VoiceThread, Revision, and Conferring

I am growing to like VoiceThread as a way for students to share their work for feedback. Throughout the year, we do a fair share of student sharing and feedback in groups of three. Often, students will express that they hate reading their work. Some ask if another could read it for them. Sometimes, they wriggle out of it altogether.

Posting and narrating one's work on VoiceThread allows students to read and record their work aloud (an important phase of the revision process) and then listen or read the feedback of their peers...sometimes over and over.

It also allows me to hear as much of the feedback as I choose, and certainly allows me the time and flexibility to hear every student read their work. Obviously, when students are reading and sharing their work in class in groups, I cannot possibly hear and comment on every single piece of writing.

Using VoiceThread has, in a sense, created time...or suspended time. Because I can access it from my iPhone, laptop, iPad, or any web browser, I can access student work anywhere, at anytime. 

In my first example of student work, an 8th grade student, Connor, uploaded an original photograph. We participated in the My Hometown project which was run by the New York Times. I asked students to select one from  the dozen or so pictures they took of their hometown. With that picture, I asked them to write an original piece to complement it--it could be an essay, a narrative, a poem...anything.

This second example is a piece of an original story written by Sophie, also in 8th grade. Sophie uploaded her pages and then recorded herself reading it. Over the course of the next several days, I along with several other students will be offering comments on Sophie's work. Interestingly enough, when I had students practice leaving comments on a piece of my writing, they almost all choose to type them rather than record them on either an audio file or video file--even though VoiceThread makes that very easy to execute.

I am finding another level of understanding when I listen to my students read their own writing. Hearing their tone and inflection makes their pieces human in way that I miss as their primary reader...I am not hyper-focused on the flaws and find myself celebrating the positive elements. Also, their voice adds a freshness to working through a stack of papers--after all, I only "hear" my voice when I read student work silently to myself. VoiceThread helps me in this regard.

I know others use VoiceThread as a way to develop online student writing portfolios--something I will explore next year.

Teacher Appreciation Week

Expect for a listless tweet by Arnie Duncan and a couple of stray posts on my Facebook page, the whimper, otherwise known as Teacher Appreciation Week, has almost passed. In an effort to make it more audible, I wanted to write about some teachers...and realized I had forgotten some of their names.

The female teacher who encouraged me to draw pictures with colored chalk--she also hugged me as I wailed real tears as a witch ran through the blankets we were about to nap on (a Halloween surprise gone awry).

And it makes me wonder, after 19 years, how many have forgotten me. And, quite honestly, I don't blame them. Life rolls on. Out of sight, out of mind.

Mrs. Grasso, an elementary/middle grade teacher, drove from Philadelphia to Springfield, Delaware County, to watch me play ice hockey. While I also remember that she was pretty tough on us, her gesture of coming to watch me play still hangs with me.

In the past, when I saw "teacher appreciate week" I didn't really think much of it. Occasionally, a nice luncheon may have been planned. But for the most part, it takes it place on the hooks in the closet of national days of recognition.

In 8th grade, Sister St. Christopher thought of me when a local pharmacy called the school looking for delivery boy. I remember her pulling me into the hallway at Stella Maris--the hallways were always so dim with the evergreen carpet, beige and brown tiled walls, and low wattage bulbs overhead. She offered that I was the first person she thought of when the man asked for someone trustworthy and from a good home.

In reality, what sticks to my bones is the humanity of the people who taught me. Not the books or worksheets.

Mr. Carey was my 9th grade English teacher in all-boys Catholic school. We read The Canterbury Tales. I remember learning the word vermin. Yet, what I took from that class--even though I struggled to earn Cs and Bs--was his sense of humor. He made that slice of school a moment of joy--irrespective of my grades. 

Many years later, I ran into Bill Carey at bookstore in downtown Philadelphia. Introducing myself to him, he stared at me--I was lost among the hundreds, maybe thousands, of other boys who passed through his class. He had forgotten me.

We made small talk--he was very gracious and flashed the smile uncovered the sense of humor I remember--and then parted. 

I realize I have to read and listen to others to continue to grow as a teacher. I realize we have to pay attention to the scores and the outcomes and learn to adjust our curriculum and methods. And I realize, throughout a teaching career, when we count all of our administrators, parents, and students, we are held accountable to an entangled web of standards by thousands of different people. Yet, in the end, what sticks?

Mr. Smith was a well-liked math teacher. He also coached a pretty darn formidable girls basketball team. As a senior, I was failing Mr. Smith's math class.

My father called him on my behalf, and the next day Mr. Smith (his friends called him Smitty) offered me some help with my math--I could be the statistician for the girls basketball team. And so I did. I recorded their statistics, crunched their numbers, and Mr. Smith checked my work...and made corrections. 

I haven't seen Mr. Smith since that year--1986. But I happen to see a retired teacher (Dominic) who worked with "Smitty" and who subs in our building. Dominic shared that "Smitty" is battling Alzheimers Disease.

Our family has seen Alzheimer's at work in close friends and family. So, I am familiar with the courage required.

Privately, I grieve for Mr. Smith's fight with nature and time. In honor of those of who have helped shape me, I want to appreciate my current colleagues in my building and beyond our borders.

Our work wears on us, doesn't it? Even the positives take a piece of us...because they don't just happen. The positives are product of a lot of energy, emotion, and initiative.

And I have to acknowledge the negatives in education. They don't wear us out so much as they incite the bone spurs emerging on us--parts of us thicken. These negatives...they make the next round of positives that much more challenging to happen. Sometimes they rub on our teaching so much it can lead to a lot of discomfort in our positions as teachers and colleagues.

Yet, in my experience, the great ones worked through that discomfort and found a way to be positive...to be a force of good. The great teachers in my life were not those who needed to calculate or deconstruct or recite to impress me or move me...in my opinion, the great ones were better than that.

The great ones showed me compassion.

And there is no accounting for that...except in the fact that it is the one thing I will always remember.

YA Book Review: Jellicoe Road

Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Taylor Markham asks, "What's the difference between a trip and a journey?"

The answer offered is, "When we get there, you'll understand."

A few weeks ago I spent six hours in a car with a man I didn't know. Heading to the same conference, we carpooled. Six hours is a lot of time to talk about experiences, teaching, reading, and writing. One moment of the conversation resonates with me--we talked about the books we read.

We each had read Marilyn Robinson, but not the same novel.

We each had read some contemporary authors at the top of their game: Phillip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy--just to name a few. But, again, our reading stars didn't align. We hadn't read much in common.

And then I mentioned I also read a lot of YA literature--to keep pace with my students, to have recommendations, to be able to have conversations about the books they care about. I related a story of a girl stopping by my desk because she saw (on my sign outside my classroom door) that I was reading Crank by Ellen Hopkins. She wanted to talk about it because she had read it too.

While the teacher-student effort wasn't diminished, the nature of YA literature was with a "what are these books with slick plots that kids can slide right through with no challenge..." Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

For all intents and purposes, that is what I heard over the last few hours--I tuned him out.

The Printz Award Winner Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta made tears well up in my eyes.

Marchetta took the loving friendships of five adolescents and wove them into a sort of Gordian Knot for the main character, Taylor Markham.

Abandoned by her mother, a relapsing addict, at a 7-Eleven, Taylor is raised in a house on the fringe of a private high school. Her guardian, Hannah, is writing a novel about five adolescents. Taylor reads it in pieces..sometimes at the behest of Hannah. Initially, Taylor does not realize that the novel is actually Hannah's story...and Taylor's mother's story...along with their friends who also attended this very same school on the Jellico Road.

More than a coming-of-age novel, this is story about relationships in all of their forms...and the fact that relationships are hard. Even the easy ones carry some hardness.

I love the fact that friends keep coming back for one another--friends keep fighting for one another--and friends always find common ground and forgiveness for each other.

Simply put, Jellicoe Road is gritty YA novel which holds friendship and loyalty supreme. I found the message moving and as relevant as anything I might pick up by Colum McCann, Junot Diaz, or Jennifer Egan. (Although I would like to place A Visit from the Goon Squad into my reading pile!)

You don't need to be fourteen to be moved by this book.

And you don't need to be fourteen to read a novel that teaches the reader a little something about friendship.

View all my reviews

Five Reasons Why Computers Should Not Assess Writing

1. Computers Do Not Read With Understanding. By using algorithms based on components like sentence length, sentence structure, word frequency, computers substitute correlation for understanding. We write for the formula in the same way that we write for the scorer for the prompts found in state testing. As Robert B. Shephard commented after a Diane Ravitch piece about computers scoring student writing:

"Consider Noam Chomsky's famous sentence--Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This would be rated very readable by most readability systems. But it is utter nonsense."

2. Context is Human. Imagine the following passage from Ernest Hemingway's "In Another Country" monitored by the algorithm:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

The sentence structure is repetitive or, thought another way, uses parallel structure to create a rhythm and craft a tone. Similarly, the use of the conjunction "and" appears seven times in six lines of text; the preposition "in" appears six times, and the noun "wind" appears four times in the span of thirty-three words.

Writing this paragraph above, I tried to think like the computer--as a writing teacher this was unnatural for me. My eye and ear was drawn to the beauty of the wind in the tail of the foxes and the crisp imagery of the setting. For all of the simplicity of the individual words and the frequency with which some appear, does not make any of it an error. The context of the passage takes those individual pieces and moves back, to allow our sensibilities to focus and regard the piece as a whole. No human writing teacher examines and criticizes word for word nor should one.

3. Writing is an Art. Imagine an algorithm written to examine the combination of mechanics used in art, such as brush stroke. Seurat's dots on a canvas might be assessed point by point--frequency, shape, thickness, and color--all could be criticized I suppose. But why would you? If you were teaching someone to paint and to develop their skills we don't burn our sweat over brush strokes. We encourage the artist to learn how to say something with those brush strokes.

Would we try to force every painter to work with the same brush strokes?

4. Confined to the Writing Prompt. While the same issue binds students on state testing, using scoring software muddles the most important part of growing into a good writer--writing about what matters to us. Students can not feed any piece of writing into the algorithm. It must be on the stated topic. By using this system over and over again we are feeding the beast--teaching to the test. And writing remains something that is just done for school or just done for testing.

Being confined to the writing prompt on a weekly basis suffocates any hope of developing a young writer. While, I agree, students need to learn to write to a prompt, a balance must be found. And when students write about subjects not found in the scoring algorithm, what is to be done?

Read them ourselves?

5. The Art of Conferring is Obliterated.
Bad writing is necessary, and we all do it. We have to do a lot of bad writing in order to mine and polish the good stuff. But we will never know what promise a piece has when all we receive from computer-generated scoring is a print out of pre-determined errors.

Georges Seurat - Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass

No conversation takes place.

A student must be able to look at the negative comments and try to figure out where they apply. Nothing is highlighted. No questions are asked of the student.

Ostensibly, the print out would be carried back to the teacher or a peer so that the two might engage in a conference about the piece. In either case, the essay still needs to be read so that a conversation about the computer's tastes can occur. And even if that were the case, what are we talking about? How to mold our writing to satisfy an algorithm? So my piece looks and sounds likes yours?

Worse, my fear is that computer-generated scoring means some may use it to replace ever engaging with students and their writing at all. The tool becomes deemed a time-saver and replaces human skill and compassion. At the risk of offending people, if you are teaching writing and seek ways to avoid reading papers and discussing essays with students then you are in the wrong classroom. If you lean on "time" as the reason why this computerized method of assessing writing then you need to reassess how you spend your time in the classroom.

This is not to say that anyone is a bad teacher, but the earmarks of bad teaching are all over the use of computer-scored writing. The worst possible scenario is that this tool becomes a hoop for students to jump through and all of the necessary and influential steps to becoming a better writer are lost.

Writing becomes a chore for our students. They write to the judge...Big Blue...not to an audience, and never for themselves.

In the process, we all stop reading and we all stop talking.

And when that happens, they stop writing.