Ruderman's post offers some advice for teaching poetry at the secondary level and highlights some great online resources for teaching, appreciating, and reading poetry.

Ruderman first points out some excellent print sources he's found helpful. The main piece of technology he uses in his classes is a projector to show a poem to a whole class and center discussion. But audio and video also play a great role in his teaching and help bring what can seem complicated and dead on paper to life for middle schoolers and others:

• Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers features video clips of poets reading their work at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Poets featured include Amiri Baraka, Sharon Olds, W. S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz and Lucille Clifton. In addition to readings (marked with an R), there are brief interviews with some of the poets. The site also has a teachers guide and a few lesson plans.

• The Favorite Poem Project features videos of people, some famous, most not, reading and discussing poems they especially like or that have had a significant impact upon them. The project is part of a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour and the videos are also included in the Library of Congress recorded poetry and literature archive. Fifty videos show people ranging from a college professor to a reverend to poet Stanley Kunitz reading and talking about poems. A link for teachers has links to lesson plans for middle school and information on the annual Summer Poetry Institutes for Educators.

• The Poetry Foundation has audio files of poems being read by poets and others. You can search for poems by category or theme or by poet name. Each day, an audio reading of a poem is featured (Tuesday's featured audio was C. Dale Young, who went to the same MFA program as I did, reading and discussing the origins of his poem "Corpus Medicum"). An audio and podcasts link takes you right to a page of individual poems that can be listened to at the site (but not downloaded to save for later). Because of the Foundation's link to Poetry magazine, you can also check out current issues for more poems, articles and discussions.
  

• The PBS Online NewsHour site also has a page dedicated to the NewsHour poetry series. You can also find stories on poets and poetry, plus interviews with contemporary poets like Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo, Mary Jo Salter and Ghassan Zaqtan.

• Teachers' Domain is working on a poetry page that should be up and running by the end of April. The site will feature videos of poems being read, lesson plans and other tools for teachers.

Ruderman ends with links to poems online that he has found useful for his classes, great for items not found in an anthology or for home study without a hundreds-pages-long poetry anthology.

SOURCE: "Taking the Pain Out of Poetry" April 2008
photo courtesy of Glutnix, used under this Creative Commons license

Benjamin Wilkoff: Blogging Middle School Language Arts

"A Chat with Benjamin Wilkoff," a profile posted by Alexei Rodriguez, highlights one middle school language arts teacher's views on, and use of, technology. Though the profile is written to highlight Ning's social networking service, the bulk of the profile outlines Wilkoff's tools, teaching and philosophy. He offers a lot of great advice for teachers.

Wilkoff currently teaches seventh and eighth grade language arts at Cresthill Middle School in Colorado. He calls himself "hopeless addicted to music, writing, and new technology." His webpage features many of his online tools. He even accesses his blog in class to link to articles, posts and other items saved there. In his Learning is Change blog and podcasts, he reflects on teaching, introduces ways to use technology in class and discusses other tools he likes or thinks work well for middle school language arts. He also maintains a technology integration wiki to guide fellow teachers and share ideas.

One of his favorite tools for language arts is blogging. Blogs involve his students in "authentic -- that is, with a real purpose and a real audience" writing. Every student has a blog that he or she must post to at least once a week. It changes their experience of writing to have their peers, and potentially others in the community and world, as their audience. Wilkoff also uses a lot of online sources for reading in class, not just "paper novels." He particularly likes Internet sources to enhance literary studies and critical thinking:

I like the idea that the internet can enhance our understanding of literature because we can use our collective intellect to analyze the theme, language, or author intent. I also find that my students are much more capable of seeing the relationship between reading and writing when they are creating content for the web. By responding to others' posts in comments or creating a wiki page they are growing their our body of knowledge organically rather than simply observing a unchanging cannon [sic] of words.

Some of his students have started their own blogs, but mostly, students become "better consumers of Internet content," better able to find what they are looking for and interpret what they find -- badly-needed skills in the 21st century.

You can see the entire text of Wilkoff's profile here. You can also find links to new tools he looks forward to using with his middle schoolers, links to student posts of which he is especially proud, and more about his blogs and wikis.

SOURCE: "A Chat with Benjamin Wilkoff, School Teacher" 09/10/06
photo courtesy of Simon Shek, used under this Creative Commons license