Reaching the Goal

The report "Reaching the Goal: The Applicability and Importance of the Common Core State Standards to College and Career Readiness" shows strong support among college faculty for the Common Core State Standards, which clearly will prepare students well for success in higher education.  I could not agree more.  The sooner we act to adopt these standards the better, especially when recent ACT data suggest that fewer than 1/4 of all students taking the test are prepared for success in college!

Summer College for Teachers: Links of Interest

The following links are among those we will discuss during the technology portion of our program for the Summer College for Teachers, August 2.


The Rutgers Writing Program

• Expos the MovieYou can find several videos about Expos at Rutgers at this location as well as at our website.
• Rutgers Writing Program website where you will find information about our classes, including Expository Writing (scroll to the bottom for downloads)
• NewHum website
• Plangere Writing Center
• Writers House

Teaching Expos 101 from Expos the Movie on Vimeo.


Common Core State Standards


For those wanting to learn more about the new Common Core, the following links may help:

• Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3–12
• Common Core State Standards
• Writing and the Common Core

Decision-Making and Critical Thinking Webliography
The following list is an experiment in curating internet readings for high school and college teachers.  We think that this may be a valuable way of making viable readings available for high school teachers of English so that they do not have to invest all of their Common Core "conversion" money in materials but can put it where it will really make a difference: in teacher training.  We are hoping to make a large number of webliographies available to teachers, along with collaborative tools for sharing assignments and other materials.

• Dan Ariely, "Painful Lessons" -- PDF download (January 30, 2008) This essay on the author's experience of being terribly burned became the introduction to his later book, Predictably Irrational.
• Sharon Begley, "I Can't Think!" (Newsweek, February 27, 2011)
• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July / August 2008) Controversial when published, Carr's article presented his initial thoughts, later expanded in The Shallows, on the way Google has encouraged a generation of skimmers and not deep thinker.  See James Bowman's "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" for an interesting response.
• John Dewey, How We Think (widely available, including at the Internet Archive) A seminal work on thought and decision-making and how these should be the content of the school curriculum.
• David Dobbs, The Science of Success (The Atlantic,  December 2009) "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."
• Nitika Garg and Jennifer Lerner, "Sadness and Consumption"
• Adam Gopnik, "The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us" (The New Yorker, February 14, 2011)
• Seunghee Han and Jennifer Lerner, "Decision Making"
• Jonah Lehrer, "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up." (Wired, December 21, 2009)
• Jonah Lehrer, "Don't: The Future of Self-Control."  (The New Yorker, May 18, 2009) This article revived interest in the now famous "marshmallow test" and what it has taught us about the importance of self-control.
• Maria Popova, "The Science of Choice: 5 Perspectives"
• Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Extract from Nudge (The Independent, March 22, 2009)

Blogging

• Blogs for Learning
  An excellent site maintained by Michigan State University devoted to using blogs in education.
• Inwords/Outwords by Anannya Dasgupta and students
  An example of using a blog to have students communicate with each other and share drafts.  The teacher gave every participant equal access to the blog to post.  You could also post questions and use the blog comments feature as a bulletin board for threaded discussion.  But enabling students to post to the blog had some interesting fringe benefits, such as their ability to share links to online material.
• College! by Michael Goeller
  In my research writing class last year, I had all students set up a project blog to track their progress throughout the semester and to give me many chances to intervene along the way.  I set up a blog myself that linked to all of their blogs.
• Sakai at Rutgers
  The home page of our open source course software.

Google Docs


One of the best ways to encourage revision and online collaboration is through Google Docs, which is part of the Google suite of tools.
Google Docs

Other Links

Jane E. Miller
Science teachers will find Dr. Miller's links under "Writing about Numbers" of value.

Reality Hunger

I am reading Reality Hunger by David Shields, which you can find mostly reproduced on the web -- perhaps because so much of the book itself is a collage of stolen quotes that it might be difficult to sustain claims of copyright violation against the poster.  It's a much more slippery consideration of the rising importance of nonfiction than represented by Shields's critics, who universally quote his statement that he will not read the latest Pulitzer Prize winning novel because fiction "has never seemed less central to the culture's sense of itself" (section 523).  While I couldn't agree more with that sentiment, I am not sure if Shields himself truthfully agrees with it, since he tells us in so many ways that the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction are more blurry than we might want to admit.  


The term "nonfiction," like "truth" or "reality," is almost a word in which we do not believe: as Shields writes, "Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks" (section 1).  The best proof of how slippery "nonfiction" can be is the title of the book currently at the top of the bestseller list for "nonfiction" (New York Times and Amazon): Heaven Is for Real.  This is just one of many such books on the market -- my favorite example of which is The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin Malarkey -- and it follows in a long tradition of such books, which were already so numerous by the early 20th Century that they inspired Mark Twain to write his comic Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909).


In the end, Shields is so slippery in his defense of nonfiction that you begin to wish for a more coherent defender of that mode of writing.  But his book does remind us that it is difficult to make fine distinctions among nonfictions as we move toward introducing them into the curriculum.  


What sort of nonfiction should we be teaching?  I used to say "fewer first-person narrations" and more "books about ideas, in clear conversation with other voices."  But then I consider this strange book itself, which is a collage of quotations from others intermixed with the authors own writing -- all represented as first-person narration -- and yet so clearly a book about ideas in conversation with other voices.  I'm not sure if that means we need a clearer distinction or if that means all distinctions can inevitably be deconstructed.

Is College Worth It?

I taught a research-writing class last year called "College!" where students took on research subjects related to higher education.  My focus was on the privatization of public education, and among the readings we discussed was Tad Friend's "Protest Studies," about the Berkeley student unrest following major budget cuts in California.  I was frankly disheartened, though, by the large number of students who were not asking if we as a society should invest more in public education but instead asking the question, "Is College worth it?"  Of course, they meant "is it worth the investment" for the individual, in strictly economic terms.  And, from an individual perspective, it might feel like a reasonable question, especially considering that most of them have already gone into debt and have to consider accrued interest in paying back their loans, the high cost of tuition, and the four years of lost wages in making the calculation.  


Those who asked "Is College worth it?" did not recognize, however, that the question itself arises out of the privatization of higher education: students now look at the degree purely as an economic benefit to the private individual, something that adds to the graduate's earning power -- on average "about $1 million in a lifetime" (which has been the claim since the Reagan years and confirmed recently, including in The New York Times following Pew Research and by more recent studies; of course, it depends on your degree; and you do have to wait well over a decade after graduation before you catch up with the earnings of your peers who became UPS drivers right out of high school.)

Is college worth it?  According to NPR, this question gets asked every time there is a recession and individuals become debt averse.  But even from an individual perspective, almost all of us with college degrees can easily answer, "yes."  As the author of "Yes, College Is Worth It" (from Confessions of a Community College Dean) relates, few individual graduates would ever surrender their college degrees (and everything associated with that degree), so the easy answer is "Of course college is worth it."   And as the Lumina Foundation, the Obama administration, and the Gates Foundation will tell you at great length, it is imperative for our society to get more people to choose college and to graduate.  It is not about the individual alone, and it has to be a social commitment to make it happen.

So who is encouraging young people to think that skipping college might be a better option?  Who wants us to be asking, "Is college worth it?"  Who doesn't want kids going to college?  And who is supporting talk of a "college bubble"? (talk recently debunked quite forcefully in an article titled "What bubble?")  


Or is it just that we find it so difficult to think outside of the language of privatization, that the question just comes to us naturally?  We as a society are now unwilling to help foot the bill, so the cost of college falls to the individual student -- or, as in the cartoon above, it falls on the individual student as his or her private debt.  Privatization at its best.


Is college worth it?  That's not the right question.  A better question is: Can we, as a nation, afford not to send our high school graduates to college?

New Jersey Writing Alliance Conference

I attended the New Jersey Writing Alliance's Conference this Tuesday entitled "Writing for the 21st Century: Expectations, Experience and Exigencies" (http://www2.bergen.edu/njwa/index.asp). As I walked through the halls at the College Center building of the Middlesex County College Edison Campus, I thought heavily about the word exigency. The needs of our students at the college level are compounded by lives filled with mutlimodal media, the stress for job-specific academic careers and difficult financial times. The budgetary issues facing New Jersey school districts and public universities have made instruction an even larger challenge. The board members of the NJWA desired to address these issues and many more as they related to the transition from high school to college writing.

My desire to see what high school teachers felt about college writing sent me to many sessions involving the transition between the two and how to deliver effective remedial instruction. My first session was a themed panel involving two presentations. This theme was called "Helping Students Transition to College and the Real World." Dr. Kathy Mueller presented a documentary she developed about students' transition from her class to college writing. Her anecdotal work presented a gap between high school writing and what students are asked to do in college. She highlighted several areas involving argumentation and the need for textual support when students make claims. Dr. Mueller has worked closely with my colleagues, Mr. Michael Goeller and Ms. Regina Masiello. They have conducted professional development seminars in her district, Bayville Public School District, involving the work we do at the Writing Program and the Writing Program Institute. Her presentation called for more focus on close reading, peer revision, and strategies to answer complex writing assignments. Dr. Linda Littman and Ms. Jane DeTullio focused on in-classroom activities and discussion-based practices as an example of a way to bridge the gap. Many teachers responded later to this panel as desiring that writing instruction be presented as uninterrupted rather than a gap with two ends needing to be bridged. A call for a community of instructors in writing was received loud and clear. The teachers seemed to desire a community with regular conversations about how we all address the need for more complex thinking and writing.

The next session I attended discussed the Second Language Learner (L2) and what he or she can teach us about how to help him or her. Dr. Darcy Gioia, a director in the Writing Program, and Ms. Agnieszka Goeller, a fellow Writing Program instructor, used personal anecdotes and theoretical concepts based on their experience to help the audience understand the L2 learner. They expanded upon trends they noticed in the learning patterns of the L2 learner. They postulated on how an instructor might be able to ask questions that approach the core of the pattern of language issues plaguing the L2 learner. Individualized instruction is something every teacher can understand pedagogically. We all develop individualized instructional plans for our students, and the L2 learner is no exception. Dr. Gioia echoed an equal focus on argument in her instruction that Dr. Mueller mentioned in the first panel. Dr. Gioia sees her remedial instruction as in direct support of the standards upheld by the Writing Program. When she spoke of patterns of error in her panel, one teacher in the audience emphatically nodded in agreement. This expression reminded me that fundamentally all teachers of writing feel a commonality. We all want to improve our students' abilities and understand the need for claims of their own to exist in their writing. The remedial instruction performed at the Writing Program is one way to envision the writing process as a continuum across a student's entire academic career instead of within one semester or course.

The final session I attended was a round table discussion about the topics of the conference's subtitle. High school and college instructors investigated the new needs of students brought about by non-fiction focused standardized testing, including the HSPA and SAT. Many instructors identified a need for critical thinking and exposition as a necessity in their college classrooms. Although there was a brief hint of animosity between the two seemingly opposing entities within teaching, a sigh of relief came when one administrator expressed her vision of a continuum on which all writing instruction was placed. Instead of questions like what is the difference between the high school and college writing classroom? Ones arose asking, how do teachers achieve the same standards in different modes of instruction? What do the college instructors do in the classroom that the high school teachers can learn from? What can high school instructors teach their students about the college arena? How can college instructors adopt the instruction currently given in high school? And finally, what should we do with the "5-paragraph essay?"

Although the "5-paragraph essay" is seen as a problematic issue for critical thinking and writing because of its formulaic presentation, many college-level professionals said that it in fact presented a moment in a student's learning process that was a necessity to build critical thinking, a requirement at the collegiate level. Arising out of this structure presented the idea that a student's writing is a process throughout his or her academic career. Although many of us at the collegiate level recognize writing as a revision process, we might fail to see it as a developmental one. A developmental continuum that includes structural moments like the "5-paragraph essay," literary interjections like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and connectivity between authors as we teach in Expository Writing can address the problem modern teachers face in the classroom. We desire our students to be involved in a larger academic discourse and in doing so must change our vision for writing based on the very questions brought up at the conference.

The WPI attempts to administer these very values to high school teachers in an attempt to collaborate with school districts. I believe that my attendance at the conference identified for me a serious problem of vision for writing instruction and recognition that many professionals across New Jersey are aptly ready to take these issues to task. Missions like the WPI are the very theoretical basis we need to help continue this conversation towards a learning initiative. The idea that student learning is an uninterrupted path can help to underscore the collaborative nature of this conversation.

Writing and the Common Core State Standards

Professor Dorothy Strickland of Rutgers University last week made a PowerPoint presentation to the New Jersey Board of Education on The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS), which might mark the beginning of a wider discussion how these standards will change the curriculum.  We think it's important that those in education looking to improve college readiness get involved in the process, especially before major corporations begin selling their solutions.   Ultimately, the spirit of the Common Core can only be honored if we find a way of communicating its standards to teachers so that they can put them into practice themselves rather than purchasing some "one size fits all" solution.

As a slide in Professor Strickland's presentation cautions, it's important to "Establish a long-term program of information, communication, and active collaboration with all stakeholders" before buying into the "mass delivery of standardized instruction."  After all: "Knowledge and understanding of the Standards and the new Assessment Programs will be critical for good consumerism."

The Rutgers Writing Program is definitely a stakeholder in seeing that students are honestly made ready for college success.  We hope that the Common Core does not go the way of No Child Left Behind and become just another test-focused program.  As you move from recommending pedagogy to developing assessments, though, there is always the danger that standards will get boiled down into bubbles that #2 pencils can fill and a large corporation can sell.   And then the teachers become simply the means of delivering content.

Some of the news coverage of the Common Core suggests that we should be cautious about it being hijacked by the education-industrial complex.  Though the CCSS initiative began about two years ago and its standards, released last year, have been adopted by 44 states, it seems it only began to make the news when corporations began showing interest, as when the Gates Foundation announced that it will partner with Pearson Publishing to develop Common Core materials for classroom use, or when other potential content providers sent out press releases about their plans (such as: "LitLife to Assist Schools with Common Core Compliance").

Newspapers have been late to cover the CCSS, but a few have done a good job of reporting its calls for change.  Some of the better recent stories include "A Trial Run for School Standards That Encourage Deeper Though" (The New York Times), "Education Standards to Be Unveiled" (Charleston Daily Mail), and "Will Common Core Standards Make Students College-Ready?" (Huffington Post).  Last week's story in the Charleston Daily Mail emphasized the need for more complex non-fiction readings and more expository writing in the English and language arts curriculum: 

Assistant State Superintendent Robert Hull says changes to [English and language arts] will primarily involve the use of more 21st century literature and nonfiction, rather than just fiction. Educators also want a better focus on the writing process.

The amount of informational texts (nonfiction) compared to literary (fiction) found in classrooms is not known, but Edwina Howard-Jack, English/language arts coordinator for the state office of instruction, says the new standards place much more emphasis on informational texts.

Even in kindergarten, the new English/language arts standards call for half of the texts to be informational and the other half literary. By senior year, that would become 70 percent informational and 30 percent literary.

Another change will be reflected in increasing the difficulty in the required texts. Howard-Jack says there is generally a two-grade difference in the level of difficulty of most required texts currently offered.

'In working with teachers within the West Virginia framework, the teachers are just thrilled with these new standards and objectives. This is the direction we need to go and will make a difference in public and higher education,' Howard-Jack said.

Tightening the standards to become more focused on factual texts is also reflected in changes to writing expectations. Less emphasis will be placed on narrative and more on argumentative and explanatory writing.

The Rutgers Writing Program has long advocated the use of non-fiction prose about complex ideas and the need to emphasize the reading and writing of expository (rather than narrative) prose in high school.  The only way to engage students with this literature and the ideas it contains is to get them writing on their own, applying those ideas in novel ways, and making connections across multiple complex texts.  It's not something you can boil down to filling in bubbles with a number two pencil.  And it requires knowledgeable and engaged teachers to administer.  We hope everyone keeps that in mind.

Comments on "Death to High School English" in Salon

To confront the typically unspoken truth about why students throughout this country have so little practice writing formal essays, read Kim Brooks's "Death to High School English" in Salon.com.  Though she approaches the problem, rather divisively, from the perspective of a college professor complaining about the lack of writing instruction her students received in high school, Brooks ultimately highlights the common issues that we all confront as teachers of writing and the common burden we share, whether we teach in secondary schools or colleges.  Most importantly, Brooks visits a high school and confronts what is to my mind the core "logistical issue" of why students don't write more, which boils down to:

...the almost insurmountable challenge of teacher-to-student ratios, miserable ratios that are only going to get more miserable in light of the devastating teacher layoffs taking place around the country. At this particular school, every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students -- a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated. The very thought makes a cold, dark dread creep across my soul. It makes my own burden, two sections of composition, 15 students to a class, seem laughably light. And yet, to my more successful, tenured friends, even my numbers seem grueling. One of them says flatly, "I'd teach four sections of lit before I'd do one of comp. Four sections with my hands tied behind my back. It's just too much work."

As Brooks points out, the labor issue does not go away in college either: most of us who teach college English would prefer not to assign a lot of writing either, or to grade it with the care of a composition instructor.  Many literature professors get to teach with "their hands tied behind their backs" for most of the term, with the final papers in their classes used only for grading purposes.  


The labor of grading is the 500-pound gorilla in the room in any discussion of how we improve student writing.


In my own visits to high schools, I have frequently heard about this "logistical issue" that prevents teachers from assigning many formal essays in their classes: to do so would mean an unbearable burden and an additional month of uncompensated labor.  Who would willingly subject themselves to that if they did not have to?  -- especially when most of their colleagues don't do it and there will be no rewards for doing so.  In fact, assigning essays and grading them accurately will mean unhappy students and parents, talks with administrators, and little support from colleagues -- not to mention all of that work of commenting and grading.  


If we are honestly to confront how we get students to do more writing, we have to begin by confronting this problem and to do so at a structural level.  And I admire all of the great schools I've visited where administrators are the ones leading the way toward change, because it is they who are best positioned to deal with this "logistical issue" head on. 


Unfortunately, given the funding realities that public schools face, I don't have any easy answers for how they should do that.  Not yet anyway.  But I think it helps to raise the question and to do so honestly.  It will make us begin looking for an answer.

2011 Summer College for Teachers of Writing

For more information about the Writing Program Institute Summer College for Teachers, visit our website, which offers complete details and links to registration information.   Teachers completing the course receive 16 hours of professional development credit. 

Bayville Welcomes Rutgers

Regina Masiello and Michael Goeller present to teachers.

Teachers from a range of disciplines were in attendance.

We thought the sign was so nice we had to get a picture.

Afterwards, Michael had to get a picture with the school mascot.

Regina Masiello and Michael Goeller gave the first in a series of presentations at the Central Regional High School in Bayville, New Jersey, to a group of about 15 teachers plus administrators.  We talked about the growing importance of non-fiction prose and how teachers can incorporate it into the high school curriculum.  


While the majority of teachers were from English and language arts, there were also Spanish, Math, and Science teachers present.  One of the administrators brought up the importance of teaching students to read carefully in order to help them understand science texts or grasp "word problems" in math.  I recently attended a wonderful talk by Jane E. Miller of the Edward J. Bloustein School at Rutgers University, author of The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers, which brought home the point that if we do not address this issue in high school then we are dealing with a remedial writing problem when students get to college. Prof. Miller has some excellent resources at her website (under the heading "Writing about Numbers"), and I was especially impressed by her article on "How to Communicate Statistical Findings," which includes specific expository writing advice that would benefit high school students.