Google NGrams

Hi teachers-

I'm really, really excited about this new tool from Google.  Google NGrams allows you to search trends of words appearing in a database of 5.2 billion words from all of the millions of books Google has in its digitized Google Books catalog.  It's a very interesting tool in that it's a window into people's thoughts over the past 500 years.  I can only begin to imagine the new research opportunities available to students.  The discussions that you could generate with this tool are limitless.  Check the tool out here, and see below for a few examples.


            

 

This should be a really fun thing to play with over Christmas.  Let me know how you're using it in your classroom.  And keep those success stories coming in!  I'll post them after break.

Thanks, and have a great break,
Marc

What Kind of Person Are You?

I know many of you like Dan Pink and his works... if you're not familiar with him, I highly recommend reading A Whole New Mind, his book on right-brain thinking and Drive, a fascinating study in what motivates people and what doesn't-- especially useful for teachers.  In the meantime, check out this short end-of-year self-reflection guide:

http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/12/there-are-two-kinds-of-people-in-the-world

Also see relevant Dan Pink info on http://www.first180.org/.

Expository Writing Article

Check out this series of questions and answers regarding expository writing.  If you can't read it well, click here and download the file from the bottom of the screen under "attacnhments." Thanks to Dennis for this one....

Reading Comprehension

Hi teachers-

All of you do a fabulous job with your efforts to understand and employ the strategies associated with reading comprehension. No doubt it's one of the hardest things to teach well, or teach at all. When I started teaching, I soon realized that the literature I had learned in college would quickly take a backseat to what I was really there to do-- teach students how to read complex materials.

This article sums up reading comprehension strategies for expository texts pretty succinctly. Naturally, the topic is more complicated than 5 steps can summarize, but given its nebulous nature, I think this is a good, cogent summary of what's involved.

Enjoy!
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A Five-Part Strategy for Good Comprehension

            “Do you have students whose minds go blank when you ask, ‘What was this article about?’,” ask New Zealand professors Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in this article in The Reading Teacher. “Do you have students who write screeds of notes about an article but cannot boil it down to four or five main points?” Their answer is the “High 5” strategy to help students boost comprehension of expository texts:

            • Activating background knowledge – Good readers ask what they already know about the text and fill in gaps through discussion or Internet searches.

            • Questioning – Good readers generate their own questions about the text at three levels: information that is right there in the text; think and search questions about the author’s intent, and beyond the text questions about what’s not said that needs more thought or research.

            • Analyzing text structure – Good readers look at subheads and key words to see what kind of text they are reading, for example, a list, a web, a matrix, a step-by-step description of events, a cause-and-effect sequence, or a problem-solution sequence.

            • Creating mental images – Good readers create and often sketch an image of the structure of the text; it’s as if they could see the ribs and bones of the content they are reading.

            • Summarizing – Good readers pull together the big ideas, the key skill being to discard unimportant and redundant information and zero in on what’s most important.

“‘High 5!’ Strategies to Enhance Comprehension of Expository Text” by Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in The Reading Teacher, November 2010 (Vol. 64, #3, p. 166-178), no e-link available; the authors are sdymock@waikato.ac.nz and t.nicholson@massey.ac.nz.

Teacher Teamwork

This article from the DuFours says a lot that I agree with regarding teacher teamwork and collaboration.  I wanted to send it forward in advance of the data collecting we'll be doing and will continue to do for our benchmarks, starting with this month's persuasive essay grading. 

If you don't know, the DuFours are two of education's most trenchant writers on the subject of teachers collaborating to review data, examine their practice, and share in the pursuit of ways to improve everyone's teaching.  That's why I was very excited to see the bullet points (highlighted)-- that's exactly what we're doing when we participate in the benchmark grading! 

It's good to know we're on the right track.  I'm excited to see how the first round of grading goes!

2. Richard and Rebecca DuFour on the Elements of Teacher Teamwork

            “One of the more pointless debates going on in many school districts is who will decide how teams will use their collaborative time,” say consultant/authors Richard and Rebecca DuFour in this Solution Tree advertisement in Education Week. “Both sides should be able to agree that if teachers do not use the collaboration time for the purpose intended (that is, if they don’t co-labor on the right work), there will be no gains in student achievement.” What is “the right work”? For the DuFours’ list of 18 critical issues for grade-level and subject teams, see:

http://www.allthingsplc.info/pdf/tools/CriticalIssuesForTeamConsideration.pdf

            The big idea here is that when educators work collaboratively rather than in isolation, students learn more. Key elements of collaboration are:

-    Committing to implementing a guaranteed and viable curriculum;

-    Using interim assessments that provide ongoing evidence of each student’s learning;

-    Collectively analyzing that evidence and using it to inform and improve practice;

-    Putting in place a systematic intervention process that provides struggling students with additional time and support.

It’s also important, say the DuFours, for teacher teams to be as self-directed as possible, so that if the principal leaves, the work will continue. Team leaders and administrators should agree on the work to be done, a timeline, and what the team will present as evidence of completion. As long as things are running smoothly, administrators should meet with teams only once a quarter to review progress, analyze evidence of student learning on interim assessments, and offer specific support. But if there are signs of dysfunction on a team, administrators should attend meetings to get things back on track. The key principle here is reciprocal accountability – the team is accountable for doing its work and administrators are accountable for providing what’s needed to support success.

“Who Decides Who Decides” by Richard DuFour and Rebecca DuFour in Education Week, Nov. 3, 2010 (Vol. 29, #10, p. 14), no e-link available

What To Look For

Lately, I've heard a lot in the news about what bad teahcers do in classrooms, and how detrimental they can be to a student's education.  Unfortunately, there isn't nearly as much discussion as to what good teachers do, and how valuable they are to the education of those same students.  Lots of research agrees on one thing-- a good teacher makes the most difference in whether a student is successful or not-- more than SES, more than attendance, more than behavior, more than parental involvement, more than any other factor. 

I think that a good teacher asks his or her self these questions before each and every lesson:

- What do I expect students to know and be able to do as a result of your lesson?
- How do I “hook” the students in at the beginning?
- How do I make sure students are engaged throughout the lesson?
- How do I know students are understanding the lesson?

For me, being a good teacher amounts to three things:  Clarity, Continuity, and Concurrency.  Let me explain what I mean by these three:

Clarity is about one question:  Is the teacher clear about exactly what his students should do?  If a teacher doesn’t know why he’s doing an activity, you can bet that the kids won’t, either.  If there’s no objective in mind, whatever learning occurs will be accidental, haphazard, unpredictable.  Classrooms without clear expectations for behavior, attitude, and achievement will have kids mired in mediocrity, at best. 

Continuity is about putting it all together– one of the most important things a teacher does is make coherence out of complicated, difficult subject matter.  A teacher showing continuity begins class with an opening deisgned to pique interest not only for that day’s lesson, but as part of a think-back to the day before.  At the end of a class, she does the opposite– make sure students understand all that was done that day, and link it to what’s coming the next day.  And most importantly, she doesn’t move on if her students didn’t get it!  A teacher with engaged students will also be consistent in policies– if you’re wishy-washy from one day to the next about how things go down in your classroom, guessing your mood will be distracting.  Good teachers are also continuous learners– you can’t be finished learning when you’re done your master’s or a workshop or a seminar.

Concurrency is maybe the hardest-to-pin-down of the three because it describes something that’s tricky to articulate: “With-it-ness.”  We all know people who are “out of it” and people who are really “with it.”  That’s not unique to teaching.  But there’s more to concurrency than just being “with it.”  Concurrency is about being in the moment, whether we’re talking about in the classroom moment, with our students, engaged in them as we want them to be engaged with us… it’s also about being in the moment with the world, and being aware of what’s going on out there– the issues and problems students in your community have, the digital tools they constantly use as fluently as we drive our cars, the unique structure of their social lives and how different it is than that of kids just 10 years ago– and certainly how different it is than most of their teachers’ K-12 years.  Being concurrent means being in touch– in touch with the individuals, the human beings in front of us, the community in which they live, and the world in which they’re situated.  Concurrency gives you credibility– everyone, especially kids, knows who’s with it and who’s out of it.

I hope this gives you a sense of what I consider to be good teaching.  Please add your own observations.  Comment, or write a new post yourself!  See me for help with this, if necessary.

-Marc

Flocabulary

Every English teacher has heard about people who use rap and hip-hop to enhance their lessons.  Most of the time it's pretty comical.  But this is great.  Flocabulary is the first site devoted to real, authentic, good rap versions of literature, reading, and other subjects.  Check out this Macbeth video. 



Explore the site and let me know if it resonates with your students. Holla.

The Value of 5-Paragraph Essays

The article in this post does a great job of putting the 5-paragraph essay in context.  I always used to tell my students that there was really no such thing as a 5-paragraph essay outside of school, just the way that surgeons don't go around dissecting frogs in their job (read the article...)  But I'd also show them my master's thesis and explain that although it was long, it was really just a huge 5-paragraph essay-- only with a "preface" instead of an "intro paragraph," and so on. 

Hope this article puts the purpose and value of the 5-paragraph essay into focus.  Don't forget about the video on our persuasive writing page on the CCTS English site!
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Can the Five-Paragraph Essay Be a Useful Teaching Tool?

            In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Georgia Perimeter College English professor Rob Jenkins says he used to believe that the five-paragraph essay was “evil” – he firmly believed that organization should arise organically from the content, as it always had with his own writing. For years, Jenkins refused to teach the five-paragraph formula in freshman composition and other courses, even, he says, “when students practically begged for a handy rubric to help them organize their thoughts.” Instead, he tried to lead them “on a journey of self-discovery, or at least a discovery of what they were trying to say and how.”

            But it didn’t work for most students, and Jenkins gradually came to realize three things about writing:

-    Organization is vital; this is what makes it possible for the reader to follow the writer’s train of thought.

-    Few people are naturally good at organizing their ideas in writing.

-    People won’t magically get better at it, even if they are highly intelligent and well-educated.

He came to see the five-paragraph formula as exactly what students needed, not just for their college papers but for all forms of communication, from after-dinner speeches to doctoral dissertations – basically, Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, then tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em.

            The danger of the five-paragraph format is that it can become too rigid and formulaic. To prevent this, Jenkins uses two metaphors with his students:

            • The accordion – A piece of writing can expand if there’s more content and contract if there’s less. For example, a major writing assignment might have three or four introductory paragraphs, 18 middle paragraphs fleshing out five or six supporting points, and two or three concluding paragraphs. A brief interoffice memo might be only three or four paragraphs long, with the important points sandwiched between a brief introduction and conclusion. The key, says Jenkins, is that “if students can learn to organize their ideas into five paragraphs, they should be able later on to expand or contract the format as necessary – especially if they understand that the five-paragraph theme is merely a beginning, not an end unto itself.”

            • The frog – “A student who wants to become a heart surgeon doesn’t start out by cutting people open,” he says. “That student will probably begin, in an introductory biology course, by dissecting a frog… For student writers, the five-paragraph theme is their frog. It’s not a 10-page term paper, much less a 50-page proposal. But the lessons learned about organization from writing in the five-paragraph format make it possible, later on, to put together longer documents that are more logical and coherent.”

            Jenkins goes on to rebut the kinds of objections he himself used to raise about the five-paragraph approach:

            - It’s repetitive and redundant. Yes, it is, but redundancy isn’t all bad. “As any teacher, parent, or coach can attest, the way to get people to remember and improve at things is to repeat them over and over,” says Jenkins. To avoid being tiresome, the trick is to “repeat yourself without sounding as though you’re repeating yourself – which can lead to many fruitful discussions about sentence variety, word choice, and the importance of vocabulary building.”

            - It’s formulaic. True, but it really helps students to learn how to follow a set formula, because most kinds of writing are formulaic.

            - It’s devoid of content. Yes, content comes from students’ knowledge and life experience. This means that as students get older, they have more to plug into the structure of the five-paragraph essay. But the structure is helpful in managing and expressing thoughts in a way that others can understand. And that is what really counts.

“Accordions, Frogs, and the 5-Paragraph Theme” by Rob Jenkins in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 26, 2010 (Vol. LVI, #24, p. A76), no e-link available

The CCTS English Blog

Hello CCTS English teachers!

Lately, I've come across some great articles, websites, and ideas that I think would be great to share with you all.  In addition, as I've conducted walkthroughs and observations, I've noticed a lot of things that I'd like to mention to everyone in a group setting.  Unfortunately, we only meet as a department once per month.  I'd like this blog to be part of my effort to fill in that communication gap.  I wish we had time in our schedules to meet every day-- to share success stories, concerns, best practice ideas, and the like.  Since we can't meet daily in person, I intend to use this blog as a space to do just that.  I beleive its important to have professional discussion and community-- since scheduling makes that hard to do in person, this, I believe, is the next best way, short of flooding you inbox with emails (especially since I keep getting that "over the space limit" notice in Outlook!)
Please keep in mind that I will use email to communicate important things that require attention, and that nothing takes the place of our face-to-face time at department meetings. This blog will be more about providing you with any information, thoughts, ideas, or developments that will assist you in doing your jobs to the best of your ability.  You aren't required to check it or contribute, but it's here if you'd like to do so, and I hope it serves as a valuable resource to you.

If you'd like to be able to contribute to the blog, please email me your Gmail address and I will add you as a contributor.  Otherwise, please feel free to read and comment. 

My goal is to post on the blog several times per week.

Thanks,
Marc