Introduction
Back in 2003, my student teaching adviser forced all her advisees to read Nancie Atwell's quintessential text In the Middle. I hated it. Atwell's ideas were pie-in-the-sky. Of course, this workshop system worked for her when she worked in her own school and developed the class structures and procedures herself. How date my adviser make me read this text when this system could never work in a real school, with read students, and real accountability? Yet, when I revisited the text this semester and her words reemerged in my memory, I saw my experiences from the last four years in Atwell's narration.
I feel I can sympathize with Dianne Dodsworth who wrote a short piece titled “Nancy, you lied!” She explained how she excitedly jumped into writing workshop expecting to follow In The Middle like a cookbook. Yet, as she went, she realized that she had to adapt the information provided by Atwell to fit her teaching style as well as her student's experiences. I could identify to this very much. I was ready to give all these ideas a try, but was not sure how they would work in reality. Her comments made me feel very secure in having asked my students about their writing pasts. Just like Dodsworth's students, some of my students have never experienced writing workshop, and I needed to know that information if I was going to fully understand what was happening in my class and how best to modify my teaching to support my students.
Question
Thus this year, I made the decision to teach all my courses using reading and writing workshops. Two factors manifested this change. First, the lowest and middle levels at my school were combined so that I would have a wide range of abilities and motivation in a single class. My old method of telling students what to read and write and when would not work with such a diverse group. This course adjustment alone would not have brought about the changes in teaching. My course work for my master's over the past year focused a lot on providing choice for students and authentic reading and writing situations. Slowly, my aversion to Atwell's approaches changed, and by the end of the summer, I dedicated myself to giving students reading and writing in class daily as well as free reign to choose what and how they completed these activities.
Once the year has started, the reading portion of my class ran well. Student's commented in reflections that they are learning about what they like to read and how to choose and abandon books. The library return pile at the back of my room often overflows the bin and I'm having a hard time keeping up with end of book conferences.
However, the writing portion of class was a different story. I feel that often other elements of class run over into writing time and that the directions I am giving are confusing to the students. While they seem to understand the idea of choosing anything they want to read, many are having a hard time choosing from any topic about which to write. As a result, I have some very silly writing pieces, some boring writing pieces, and also some nonexistent writing pieces of students who are stuck or overwhelmed. When I give the students time to write, I don't feel that much writing is actually taking place and I'm not sure why.
I want to investigate what is actually occurring during my writing workshop time. Are students writing? How many students are sitting there lost or stuck? How many of those conversations are about writing? Is more “work” occurring during the silent time versus the time they are allowed to talk?
Context and Sample
Leavitt Area High School is in a rural area. When I first moved here from a Boston suburb, I had a lot to learn about how this area of Maine differed from where I grew up. Not only did I have learn about four wheeling, hunting, and different types of skiing, I had to realize that in a rural community the students have fewer college options, less wealthy families, and longer distances to get to “town.” Over my four years at Leavitt, I have learned that we have all ranges of students from Special Education students with heavy modifications to valedictorians that go on to Harvard; in my current class load, I have representatives of the whole range.
I teach five freshmen classes (91 students total); two of these classes are “academic” (36 students) and three are “advanced” (55 students). Seven of the academic freshmen are really sophomores or juniors who are repeating, only one of which had me last year. I also have one class of “advanced” sophomores (14 students), all of whom I had last year, one of which moved up a level. Of these students, I have two Latino student and one African American student. Eight of my students have Special Education modifications. Sixteen of my students are the younger sibling of a student I had in a previous year.
With this as a possible sample, it was challenge to decide which students to focus on for my study. Using the full sample would be too much for the time span of my course, but any one class wouldn't show accurately the the range of students I teach. In the end, I decided to go with my top group of advanced freshmen and one group of my academic student. The advanced class was an easy choice since it contained some of the top caliber students I've encountered at Leavitt (as well as some very involved parents). Meanwhile, the the academic class contained three students with special education modifications and three students repeating the course, each for very different reasons. In both classes, some student were better at the subject of English than others, preferred the subject more than others, or were more motivated than others. I also wound up with a range of personalities from shy to talkative, leaders to followers, inquisitive to disinterested. These two classes also met on the same day, which I thought would help me in planning around my observations. The advanced class met first period and thus I will refer to them as Group 1 for the duration of the study; the academic group was my second class of the day, though met third period after my prep, and they thus will be referred to as Group 2.
At Leavitt, we have 80 minute class periods every other day. When I decided to start free choice reading and writing workshop, I needed to break up the period. I followed the time table Atwell shares in The Reading Zone and gave more time to writing than to reading based on her assertion that more reading will get done at home than writing. Thus, I started each period with 20 minutes of time to read, followed by 30 minutes for teacher led instruction, and wrapped class up with 30 minutes of time for writing, the first third of which I asked to be silent. There were problems with this set up from the get go. I often had trouble completing what I needed to and still have 30 minutes for writing. Sometimes I would fall behind due to my own over planning; other times it was because the students were unfocused slowing down my lessons. Still on other occasions, we were delayed by students' unexpected questions or problems. Another problem I encountered was the problem I had when I used to teacher our semester long essay writing course for freshmen, Writing Lab. I would give my lesson about writing, tell the students what I wanted them to work on, and then make myself available to conference with students, but no students would want to conference. Thus, almost all the period for almost the whole course was spent with the students working on their writing. Not only did this leave me feeling I wasn't teaching, which I wasn't, but the students quickly got bored with the predictable structure. I soon found what I was falling into my old patterns with class writing time.
Literature Review
Since my central question was to discover what was happening in my classroom so that I could then modify the structure and my teaching to enhance student productivity and products, I primarily researched how other teachers structured their writing workshops.
The next text I referenced was The Nine Rights of Every Writer. I read this as part of Denis Enrico's course on the Writing Process. That course was the first stepping stone in my decision to try writing workshop. The author outlines nine rights of writers spending a chapter explaining how each one is necessary.
I then began to think about what it was that I needed to teach. What should these mini-lessons be about? I had my school's curriculum to guide me, but it was so cold a document. So disconnected from the actuality of teaching. So, while searching for articles, I kept coming across Katie Wood Roy's text What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop. Roy describes how writing teachers can use their own experiences as readers and writer's as curriculum for their classrooms. She recommends telling the story of a writing experience. Each of these experiences can be molded into a stories that teach multiple understandings and experiences about writing.
Roy's text lead me to Breathing In, Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Notebook by Ralph Flectcher. This short text gave a lot of information on the tricky task of helping students generate ideas to write about.
Data Collection
I first decided to observe my students. How were the students interacting with each other? How were they tackling the task of writing? I thought being able to stop and watch and listen to what the students were doing, instead of all the other teacher duties, would allow me to see this part of my class in a new light. But before I started observations, I had students answer two questions: What do you think is going well in this class? and What do you think is not going well in this class? This data allowed me to focus my observations on the silent time of writing workshop because the biggest complaint was that silent time wasn't actually silent and students were distracted.
Since the short questionnaire worked well, I decided to give my students a longer survey to complete around the same time I started observations. (See survey at the end of the post). At the suggestion of my professor, I asked my students many questions about their past experiences with writing, which I hoped would provide insight now how they adapted to my class. I also asked my students several questions that asked for feedback on their current opinions on how they write. All put one survey that went out came back in. Only one additional student didn't complete the survey because she was absent when it was given. From their answers, it appeared that students understood the questions quite well. I only noticed one survey with answers that didn't match what the question asked.
With survey completed, I started observing. I observed Group 1 four times on November 3rd, 14th ?, 12th, and 18th. Meanwhile, I observed Group 2 of students on November 3rd, 5th, 7th, 12th, 14th, and 18th for a total of six times. I realized that it was harder for me to remember to do the observations first period in the morning and thus completely forgot to observe the students working on two occasions. On the first occasion, the discussion the students held before writing time ran over into the allotted time.
When I observed, I sat at my desk and watched and listened to the students as they were asked to work silently at the beginning of their writing time. The way my room is organized, I could see all students sitting at the desks clearly. Students who moved to sit on the floor to write were partially obstructed by students in the seats or by the table at the back of the room. (insert pictures of my classroom). My observations usually lasted for ten minutes, which was usually the portion of writing time that was silent, but I often would jot down another note or two after a few more minutes.
I ran into two additional complications with observing. I found that students had a hard time not coming up and talking to me while I was trying to observe. This was hard for several students in Group 1 who often need to ask questions. In Group 2, there were a couple of students who needed to ask questions, but more often it was two students who wanted to talk with me because they didn't fit in with their classmates. After addressing this problem with the students and asking them to hold their questions and comments until the end of the ten minutes, it improved.
My second obstacle was that I found I could not exactly tell what students were doing or saying from where I was sitting. I worked on this problem in a few ways. During a few observations, I made a cycle around the room to see what students were doing. On another occasion, I asked students to put in writing what they had been working on. Mostly though, I started to watch the students who sat closest to my desk to see and hear their actions. This lack of knowledge about their actions also led to my decision to analyze work samples. I wanted to now look at what they had been doing while I watched previously.
I originally planned to conduct interviews of several students who stood out during observations. However, I realized that looking at actual samples of student work created over the observation period would be more interesting. The students completed two assignments during the period I was working on my study. The first was a rewrite of a piece they did first quarter or in middle school. the second was their third free choice writing piece.
The largest complication with this collection of data was unfortunate, yet very predictable. For the rewrite assignments due November 20th, all but one student in Group 1 turned in the work; this student forget the assignment at home in her rush to catch the bus. However, in Group 2 only seven students turned in the work. As part of another class procedure that works on helping students turn in all their work, I had students with missing work tell me in writing why the work wasn't completed. There was a wide variety of reasons from note having a printer, not being finished, losing the original piece of work, forgetting to do the assignment, forgetting to bring in the assignment. Two additional students did not hand in the assignment; one was absent that day from class and the other was a transfer student who had joined class too late in the assignment to catch up by the due date and was thus exempt. This happened again with the free choice writing assignment due on December 5th. This time Group 1 had three missing assignments and Group 2 had eleven missing assignments.
As the study continued on, I asked students to submit an exit note stating a writing strategy they used as well as a short informal reflection on the piece of work submitted at the end of the observation period. I asked for these pieces to get more immediate information on to inform my teaching as well as to make sure that the students were thinking about what were they were doing during writing time and holding themselves accountable for producing some results. I affixed the exit note to the reflection and photocopied them in order to analyze them looking for patterns. These reflections will guide me as I look at the product the student submitted. In the end, I decided to use the exit notes and reflections as my third piece of data collection because the products (rewrites and third free choice piece) were just too much information to analyze properly given the time scope of my study and too many assignments were missing.
Data Analysis
I started my analysis with the easiest pieces to process: The surveys. I found the percentages of students who answered each question each way for the multiple choice questions. Some of this data met my expectations. For example, most students were not used to being expected to write for an extended period every class. Only 32%, or eleven students, said they wrote every class in the past. For the open answer question about how the teacher structure writing time, five students had comments that supported the low percentage of students who wrote every class in middle school. There were also six students who answered stating that the writing time in middle school was inconsistent. Overall, I now know that the majority of my students are not used to writing for thirty minutes every class. In addition, I began to wonder if it was possible that the students didn't understand how their writing time was structured; could what seemed inconsistent to the students, have been a plan to the teacher?
While there were other items I did not expect, such as that 56% of my students were used to have writing pieces met a couple times a quarter, some data fell in the middle. For example, when I asked students if they thought they were writers or not, a little over half said no, about a third said yes, the the remainder said something in-between. I wasn't expecting the in-between comments. (Share some comments). Another interesting fact was that before I mixed the two groups of surveys, I happened to look at this question and I discovered that all but three students in Group 2 felt that they were not writers.
After computing the percentages for the multiple choice questions, I coded the data from the open answer questions. The clearest pattern arouse when comparing the lists of areas about which students felt confident or uncertain. Five categories dominated their answers: Finding topics, different genres, parts of a piece, steps of the writing process, and grammar or mechanics. All of the comments on confident areas fell into these five areas except for two students that said they were confident in all areas, one student who said the amount of time to write created confidence, and a last comment simply said “the easy stuff.” Likewise, almost all the answers about which areas students felt uncertain fell into the same five categories. Outlying answers included two students who said they were uncertain of most areas, one student who didn't know, and one comment on making writing interesting. What was most surprising to me was that these answers didn't show exact deficiencies across the board. Instead, the needs of the two classes were very diverse. Also, 88% of my students were able to clearly identify an area of weakness and strength.
Next, I coded the reflection and exit notes I received from students. I found three reoccurring categories. Many students said they were surprised at the amount of revision they did. Many students confused revision and editing or focused on fixing mistakes. Many students mentioned that working with a peer was very helpful.
Lastly, I coded my observations. I noticed a few small items, such as that I didn't really keep track of how long students were in the bathroom, but mostly I discovered three big items. Ordinarily, when I am at my desk, I don't just stand around watching because it is boring and awkward. I don't like hovering over students because I feel it invades their space. Yet, when I work at my desk, I noticed that I miss out on a lot of data from the students. I wind up checking them out in order to get small tasks done. I also realized that most of my students have specific body language that they engage in when they are writing. This furthered my feeling that hovering over the students would invade their space. Lastly, I realized with my academic students, it wasn't so much that it took them a very long time to settle in to work, but that they would always pack up five or more minutes before the bell. For many students, this meant that they would only write with any focus for two or three minutes. Group 2 had this problem far worse than Group 1. In fact, most of Group 1 didn't notice the time. I am not sure if this is because Group 1 has more motivated student or more students who enjoy writing or if it is because Group 2 goes to lunch following my class.
Further Research
This study has left me curious in a few areas.
I want to explore further how students view themselves as writers. How would the students define a writer? What kind of writing does a writer do?
I also want to further explore how students perceive the structures teachers put in place. What do the students think about how much time they are given to work? About the requirements they are given? The freedoms they are given?
Implications
I had hoped that my research would give me insight into one large area. Instead, I have many small findings that I now can apply to my classroom practices.
First of all, I am more prepared for helping my students to assimilate into my workshop now that I know the types of experiences they have down at the middle school. I can call upon the fact that these students are used to frequent pieces being due, but also provide more support to help them know how to use their time to write and how to select topics and genres where they didn't have much choice in the past.
Additionally, I need to help the confidence my students have in themselves as writers. It was staggering that so few of my Group 2 students didn't believe they were writers and that overall only about half of my students saw themselves as a writer. I want to have more students who see themselves as this individual: (quote). Next year, I want to work more on discussing early on what makes a person a writer and what qualifies as writing.
The students are using the language of a writer to describe their strengths, weakness, and their experience with writing. I need to further encourage this practice by talking to students in that language and introducing more terms to them as we go. Furthermore, I should include more opportunities for them to reflect on their work, either during or after completion, so that they can continue to make this language their own.
However, I also need to do more work to make sure that there is meaning behind the language students use. The reflections showed me places where students may be parroting back what I expect (that revision brought about surprising amounts of change) or where terms are still not fully understood (that revision and editing are synonymous).
I also need to work on a plan so that I can address more fully the individual strengths and needs of my students as writers. The pressure of my top students has made this a concern in my mind all year, yet I was resistant because of the attacking approach used by the parents. This data now makes it clear to me that part of writing workshop is finding a way to get the individual needs of all students, not just the top ones with pushy parents, met. This could be a useful item to work on in my network as other teachers teach our heterogeneously grouped Writing Lab course as well as the mixed ability Academic courses. Having a plan in place would also allow me to remediate the skills I teach throughout the year, such as revision isn't editing and run-on sentences, to students who need it during class time without boring those who have it.
One way to provide this instruction is perhaps the easiest accommodation to make based on my data: Start giving the students instruction on how to use different types of writing manuals and handbooks. This will help them to work on their own individual needs, both remediation and further challenge, while also making them independent learners. I have already started this step by pulling different reference books, making a display for them as I do our reading books, and sharing this display with the students. (more description and add pics).
Lastly, I need to pay more attention to how I interact with student during writing workshop. In the past, I wanted to give students space during this time. I understood that students need time to think, talk, and work through their writing. But, I would wind up preoccupying myself with all the other tasks that can overwhelm me as a teacher, such as tidying up the room, responding to emails, or grading. Sitting down and watching my students work has allowed me to see how they work more as individuals and a group. I can see who is just shuffling papers and not really writing, who is staring off into space, who is just talking the whole time, and who is really invested in their work. I plan to make observation of my students working a regular part of my classroom practices. However, I have also learned that it appears my feeling about giving students space is well founded. I can see how protective the body language students have of their work is. Also, I can see how when they are really into their writing, they pull into themselves and their own world that doesn't need me intruding or hovering over them. Observing from my desk will allow me to discover which students need redirection, guidance, or space.
Works Cited
Atwell, N. (1998). In the Middle: new Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Fletcher, R. (1996). Breathing In, Breathing Out: Keeping a Writer's Journal. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ingalls, B. (1999). “Learning School / Learning to Write.” Teacher – Researchers at Work. Berkley, CA: National Writing Project.
Painter, D. (1999). “What Happens When Students Engage in Peer Interaction During the Writing Process.” Teacher – Researchers at Work. Berkley, CA: National Writing Project.
Ray, K. (2002). What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Spandel, V. (2005). The 9 Rights of Every Writer. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Survey
1. Circle the one that best describes your past experiences. In the past, my teachers gave me ...
- total free choice on what to write
- free choice with a couple guidelines
- a whole bunch of guidelines with a little bit of choice
- all guidelines and no choice
- topic
- format / genre
- length
- grammar, mechanics
- appropriateness of content
- appearance
3. If you were given guidelines, star the one above your teacher emphasized the most.
4. Do you like guidelines or having free choice? Explain why.
5. In the past, were you given class time to work on writing? Yes No
6. If yes to #4, explain how did your teachers structure your time to write?
7. How often did you have to turn in a big piece of writing?
- All the time! Something was due every three or four weeks.
- Occasionally. We had something due once or twice a quarter / trimester.
- Rarely. We did only a couple of pieces over the course of the year.
8. How often did you work on a big piece of writing in class?
- Every class.
- About once a week.
- We'd work for a few days in a row ever month or so.
- Rarely.
- Never. All writing was homework.
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