which teacher would you rather have?

this teacher:

Fluent Writing: How to Teach the Art of Pacing
by Denise Leograndis


Chapter 1

Synthesizing a Definition

When I first saw that NCEE New Standards bullet—provides pacing—I checked my memory for any knowledge of pacing in writing. Nothing. Apparently I had either forgotten or never heard of it in a writing context. I was careful to check way back to memories of lessons in my high school and college writing classes. Still nothing.

I proceeded to search out a definition. I found many similar and different and overlapping references. Eventually, I synthesized all these references and my supporting inquiry work into something that, I believe, makes sense and more importantly works well for my students.


Checking My Schema

As with any new learning that we encounter, we start building an understanding based on what we already know. As I had no pacing in writing connection, I checked my own schema for any references to pace and pacing. I found pace car, pace yourself, pick up the pace, and memories of my track coach hollering at me over his stopwatch.

All references to controlling speed

Let’s look at the ubiquitous “Pace yourself.” We use it in all sorts of different situations. We pace ourselves when we take on projects. For our students, we pace individual lessons and our yearlong plans. To pace something well is complex. To get the overall plan to work, you’ve got to consider and have control over all the details, big and small.

Control over all the details, big and small, to control the pace. True in life. Also true in writing?

I started asking around.


Advice from Others

“You know, short, medium, and long sentences,” a veteran teacher told me. I nodded. I had (and still do) read plenty of student writing where each sentence ends predictably at the same length as the last. Lifeless writing. Droning writing. Certainly sentence length is a critical element for the writer to control.

So I had the specific detail of sentence length. But is that the only detail that controls the pacing in writing? I needed more.

I asked a literacy coach. “It’s spending time on the important moment in the piece,” she said. Yes, I understood that. I remembered a fourth-grade student from the year before. He had spent every moment of our writing time nose down, writing and writing. By the time I conferred with him, he had nine pages of meticulous details of a five-hour plane ride he took to visit a relative he rarely saw. He recounted his journey from the car ride to the airport parking lot, to the ticket counter to the takeoff, the meal, the movie, everything. The joyous two-day reunion with the relative got one short paragraph. Followed by a “The End.” Boring writing. Disappointing writing.

Now I had two ways to focus a pacing lens on a piece, a small lens—controlling the pace through the details of a sentence length and a big lens—the balance of proper attention and time spent on the important moments in a piece. Anything else? I kept searching.


References in Professional Books

I gathered every professional book I owned or could borrow. I scanned the indexes, tables of contents and read every possible paragraph where pacing might show up. I found a little help here and there.

etc.

What’s on the Net?

There’s the axiom “consider the source.” Always good advice, but when comparing information gleaned from the Net as opposed to say, a book, I would prefer “judge the message, not the medium of conveyance.” So I surfed and I judged. I was determined to find definitions and explanations that made sense and would be helpful.

or this teacher:

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling: Skills for Better Reading, Writing, and Test Taking by Emily Kissner
ISBN-10: 0325007977
ISBN-13: 978-0325007977


Introduction

I started teaching language arts at the height of the whole language movement. The supervisor in my district had removed the old scope and sequence, drill and kill-based curriculum in favor of a far more open curriculum that allowed teachers to plan their own lessons and make their own judgments. “But I have no judgment!” I remember wailing to my mother, also a teacher. “How do you think I learned what to do?” she asked, and showed me her bookshelf, which was covered with stacks and stacks of professional books. I got the message. I couldn’t expect to make it through a career of teaching with only the knowledge I had picked up in a handful of undergraduate courses. If I was going to be successful, I needed to read. And read. And read.

During the next few years, I amassed my own collection of books. When I came to a thorny patch in my instruction—for example, how to get students to apply grammar skills to their writing—I would look through the books for ideas and solutions. If I didn’t find the answer in my own books, I would borrow from my mother’s bookshelf or the reading specialist’s. I knew that I couldn’t become comfortable with every aspect of teaching reading and writing in one year, so I slowly built on my knowledge base and developed my own judgment.

This helped me to cope with the changes that swept through my classroom during the course of the next seven years. I started teaching seventh grade writing, then added sixth grade writing to the mix. When Integrated Language Arts came to our school a few years later, I was thrilled to be able to teach a ninety-minute block of reading and writing. Our state outcomes became content standards, our state testing program was transformed from performance-based assessment to “selected response,” or multiple choice, and the district middle school reading and writing department was headed by three different supervisors who dispersed three different curriculum manuals. As if these changes were not enough, I uprooted myself after seven years and went to teach a self-contained sixth grade class in a tiny rural district. Moving from a district with 28,000 students to a district with 1,80 was quite a culture shock.

Some people may have found the pace frustrating, but I liked the excitement. I learned how to adapt to new thinking and new ideas while still holding on to the philosophies and structures that worked in my classroom. The more things changed, the more I could see how some things remained the same. Whether I was teaching to outcomes or standards, whether my curriculum was organized according to theme or genre, whether I had a classroom with windows, I faced young adolescents every day. All the books in the world cannot prepare a teacher for what happens once the students walk into the room.

I certainly wasn’t prepared to teach summarizing. Included as a content standard and an assessment anchor, I knew that summarizing was important, and I dutifully tried to help my sixth and seventh graders write summaries of both fiction and nonfiction texts. I envisioned smoothly written short pieces, like those in TV Guide, that would elegantly capture the essence of a text with a minimum of words.

What I got were stacks of bizarre constructions that claimed to be summaries —or “sumeries,” as my students often wrote—that either copied whole sentences of text, focused on just one section, or missed the main points altogether. Sometimes I wondered if the students had read the same text that I had. The more able students could occasionally pull together a coherent comment or two, but often they would try to jam a summary into the traditional paragraph template — topic sentence, supporting details, concluding sentence.

I learned many things from the article. How tomb robbers took things from tombs, what they stole from tombs, and what they were like. It was a great article.

I wasn’t sure of how to help them. My usual comments—”Elaborate. Add more. Give more detail” —are not helpful for summarizing. The students thought I had become temporarily insane when I told them, “That’s too long. Make it short. Are those details necessary?”

Standing in front of the classroom with a student summary on the overhead projector, I struggled to explain to the students why it was not effective.

“But the article is about trees, right?” Patrick asked from the front row. “So why can’t I say, ‘This article is about trees?’”

I floundered. As the teacher, I was supposed to know these things! “It’s not good writing,” I said, finally.

“It sounds good to me,” Patrick said, to a chorus of agreement from elsewhere in the room. “I think it’s fine.”

I tried to use various graphic organizers or catchy formulas, but I couldn’t find anything that would work with every text every time. “Write down the main points and important details,” I told the students, only to realize that they could not find the main points or identify the important details.

To make matters worse, the usual rubric we used to assess reading comprehension questions did not work for summaries. We were focused on getting kids to include text evidence in their responses to questions. However, summaries don’t require explicit text evidence or references back to the text, and when kids tried to add those elements, they created some pretty strange responses.

This article was about tomb robbers in ancient Egypt. I know this because the author made the title be “Tom Robbers and the Mummy’s Treasure.” The author explained what treasures were in the tombs and how the tomb robbers stole the treasures. I know this because the author said so.

So I was faced with teaching something that I couldn’t explain and couldn’t assess. It was time to hit the books and find out what was really going on.

Strangely, though, I didn’t find very much written about summarizing. There were a few pages in a content area reading textbook, scattered mentions in books about reading strategies, and philosophical ruminations about what is important in a text. Most discussions of summarizing cited the same research and listed the same steps for helping kids to improve their work. I found little to tell me why students don’t summarize well, what skills students need to write good summaries, or the relationship between summarizing and reading comprehension.

Not much of a contest if you ask me.


update 10-5-07:

The right answer is teacher number 2!!!!!

Teacher number 2 is a mensch!!!!

Teacher number 2 also took it upon herself to go out and REALLY research what-is-a-summary-and-how-do-I-teach-it, and then to write a funny, self-deprecating story about this process by way of an introduction to her book on the subject of summaries, paraphrases, and retelling, which is terrific, btw.

Teacher number 1 is pretentious, self-obsessed ("I synthesized," "I checked my schema," "I surfed and I judged"), and disrespectful to young children ("Boring writing. Disappointing writing.")

It's appalling to write such words about a child's writing; it's even more appalling to write such words about a child's writing in short, two-word sentences that are clearly intended to display the author's command of variety in sentence length.

.............................

I found Teacher Number 1's book on Amazon nearly a year ago (I own the book by Teacher number 2).

The opening passage of Fluent Writing was really the first time I "got" the grandiosity of so many of these people.

I'm starting to think it's possible to spot a closet instructivist simply by analyzing the language he or she uses in letters and emails.

Direct and frank language may be a tip-off.

It's possible.