Righting Wrongs

Lisa Weiss contributed today's post.

Last year I blogged about the transition of changing our 6-12 district goals to writing goals. I shared the process, the successes, and challenges of the plan, and that is where I want to begin this year: writing about how I intend to address the fatal flaw I made last year--ignoring the importance of the culture that teachers build in their classrooms.

Last December I had Fox Valley Writing Project teacher leaders from most content areas come into the district  to model how the gradual release of responsibility looks when you model writing. I needed the 6-12 teachers to be engaged in the process, like students would be, in order to see first hand what the teacher role looks like, as well as to feel how the natural scaffolding of the GRR worked for students; I wanted teachers to experience the GRR. After teachers saw and felt the power of the GRR in their individual disciplines, I walked them through some simple steps for planning their own model of writing, using GRR, and then set some expectations for teachers  to engage students in the process so we could begin to have some conversations focused on student writing.

My phone was forever ringing, my inbox bursting with emails, the literacy coaches in my ears. The message were all the same: teachers were uncomfortable modeling writing in front of their students. Teachers did not see themselves as a writers, and modeling the messy work of thinking and writing (live) was pushing teachers into disequilibrium, and not the good kind where one can be reflective on a messy process, and walk away with new understandings. This disequilibrium was on that was causing two responses: refusal to model the writing that was being assigned, and challenging the people who were there to support those efforts.

I did much talking, thinking, and writing about the situation, drawing the conclusion that the fear of modeling a messy process in front of kids is about the culture of the classroom. I also acknowledged that a secondary problem playing into the issue of culture was the thinking that I don’t know how to teach writing. But first things first…

How do I “fix” this? How do I go into fall of 2015, backing up to address culture? How do I teach teachers to build a culture of (literacy) learning? Does it start with principals, and building expectations? I still have many of these questions, but I had to start somewhere. I chose to start this year by sharing the identified problems, as well as some possibilities for moving forward as building leadership teams consider how much time needs to be devoted to building a culture of (literacy) learning in each building, department, and classroom.

I set up building leadership teams including technology, literacy and instructional coaches, along with principals to consider the use of the following resources as they consider how they might approach building a culture of learning:

Our writing data from last year 6-12, to revisit the “why” behind the efforts directed at the purposeful and explicit teaching of writing.

Our OASD belief statements

Student & Teacher surveys (as suggested in Eric Jensen’s Teaching with Poverty in Mind, or any developed one that elicits responses from teachers & students regarding the culture of the school and the culture of learning that exists).

Readings or activities that include information about mindsets, for both teachers and students.

Chapter 7 from Subjects Matter: Exceeding Standards Through Powerful Content-Area Reading, Second Edition, Harvey Daniels & Steven Zemelman

Possibly assessing the school’s capacity to support systematic literacy development by considering the use of one of these tools: http://nationalliteracyproject.org/rubrics/

It has been interesting to learn about the similarities and differences that building teams have taken in order to begin having open discussions about what it means to foster a culture of literacy learning, but more on that next month.