Characteristics of Effective Writing Instruction

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, contributed today's post.

The second part of the new professional learning on writing from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction focuses on research related to 21st century expectations, characteristics of effective writing instruction, the writing process, and balanced assessment. It includes different resources in support of research and practice including example writing processes, videos, and handouts. 

It is important to note that writing is represented as composing, working through a process, as opposed to something like filling in a worksheet. This professional learning begins with the assumption that we require that all students write. Lessons and units are based on big ideas, and there is an emphasis on educators sharing their own writing process/es to explicitly teach strategies for writing, highlighting the recursive nature of a writing process. Discussion and inquiry are a major focus for teaching a variety of writing tasks as well. There is a video that works through some of the research and an example writing process if you prefer to use it for that portion of the presentation. You can find the presentation in PowerPoint and Google slides formats, along with the video and handouts through the following link: http://ela.dpi.wi.gov/ela_writing

This professional learning begins and ends with English language arts educators’ beliefs about the teaching of writing. The importance of first identifying beliefs so that we can build upon them with support from research and experiences is paramount in improving teaching and learning. The materials on the website include the presentation in PowerPoint and Google Slides formats, a brief facilitator’s guide, and a resources tab which includes all of the handouts.

21st Century Writing Expectations: Examining Task, Audience, and Purpose

Marci Glaus, English language arts consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Public instruction, contributed today's post.

As many of you know, the Literacy and Mathematics team at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provides professional learning materials on various topics based upon perceived needs from the field. Many of these resources are produced in a train-the-trainer format, allowing for a broader audience. Based on information we gathered from across the state through survey data and conversations with educators, it was apparent that there is a demand for professional learning on writing. We found that the biggest needs were around the following topics:

•      Teaching students how to use the writing process and technology to produce and distribute writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

•      Develop a balance of explanatory informative, argumentative, and narrative texts for different purposes and audiences.

As the Wisconsin DPI English Language Arts Consultant, I have built resources surrounding these topics and solicited feedback from some of the best English language arts educators in the state. I am thrilled to debut the finalized version of this professional learning today.

The first part of the professional learning, and the part that I write about today, focuses on 21^st century expectations, how these relate to the teaching of writing, and the examination of task, purpose, and audience with digital and print mentor texts. All of this begins and ends with educators’ beliefs about the teaching of writing to recognize and build upon their knowledge and experiences. This interactive professional learning provides the time and space for analyzing texts written for different purposes and audiences and discussion of current writing tasks from your school/classroom context.  While there is time for exploration of different technology tools for writing, the major focus of this portion of the professional learning is to first recognize the purpose for writing, the context for writing, and then the exploration of the various modes in which writing could live. You can find this part of the professional learning through the following link:

http://ela.dpi.wi.gov/ela_writing

The materials on the website include the presentation in PowerPoint and Google Slides formats, a brief facilitator’s guide, and a resources tab which includes all of the handouts. There are short videos that a facilitator may choose to play that cover the research portions of the professional learning as well. Finally, while there are mentor text examples already built into this presentation, facilitators are encouraged to replace them with texts appropriate to their context as needed. 

Later this week, I will provide an overview of the second part of the professional learning on writing. 

I Love the Learning, Yes, I do. I Love the Learning, How About You?

Andrea Reichenberger contributed today's post. More of Andrea's thinking can be found here.

I love new learning.  But I can count the number of times I have lost hours of my life that I will never get back sitting at a terrible conference, or a bad professional development listening to a speaker with no presence or personality, or one who speaks at his/her audience for hours in a monotone voice (Bueller...Bueller.) What disappointed me the most were the professional development sessions that were designed, but not modeled, after what we know is best practice in instruction.  That was always extremely frustrating to me.

No matter how bad the professional learning opportunity, as a learner, I force myself to take something away from it.  About five years ago I attended an RtI summit in a neighboring state.  It was death.  The presenters used a register of speech and vocabulary in which I had no background for context.  It was really difficult to learn anything, but I sure tried. It was a long bus ride (thank goodness it was a coach) back to the district, so I had some time to reflect.  Upon exiting the bus, my building principal asking me what I thought of the conference.  I was frank in my response.  “It was terrible,” and then I paused, “but I took away one very important lesson.”  

“What’s that?” she asked.

My answer was simple, yet profound because it ended up being a turning point in my teaching career: “I need to go back to school and get my reading license.”

I enrolled in a reading program and began classes two months later. If it hadn’t been for that God awful RtI summit, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

As a teacher, I am a learner first. I love attending conferences, workshops, and network meetings. I ALWAYS take away something new, and I’m usually excited about it.  Recently, I attended an orientation for a class I am taking with the Fox Valley Writing Project (Shout out to Lisa Weiss!) and even though it was an orientation, I walked away with some new ideas, and  I’m really excited about this learning opportunity.  

When I plan professional development, I do my best to design it so that everyone can take away new learning and apply it in their own instruction.  I ensure that I’m not doing all of the talking, I model, explain the purpose, and offer choice,  I build in collaboration, I provide guided practice, and I create independent tasks. But there are still teachers who seem to hate professional development, and I struggle to learn and understand why.  Just as when I’m in the classroom, I ask myself, what do my students need in order to meet the standards and how can I make the task engaging and relevant?  As educators, I feel strongly  that we should all be learners and model this for our own students.

What do we do when teachers don’t want to learn or keep up with best practice?  One of the ideas we are exploring  in our district is working toward empowering them.  We’d like to offer more choices for teachers and allow them to “chose their own adventure” in professional development--make it more focused on inquiry. We even asked teachers if they would be interested in being a part of the planning and delivery in the 2015-16 school year so we can look at creating teams.  We had quite a few teachers express interest.   This idea is still in it’s infant stage and will involve a great deal of collaboration and planning.  I know I will learn a lot as we go through the process and guess what?  That really excites me because I love new learning!

Using Assessment for Classroom Decision Making

Jaimie Howe contributed today's post. More of Jaimie's thinking can be found here.

Over the last 4-5 years the use of assessment in our district has really evolved. Below is a look at the progression of how assessment has looked in my building specifically.

In my building, we have always tried to use assessment to make decisions , but in the past it was much more informal and observational – mostly just used to form reading groups; partly due to limited assessment options.  Our knowledge and thinking started to shift back in 2011 as we began to gain knowledge of building systems and the RtI Framework.  Now with more systems in place and more knowledge of assessment, we are starting to use it more effectively with many other areas of instruction and for many other purposes.

There have been several things that have been implemented that were crucial to our shift in thinking and ability to start to use assessment more effectively.

• Standards Based Report Card: We implemented a Standards Based Report Card in 2011 for ELA. This caused us to see the need for assessments to align and be more systematic rather than only informal or observational.  

• More Assessment Options: We also began using the DRA2 in 2011, which gave teachers the opportunity to look at each individual child more closely and select specific learning targets for students.  It also allowed teachers to consider grouping students by skill/strategy versus reading level based off of the DRA2 Class Profile.

• District Assessment Frameworks: Each grade level has an Assessment Framework indicating which assessments they need to give and when.  It is organized by type of assessment (screener, diagnostic, formative, etc.).  This creates so much more consistency and common knowledge across buildings in our district and specific grade levels.

• Master Schedule and Intervention Block: Implementation of a master schedule and an intervention block in 2012 made it so much easier for us to have a consistent collaboration schedule.  This was imperative for us in moving forward.  It gave us the opportunities we needed to look at our assessments more closely and make decisions as a team. Below are the consistent collaboration times that we use each year; however, much more collaboration happens as needed.

• Grade Level Teams meet 2x per week during MAPE (45 minutes: 1 day – ELA, 1 day – Math)
• Grade Level and Cross Grade Level Teams meet with Literacy Coach 1x per month. (½ hour - before school)
• Unit Teams (K-2 and 3-5) meet with Math coach 1x per month. (½ hour - before school)
• Individual Grade Levels with resource teachers (SPED, psych., lit. coach, etc) ½ day every 6-8 weeks (4x per year) – includes analyzing assessments and instructional planning
• Opportunities for ½ day release time for instructional planning to create common assessments and/or collaborate around assessment.

This consistent collaboration schedule has been imperative in the work that we do. Without collaboration, it would be nearly impossible to use assessments to guide our instruction. We are trying to develop a system where assessment is a precursor to instruction; telling us what to teach, not just how students did.  This takes time and a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it!

Wisconsin's Specific Learning Disability (SLD) Eligibility Criteria

A new episode of Literacy Live is posted. It's all about finding data sources within your balanced assessment system that could be helpful when an IEP team is making an eligibility decision for specific learning disabilities.

The episode can be viewed here:
https://sites.google.com/a/dpi.wi.gov/lit-live-assessment/home/literacy-data-and-sld-eligibility

A Reflective Practitioner: What Have I Done to Provide Effective and Efficient Coaching?

Carrie Sand contributed today's post. Read Carrie's previous posts here.

In my November blog, I posed the question... “Small District + Big Goals = Varied Roles for a Literacy Coach: How to provide effective and efficient coaching when time is tight?”  Throughout the course of the year, I have used that guiding question as the foundation for much of my work and professional development as a literacy coach/ interventionist/ teacher. In addition, I have used this work as the inspiration for my blog posts, a place where I shared experiences and took time to reflect on my process. This mantra: “How to implement big change when time and money is tight?” has helped me focus my coaching process and initiatives. As the year concludes, I thought that this blog post would be a good opportunity to review and reflect on that process as a whole.

When trying to “Bring Back the Book Club” (January), I realized that any professional development works as long as it is timely and appropriate to your staff needs. It also helps to have a really great text that teachers want to read. For my staff, I have found that they enjoy books that are quick, easy, “how to” reads that provide short chapters, quick explanations, and ideas for easy implementation. Some of the tried and true favorites have been:

• Elementary: That Workshop Book by Samantha Bennett and Choice Words and Opening Minds by Peter Johnston
• Middle School: Text and Lesson for Content-Area Reading by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Nancy Steineke and Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson
• High School: Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines by Doug Buehl and Write Like This by Kelly Gallagher

Even using short chapters or excerpt as focus points helped guide our conversations and expand our knowledge base.

In thinking about initiating more purposeful PLC and coaching conversations, I addressed the need to give teachers a more academic language in “Centering Curriculum Conversations Around Learning Targets” (February).  From this initiative I learned that much in the same way we provide students with academic vocabulary to take part in the discourse of our content areas, coaches must do the same for teachers. Introducing the concept of learning targets and providing resources and development about learning targets helped to accomplish the goal of fostering  meaningful conversations centered around student learning.

Much like giving teachers accessibility to engage in rigorous discourse,  I thought about how to continue work with disciplinary content reading and writing at the secondary level. I modeled the professional development for “Disciplinary Literacy-A Science Focus” (March) around the Doug Buehl term “Discourse Outsiders.” Within his book Buehl claims that students in our content areas often feel like “discourse outsiders.” This phrase refers to the idea that many students come into our classrooms without the vocabulary, concepts, or experiences to proficiently interact with the content of our curriculum. Therefore, as the classroom expert, teachers must find the strategies to help students engage in our curriculum by, what Buehl calls, “bridging the gap.” By using this type of language with content area teachers, it helped them see the need for reading and writing instruction as part of their curriculum rather than in addition to their content area curriculum.

Finally, last month I thought about leadership and how different strengths can create different types of leaders (Utilizing Leadership Strengths for More Effective Coaching). In a small rural school where everyone has multiple roles in addition to their teaching assignment, I thought about how I can continue to use different strengths to create different literacy leaders in multiple buildings. This is something that I will continue to focus on next year, as fostering literacy leadership continues to be an important topic in my school district. In addition, I am thinking about other ideas I would like to focus on next year. Ideas like: common protocols at the high school for productive group work norms and how to maintain a focus on best practices in reading but also bring a renewed attention to best practices in writing. In fact, these ideas on my to-do list will probably be the place where I start to shape my next year’s focus as a coach. 

It is the never ending to-do list that helps keep me passionate and urgent about my work, and I am thankful that this blog has helped me to be a more reflective practitioner. I look forward to a summer where I can continue this reflection and begin sketching implementation ideas for next year!

The Impact of Going Back to Basics

Julie Schwartzbauer contributed today's post. Read Julie's previous posts to understand more about her district's Back to Basics plan.

In my last post, I shared how we as district and building literacy coaches needed to make an extra effort to clarify to teachers what our Back to Basics objective was: to develop a coaching model that would help teachers develop consistency in universal instruction in literacy across the school district through a workshop framework.  I also shared information regarding the building roll out of the Back to Basics components.

As the end of the year quickly approaches, we were looking for ways to collect feedback regarding the district-wide Back to Basics work that was done.  We have developed a survey intended for all teachers to take.  

CLICK HERE to read the complete survey.

As the responses pour in, I am delighted to share some teacher quotes directly from the survey...

• Bringing staff back to a common understanding and language when implementing these elements of the workshop model. Allowing time for discussion and collaboration about how these elements are implemented in the classroom is powerful in increasing student learning.
• If I am better, they are better!  
• I have improved all of my teaching practices in these areas. 
• The coaching and information has been wonderful so far this this year! 
• It helps remind me of the things I need to remember to include as well as the things I am doing that I forget about are really a part of each topic.
• I'm grateful for the Back to Basics coaching. It provides some specifics to focus on and helps me understand I'm building my workshop skills as a teacher one basic skill at a time.
• I was happy to know that my Grade Level team and I are all on the same page and offer all components to our students daily. Our students are given a variety of genres and forms of learning which creates a class that only grows in reading.
• I appreciate the support we have in our building! The literacy staff is on the forefront and willing to do ANYTHING if we just ask!

As we look forward to the next school year, or goal is to continue to build teacher and administrator expertise in universal literacy instruction.

If we focus on excellent instruction for all students in regular education as a first resort, that instruction can serve to avoid additional intervention for most students.Regie Routman