Revision

Revision sucks.I’ve been told I’m odd because I find revision enjoyable.  Getting words on paper/screen is hard for me, but once something is written, I’ll tear into it.  I can tweak endlessly, rewrite entire paragraphs, reorganize at the last minute.  My co-authors valiantly put up with me and I’m quite grateful for their patience.

But convincing my students that revision is not just essential, but can be fun, is really tough.  And given the groan that rumbles across a room of teachers when you mention supporting kids doing revision, my students and I aren’t alone.  Two things have helped.  First, the concept of fusion.  Second, The Most Magnificent Thing (h/t to Michelle!).

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The Writing Cycle in Picturebooks

The Writing Cycle (with credit to Randy and Katherine Bomer).

Working with writers means digging into the writing cycle. Not the 5-step writing process that’s codified in books or in nifty posters you can put on your walls. I’m talking about the writing cycle that involves collecting ideas over the long haul, tuning into your own thoughts, pulling out ideas and refining them, pounding through a draft, revising more than you ever thought possible, nit-picking every comma (and hiring an editor), and then finally sending it out in the world. That writing cycle. The one real writers live.

Making sense of this writing cycle can be tough, especially when you’ve been sold a bill of goods about those 5-steps. Students and teachers, when trying to move toward a more authentic writing process often struggle to forget those 5-steps because they lack a model for a real cycle. So I’ve been working to put together a set of books — picturebooks , specifically— that offers a model for this more real writing cycle. The stories I’ve collected offer ways into the various moments in the cycle, show characters experiencing the same kinds of thinking and struggles that writers — whether students or teachers — face.

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George Washington’s cherry tree never goes out of style

The stories we tell — or fail to tell — our children say a lot about who we think we are

A plate from Cobb’s New Spelling Book (1842).

Curriculum is a story we write, out of all the possible stories, to teach our children of our world and our place in it. That’s why curriculum is such a contested thing and the debates around the Common Core or evolution or who Bill Martin is (the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, not the philosopher) are so heated: people care a lot about the type of story we teach our children about ourselves as a world, a nation, a people. And people should care! These discussions are often hard, heated, and yet have the potential to be moments for growth and change. We — as a nation, as individuals, as families, as cities — should think about and discuss the stories we tell and consider the stories we aren’t telling, especially because schools can’t ‘cover’ everything in the limited time they have (especially when so much time is spent on testing).

What does all this have to do with George Washington chopping down a cherry tree? Because how (and if) we tell Washington’s story is an indication of what we — which is a naturally limited and contested ‘we’ at any given historical moment — think about ourselves in that historical moment. I’m currently editing a manuscript about my research on the early dissemination of Washington’s story, so I thought I’d share some of my explorations here.

The manuscript began as project for class called The History of American Reading Instruction. For the final class project, I ended up looking for every instance of the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree that I could find. And between the UT Library’s extensive collection and Google Books, I found a lot. I also found, as I read these stories, that they reflected exactly those cultural and societal shifts that Nila Banton Smith had outlined in the text on the history of reading instruction, appropriately titled, American Reading Instruction. The stories moved from Nationalistic/Moralistic, toward Intelligent Citizenship, through Cultural Asset to Scientific Investigation (see below for a more detailed chart).

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Wordless texts

Looking for something fun to do to fill the long hours of winter break? I recommend a family viewing of LEGO City. Seriously.

My husband and I got talked into watching an episode of LEGO City after dinner the other night. While I monitor my sons’ TV watching, I also know they refuse to watch anything in the least bit frightening/violent. We didn’t make it through the storm scene of Ratatouille, or Toy Story, to give you some idea of our threshold. Before LEGO started, both sons were giving an extensive preface about the story. And when it started, they kept talking. You see, there are no words in LEGO City. There’s some tonally appropriate mumbling, but no actual words. It was brilliant. Their narration, talking over one another, punctuated by the baby’s exclamations when a helicopter showed up.

What’s the big deal, you might be asking? Simply, that wordless texts invite children into deep engagement with that text. My sons participated actively in the watching of this TV show, demonstrated an understanding of plot structures, plot twists, character development, and all kinds of other literary devices that show up in state standards. They were also inferencing, another $10 reading teacher word, the whole time. And this happened through TV, of all things.

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On being researched

Survey noteI research people. Mostly in classrooms and schools, but I’ve also done my fair share of interviews in coffee shops. This research has focused on writing and the teaching of writing and professional development and technology and departments and communities. All of it has required the cooperation of the individuals involved. They agreed to be observed, videotaped, audio recorded, photographed, interviewed, and — eventually — written about for the public. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to do the research that I do. And without people willing to say “yes” to participating, science wouldn’t happen.

At one point it finally occurred to me and a colleague to ask these teachers we were working with, “What’s it like to be researched?” (This ah-ha happened far later in my research process than I’d like to admit, btw.) Though when my colleague and I started looking for other people who had written about this question, (because that’s what doctoral students do, see who has already written about the stuff we’re interested in) we were surprised that there wasn’t a whole lot out there. So we thought, “Hey, we can write about it!” Which also meant, of course, asking our teachers what they experienced. So we wrote, and the article was published by the awesome journal.

Some answers
I say “some answers” because solid research rarely purports to have “all the answers.” For our research, teachers’ broad answer to the question “What’s it like to be researched?” was “Good, if I trust you.”

Some specifics: when participating in research, teachers

    • valued trust, respect, and a philosophical alignment with the researcher,
    • were more reflective during research, both in the midst of teaching and afterwards, and
    • felt they were contributing to important scholarly conversations about teaching and learning.

Important to note is when teachers felt like their teaching philosophy didn’t align with a researcher, they resisted the research. What does that mean? A hypothetical: Say a researcher, Jane, comes into Annabeth’s (one teacher from the article) classroom. Jane didn’t think Annabeth’s students could really do the work. Those expectations will affect the students, as the Pygmalion Effect has repeatedly shown. Annabeth objected to Jane’s deficit view of her students and resisted Jane’s visits and research. While neither of the teachers in this article sabotaged the research — they’re professionals, after all — the quality of the research could likely have been affected. Building relationships matters, trust matters, respect matters. (Um, duh? But I find myself having to say a lot of ‘duh’ stuff right now, so why not this?)

What’s it all mean?
Findings from research like this (not just about bacon) definitely influence my life and the choices that I make. As a researcher, I’ll continue to work hard to build trust with people — teachers, students, anyone — who agrees to participate in my research. As a parent of school-age children, I’ll support my children’s teachers if they participate in research — as long as they feel confident in the research! And, as a voter, I’ll support the research process as practiced by the scholarly community.