Writing from the Sources (11:59)
Shift number five is “writing from sources.” I think the biggest shift required of us here is to begin to expect that students will take the scholarly work that they do when they are engaging with text and then start to start to generate their own informational text.
John King, Jr.: I think what is powerful about shift number five, and David references this a little bit, is that we often have such a heavy reliance on the personal narrative that I think students do not get to do the kind of writing that college and careers expect. They get to that first college class and they are asked to write a paper about a historical event or analyzing an argument in economics and that is such an unfamiliar writing experience. It is not true about every school. Some schools are doing an excellent job with this and it is quite variable. I think what is clear is that as a country we have over emphasized the personal narrative and under emphasized writing from sources. The other skill that I think is really important embedded in this shift is the ability to write from multiple sources about a single topic. That ability to analyze and synthesize ideas across multiple texts is a very powerful idea. The idea is a thing that a lot of people have to do in their job every day. They have to take in different information from different sources and try to reach a conclusion and that is what we ask of citizens. We ask the citizen when they go in to make that voting decision or when they go in to serve on that jury, we ask them to take in these different pieces of evidence to form an opinion and support that opinion with evidence. Then they need to persuade their colleagues or fellow jurors of that opinion. That is a very powerful life skill as well as a powerful academic skill.
Kate Gerson: I think the central change in behavior for a teacher, particularly an ELA teacher, right now is to let go of to some extent the time spent on the creation of the narrative. It is something very precious to many English teachers. Many of us have seen students find their voice in the generation of narrative text. Many of us have seen students begin to be able to articulate who they are, where they come from, what they are about and what they want to do in the world through the writing of narrative text. So you are asking me, and I am speaking from personal experience, to let go of something. I think it is a very natural instinct for an English teacher to want to protect that discovery of voice. I’m curious about the ways in which you think this transformation in the way we do school can protect that discovery of voice in students in this more scholarly context.
John King, Jr.: I don’t see it as abandoning voice. I guess I see it as a way of ensuring that you are saying something about something important in a sense. There is no question that creative writing and personal narrative should be in there and I think it is in there. It is not that those are abandoned. It is a part of evolution of your voice to be able to tell about something meaningful. For example; a trip to the museum and walking through a museum and having your seven or eight year old reflect on the visit. One way they can reflect on their visit to the museum is to say, “I went to the museum and my little sister got a sandwich. Then we went to the top of the museum and there were birds in the sky. Then I got tired, I fell asleep on the way home, the end.” There is another version of writing about the museum that says, “I went to the museum and I saw two things that were really interesting. I saw an exhibit about penguins and then I learned that penguins, etc. Then I went into another room and I saw an exhibit about how human beings are impacting the environment for penguins. That is the same thing and they are still voicing it from what I took away from the museum but they are very different. For me, this work and shift is about finding ways to push towards that style of writing where the voice comes in drawing on powerful useful and meaningful evidence.
Kate Gerson: What the teacher can do is give permission to the student to start to have their own reaction and meaning making about that science and what they are seeing there. They need to draw their own connections between the humans and the penguins and start to take it to another place.
John King, Jr.: Although even that way of talking emphasizes a lot like my take versus your take. Other values that really matter are precision, accuracy and clarity. I think that sometimes in the English Language Arts classrooms in particular, not as much in science classrooms, we don’t as often ask, “What’s your view of the molecule? Do you really want to know? What is the molecule and how did it interact?” There is nothing wrong in writing with being an investigative reporter and being very clear about the information. I will tell you about Minnesota: it is a very different state than our own. They had kids their submit essays from their high school and a group of college professors got together and they called themselves “College Professors Ready or Not.” They got kids throughout the state submitting writing. Over 95% of the writing was narrative and over 95% of it was not college ready. I am trying to really probe: do we have to do something painful here? Do we have to restrain? Has school become indulgent in a certain sort of way in that something we love and is pleasurable may be distracting us from work that needs doing? Voice is extremely important but the personalness of one’s voice may not always be the most important thing in a work or college setting. The accuracy, precision, the way the use of evidence and the ability to build a convincing claim are things that can be powerful. I am not trying to deny the force of the personal but I think it may be bigger than what we think it is.
Kate Gerson: In my precision as a student and in my interaction with those facts I can develop a different sense of pride about my ability to draw conclusions and make meanings assert a point.
David Coleman: To discover things and to see better.
Kate Gerson: It’s not a book report is what I am saying. It’s not, “And then the penguins did, and then the penguins said, and then the guy told us…”
David Coleman: Exactly, this is how it fits together.
Kate Gerson: Yes.
David Coleman: I think that, or rather you can see. Then another person might not just dismiss it by saying, “Oh that’s what Kate thinks.” Another reader might say, “Oh now I see too that Kate saw more of how it fit together.” When I read this I see more. I don’t have to be Kate to see things, I can see things that Kate saw because she is so clear. She discovered things that now she is showing.
Kate Gerson: One of the students that comes up here is doing this work with low income students. I’m wondering what you think about the challenges that are faced when you are asking students to create informational text or to write in reaction to text or other sources? Where the issues of accesses of standard English come in? Where the issues of access the text come in?
John King Jr.: When I was a principal I used to ask my faculty to read Lisa Delpit’s article “Silenced Dialogue” every year before we would start.
David Coleman: Silenced of dialogue?
John King Jr.: “Silenced Dialogue.” Part of that is because she really tries to emphasize this idea that there is a language of power and it is standard English, rich vocabulary and the content knowledge, references and illusions you might find in a New York Times article. The task of school is in part to equip students with access to that language of power. That is not the only job of schools, school has lots of other jobs. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t give the students those tools. She has several examples of students reflecting back on their education and saying, “I feel like I lost out because I wasn’t given those tools.” We have to be very careful because it is a fine line. We have to be very careful that we don’t, in an effort to avoid hard things, fail to give our students the tools that will allow them to be successful in college and careers. We have to have that difficult conversation about “this is how you write in school, this is how you make an argument if you are in a job interview, this is how you present yourself.” Those are real issues. If we don’t deal with them in school then we leave students and then we confront them after school with less tools and fewer skills. The other piece ties in with our earlier conversation about content knowledge. That access to the language of power is you have to know stuff about lots of things. You have to have that exposure to science, social studies, the arts, etc. so that you actually are able to engage with a complex text and see the different references and so forth.
Kate Gerson: One of the things that Lisa Delpit asked of me as a devotee of my writing workshop was to think about the structures that I would need to provide in order to access whether we are generating informational or narrative text, it doesn’t really matter. I need to create the level of structure and accountability around students acquiring skill by skill and convention by convention on the pieces of the puzzle that create my standards ability to produce standard English.
John King Jr.: Yes. If that is not something that you have been exposed to you it has to be taught. There are lots of ways it can be taught but there are two important examples that I think the Common Core supports. One way is that it is taught through reading complex text that has that kind of language in it and closely reading those texts so that you engage with that level of language. You see the difference that “however” makes in a sentence.
Kate Gerson: So that shouldn’t necessarily be the first sentence in every paragraph?
John King Jr.: That’s right. You see the way that transition words shape meaning and so that is something that you can then apply in your writing. The other piece is sometimes you need scaffolded instruction around those things. What are the rules for commas? Someone has to teach you that. I think too often we run on a pendulum and we have swung too far and we don’t do enough explicit teaching of some of those core skills. There is a difference between an effective writer and an infective writer.