GUEST POST: Written Communication

This week's post is written by guest author Jennifer Williams. If you'd like to contact her directly, see the end of her post!

I constantly look for ways to make my lessons more applicable or more understandable for my students, especially my AP students. (Honestly, right now, I’m just trying to get my 10th graders to write more than 5 sentences in a paragraph—we spend a lot of time discussing why they could/would possibly need more than the bare minimum. Sigh. I’m not going to tell them they might also need less than that “magic” 5.)

I adore teaching literature, but I’ll save it for another post; rather, I want to discuss my evolution from a teacher who teaches writing to a writer who encourages (and attempts to teach and make time for) a deeper, more meaningful connection to the process.

I recently began thinking more deeply about why we write and how we communicate as humans. Why do we make movies and write books and design buildings and sculpt and SnapChat and tweet and write songs and tell stories? What is the purpose of all this? To torture students by making them analyze and write essays? Well, that’s only part of the fun.

The entire purpose of everything we do is to communicate and make connections with others. A popular textbook claims, “Everything’s an Argument.” I don’t think that’s true. Just because you can argue anything does not make everything an argument. Rather, everything is an attempt to connect with other humans in the hope someone, somewhere understands and lets you know you are not alone.

All our movies and essays and novels and tweets and pictures and art and architecture and fashion and experiments are simply, sometimes, clumsy attempts at connecting to the human race. We desperately want others to look us in the eyes (not always literally), touch our hand or shoulder, and assert, “I hear you. Yes, I get it. No, you’re not a freak. I feel/think/say that too.” Those three words, “I hear you,” seem to be the most important. We need to be heard—not listened to, but actively, truly, deeply heard. To connect minds and emotions.

I need to continue conveying this to my students. We discuss author’s/creator’s purpose and how authors/creators then make conscious choices to convey a message and achieve that purpose. Authors/creators pick one word over another, they decide on setting and characters, they use imagery and symbols, they create sentences and paragraphs and dialogue—all to convey a message and create a connection between the audience and the medium. I call this the “Hows, Whys, and So whats or Who cares.” How does the author use language? Why does the author use the device? So what or who cares if this was used? How does it help convey the message to the audience? How does it help the audience connect to the work?

I drill this into my students until they begin asking these questions themselves. However, to take our thoughts and work deeper, I need to paint the picture of one human trying to communicate thoughts and emotions to another human.

Let’s focus again on written communication. “Know your audience” continues to be the #1 rule of writing. Once you know your audience, you can tailor your communication for them. Sometimes the simple word is best; sometimes the slang or curse word is the right word; sometimes passive voice is acceptable. Sometimes you can use a fragment. This year, I began explaining the burden of written communication falls on the communicator. The communicator needs to make the message as clear as possible with setting, characters, figurative language, necessary punctuation, diction, etc.

Do not expect your audience to read your mind.

This is when miscommunication happens: we get slothful and sloppily toss out words and images, expecting the audience to chase after and gather up the haphazard fragments and piece together an imperfect and incomplete picture. Then we get angry when our audience can’t interpret our lazy style and misconstrues our incoherent message. We complain about being “misunderstood,” but did we work to make ourselves understood? Probably not, it’s much easier to place blame than to accept responsibility.

Writing and speaking are gifts. Other animals communicate in various ways, but humans have the capacity to create words, give them meaning and nuance, to attach inflection and punctuation, to utilize body language and facial expressions—we have so much at our fingertips; however, we must and should be good stewards with our gifts. The world is chaotic, but words, especially written words, can bring order to that chaos. An essay or novel or tweet is NOT creating something from nothing; they are attempts to bring structure and infuse meaning into the disorder.

I want my students to learn the rules of format and Standard English so they can more effectively communicate with others. Then, I want them to learn how and when to break those rules. I did not truly understand this until I sat down and worked on honing my own skills, which is a never-ending process.

In the beginning of my career, I focused so much on simply getting students to write a “proper” essay, with a thesis and the other requisite pieces. I still must do this because of the restrictions of standardized testing, the AP test, and college expectations; however, in the last 4-5 years (years in which my own writing blossomed and flourished in the form of poetry and example “essays” for students), I found myself entering into discourse of the hows and whys of effective writing. Why do we do what we do? Yes, we need commas, but when and why? Dashes are so lovely—here’s why. Using more than one exclamation point at the end of a sentence doesn’t make your words more exciting; those extraneous marks just make your words louder. How do we make this more interesting, without relying on 20 exclamation points? When should you start a new paragraph? Generally when you start a new topic, but sometimes your reader needs a break…that’s when you can start a new paragraph. Traditionally, teachers/professors like the thesis to be the last sentence of your intro, so when you are writing for them, do that. Now, let’s look at where some other authors placed their thesis statements.

Increasingly more, I quickly review/teach the rules, then I eagerly anticipate conversations with those students ready to spread their wings and try breaking the rules. (This is yet another reason I wish my classes were no larger than about 20-25 students. Sigh….) I even sit in desks next to students or force myself onto the floor beside them so we can discourse on a more equal plane (see those non-verbal cues?) and so I am less of the “expert.”

My next step is maybe for my students to actually watch me struggle through a prompt or a blog post. I’ve done this before with various levels of success. Right now, many of them simply want a formula for how to get an “A.” My dream is to throw out grades for any and all writing assignments. Rather, I would love the time to have conferences with my students and help them wrestle with and fine-tune their work. Unfortunately, I have restrictions to which I must conform…as do my students.

In the meantime, I will try to balance the “bad” writing they must do for the AP and end-of-instruction tests with lessons in revising and editing. I will do my damnedest to help students understand that while writing is a much needed and desired skill, it is also an art form. Writing takes lifeless words, cautiously examines them, then reaches in and chooses that special word. Writing pairs that particular word with other carefully selected gems and strings them together to form sentences, which then form paragraphs. Eventually, when we take the time to judiciously craft our words, we just might reach out and touch someone, thus creating that most beautiful of connections: humans in understanding and harmony.  

Jennifer Williams is currently in her 12th+ year of teaching. This is her 8th year of teaching pre-AP/AP, but she says "I never feel like I truly have it figured out." This year she is teaching 11th AP Lang. & Comp. in Oklahoma. Email: APEngTeach@gmail.com. Twitter: @JennWillTeach

Snippets from NCTE2016: Lessons from Authors

One of the most amazing things about an NCTE conference is the contact one has with authors.  This conference provided the opportunity to learn from some masters of Young Adult Literature and non-fiction.  Ta-Nehisi Coates stated in his interview, “I was most effective in school when I could connect it to something real.”  Several of the YA authors taught the importance of making learning real through their writing methods and the issues they addressed in fiction.  In “Equity and Social Justice: Using Informational Texts and Literature in Urban and Rural Classrooms to Help Young Readers Become Informed Advocates and Global Citizens”, Scholastic authors Deborah Hopkinson and Deborah Wiles with Professor Brian Williams at Georgia State University had us consider issues of social justice as we learned to “evaluate, process and communicate information”.  These presenters considered the danger of a single story.  Professor Williams used the story of Rosa Parks asking, “Do we know the story?”  As we pieced together the Parks story from multiple perspectives: Park’s, the bus drivers, situations in the community, and associations Parks had, we learned what we choose to leave out impacts the story.  If we leave out that Parks made an active decision not to get up out of resistance and her work with the NCAP, we don’t think of the civil rights movement of being strategic.  The idea that this was a strategic act, empowers students. 

How can this idea can be used in an AP classroom?  Students need to know the value of multiple perspectives when writing synthesis essays and considering evidence to use for argumentation.  Assign student research on different issues or occurrences with a perspective in mind.  Each student can present their story from the assigned perspective, then students can synthesize evidence from multiple perspectives for a combined story.  Students can consider how the perspective impacts the story.  If several different topics are shared in class, students have evidence to mine in the argument essay. This will hone evaluation and analysis of evidence and provide students with the understanding of how multiple perspectives interact—a valuable skill for a synthesis essay.

Deborah Wiles writes documentary novels and her current series is focused on the 1960’s (Countdown and Revolution).  While the novels are middle school level, her research process and synthesis of ideas provides valuable insights for high school students. She intertwines her story with opinionated biographies, music playlists, artifacts from the time period such as letters, newspaper clippings, etc.  using Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/debbiewiles/) to organize her research.  As Wiles states, “Everything is a Remix.”  This remix idea is a great way to teach students to synthesize information.  Her novel, Countdown deals with propaganda—an excellent way to delve into the fake news vs. real news issue we have today. 

How can this idea be used in an AP classroom?  Have students question what is happening in their world.  Next, have them consider what else is going on in the world at that time.  How do the stories intersect?  Have students research multiple genres and organize their research on Pinterest.  Next, they are ready to synthesize the argument about the “story” they selected.  

Deborah Hopkinson writes perspectives on history for upper Elementary and Middle School students. Again, her methods can inform our students.  She tackles issues such as public health activism through The Great Trouble as she considers cholera.  She allows history to inform the reader through critical consciousness.

How can this be used in the AP classroom?  One of the things I notice the most when scoring the Argument question at the reading is history miscues made by students.  Hopkinson and the other presenters argue for students to be academically competent, culturally competent and have critical consciousness. Assigning students key historical issues to research from multiple perspectives and sharing them with the class, will provide a bank of historical evidence for argument questions.  After students have assembled the bank, students can practice using this information in argument prompts.

For more information about the NCTE Annual Conference, visit this link.

Planning and Pacing AP Language Classes

This post is dedicated to the newbies - may the force be with you as you navigate teaching this class.

Besides writing your AP syllabus, planning and pacing your course is probably next on your list of concerns.

When I first learned I was going to teach AP Lang, I was excited and nervous. It was uncharted waters for me, and I was not sure where to begin. Even now, eight years later, sometimes I have to step back and think about how I am planning and pacing my class.

After teaching this class for eight years, I am going to share a handful of tips to help you plan and pace. Most of my tips below are what I learned while in my first year of teaching AP Lang.

Tip #1

Since this was my first time working with more than just one book, I had to turn to the Internet for guidance on how to pace the readings. The best tip I have for this: NEA Big Read. This site was a lifesaver, and it had materials for each book I planned to teach. I used their teaching guide to pace my kids reading for ten class meetings, and I use this same pacing today, nine years later. In the pacing materials, there are questions to consider. I use these as guided reading questions for students. This allows them to focus their reading and to read for more than just plot.

They have supplemental handouts, soundbites, discussion topics, etc. I love this site and found it invaluable my first year with AP Lang. I found their discussion topics hit the skills my kids needed to build on in an AP Lang class.

Tip #2

When planning your essays and speeches and more, stick with grouping them in threes or fours.

For example, I had students work with how we mourn and how we heal as a nation. The piece I used to start this discussion was “Pop Culture in the Aftermath of 9/11,” which is in their textbook. We discussed what historical aspects students learned from this piece, why pop culture matters in healing, and then we switched gears into how our leaders help us mourn and heal. I used Reagan’s “Challenger Disaster” speech, RFK’s announcement of MLK’s assassination, and LBJ’s “Let Us Continue” speech. I grouped these four because it was just enough to allow students to explore the concept without overwhelming them - and myself.

Bonus tip: these were pieces I read and understood, and I could help my struggling students through the rhetoric. Which leads me to my next tip...

Tip #3

When planning, pick pieces you are comfortable and confident digging deep with students. The more comfortable and confident you feel with a piece, the digger you will dig into the piece with your kids, and the more you will all enjoy the experience.

It is best to dig deep into fewer pieces than go wide by giving them too many. This was a mistake I made my first year. I gave the students too much, and it overwhelmed me and it overwhelmed them. The first year I taught this class, my students read eight books. I still do NOT know how they survived. I made a rookie AP mistake of not going deeper into the text, I went wider instead by giving them more to read. This was because I was not overly comfortable and confident in the books to go deeper since most were new pieces for me to teach.

Do not do this to yourself. Go few. Go deep.

Tip #4

Make a 9-week plan (or whatever your school is on). This was the best tip I received from my mentor my first year. She shared her idea with me, and I created my own.

Up until this year, I used my 9-week plan like a boss. I told my students it was our Class Bible. When in doubt, check the plan. It let students know what their homework was for the entire 9-weeks so they could plan accordingly; it allowed students to know when timed essays and multiple choices were scheduled; it had pacing for their readings; it allowed parents to know what was due when for their children; and it was my lesson plan ready to simply fill in state objectives.

In the past, I saw my students every other day. For a couple of years I had A day on Mondays/Wednesday, B day on Tuesdays/Thursdays, and a skinny day on Friday where I saw all of my kids on a limited time frame.

This year I am not using a 9-week plan because I am having to pace the class much differently than ever before. This year I have my kids twice a week, and every other Friday. Pacing is killing me, so I decided to not create a 9-week plan this year until I understood how to pace these weeks. With that said, because I used 9-week plans for seven years, the pacing is down in my head. It is just a matter of amending the pacing to accommodate me not seeing them four days in a row (in some cases).

9-week Plans

Here are my 9-week plans from the 2013/2014 school year. It was the year that I feel I paced my kids the best, so I use this year's plans when looking to pace my kids for the last few years.

• A day 1st 9-weeks
• A day 2nd 9-weeks 
• A day 3rd 9-weeks
• A day 4th 9-weeks

Langers, those are my tips for planning. I hope there is something here you can takeaway and use.

What tips and tricks do you use when you plan and pace your class? Share below. I am always looking for new ideas.

Happy Teaching!

• The Hodgenator

Interrupted reading: Slowing students down to dive deeper into a passage

One frustration I have in teaching analysis sometimes is that my students often want to rush through a text as if they’re taking some kind of high stakes timed multiple choice exam. They seem to have a mindset of getting it done rather than recognizing and understanding the richness in a passage. When I want students to slow down and really look closely at the choices a writer makes, I pull out a technique I learned from Larry Scanlon at a Bellevue, WA AP Summer Institute years ago. He called it an interrupted reading because you don’t allow the students to read the whole selection right away. An interrupted reading breaks the text into small chunks, each one to be examined thoroughly before moving on to the next. This forces students to focus on short bits for extended periods of time. More on that later.

Larry  introduced it to us using the introduction to Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez. To do this right takes a bit of set-up.  You’re looking for an interesting section of text that divides into workable sections and Rodriguez’s intro fits the bill well. Ideally, you’ll want to type the text into sections such that each section has its own page. To conserve paper, I put multiple copies of the same text on each page so I can use half sheet or smaller packets of text. I still use Larry’s example text from Rodriguez (this document has 3 copies per page) the first time I do an interrupted reading during the year, which for me was a little over a week ago.

The first section is the entire first paragraph: “I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle.” For this text, I ask them to look for allusions, diction choices, figurative language, predictions, and anything they might notice about the relationship(s) between the elements in the sentences. I give them a couple of minutes to annotate and write down any observations they might have. Then I bring them back together and I write their observations down on the board, discussing them as a class as we go.

Most of the time my students are perplexed by Caliban as they have not read the Tempest, so I need to fill in enough they will be able to make connections later, but not so much I make those connections for them. We run through possibilities of what kinds of books might have been stolen, listing ideas on the board as students say them. Examples here range widely: legal books, accounting books, cookbooks, spell books, instruction books, and so on. We'll even talk about what these different choices might imply. We clarify isle vs aisle. We keep probing the passage, wringing everything we can out of it while paying special attention to implications. My go to question is, “What else do you notice?” When the class has exhausted their insights and there is nothing major they are missing, only then do I have them turn the page. When doing the Rodriguez passage, we typically spend 8-10 minutes per chunk.

At that point, we read, “Once upon a time, I was a “socially disadvantaged” child. An enchantedly happy child.” I add to our previous list that they should pay attention to quotation marks and fragments.  They recognize the fairy tale allusions right away and we spend quite a bit of time working out the connotations and implications inherent in the word choice, quotations, allusions, and fragments. This keeps going through all 6 sections.

Afterward (typically as homework or the next day), we read the rest of the introduction up to “It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far.” building upon our deep understanding of those first four paragraphs. Almost every time, they begin to see Caliban as a lens through which to interpret the rest of the text, making repeated connections back to the beginning and throughout the text. It teaches them to see detail and ask questions of the text even after they are “done” i.e. have noted the first thing they noticed. It helps break that tendency of students to move on as soon as they find something/anything. It effectively changes the goal of their reading.

So the steps are this:

1. Pick a rich piece of text
2. Divide it into 4-6 sections manageable sections
3. Make a packet with 1 section per page
4. Decide what you want students to look for and note those elements on the board
5. Instruct the students NOT to read ahead
6. Read the first section together
7. Give the students time to look for the elements you’ve instructed them to look for
8. Write their observations on the board
9. Discuss
10. Rinse and repeat.
11. Use insights gained here to build deeper understanding of the rest of the text.
12. Have students write about it.

Currently I’m using this method with the first three paragraphs of Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell. They will be writing an essay on that piece shortly, and it pays dividends for the rest of the essay to have them looking closely at word choice, tone, qualifications, etc. This isn’t a technique I use often like Liz’s back-pocket analysis strategy, but it does the job of teaching them to focus closely on a text admirably well and tends to make for a fun class period or two.

Note: I teach in 52-minute class periods. To do an interrupted reading well with the first three paragraphs of Shooting an Elephant typically takes a period and a half. With these longer paragraphs, I always begin by writing all of the interesting words they noted on the board, then we categorize them based on connotation or level of formality or whatever seems important for that paragraph. I start with word choice because it helps them recognize the tone and prompts other observations as well. With the Rodriguez passage from the handout above, we usually finish the interrupted reading in one period.

One caution if you choose to use the Rodriguez passage: In the past, my students didn’t always understand that each page was from the same text. Now when I introduce the activity, I make sure to be exceptionally clear that it is the whole text up to that point and they are consecutive sentences.

I hope you find this to be a useful technique. I certainly have.