Reading-writing workshop and American literature
by Nancy Kampfe, Bennett County High School
It’s May 10, 2006. Seniors have been counting the days remaining on their handmade, red wooden calendar since Easter. Seven days left of high school. Every student is present. A quiet buzz can be heard as students listen to friends read drafts and offer revision suggestions. Laughter breaks out intermittently when a shared experience is related from a unique perspective. Laptop screens evidence memory book chapter tweaking to make every photo fit closely within the text. The mood is intense, focused, but low key—nobody panics. Three-ring binders filled to overflowing with extras (photo collages, saved elementary writing, high school award certificates) groan and stretch to hold ten or more chapters of students’ lives. Nobody asks to use the restroom; nobody whines about a draft left behind at home, in his or her vehicle, or in a locker. A short line forms at the color laser printer near the teacher’s desk. Banker’s file boxes stuffed full of students’ draft folders sit atop stools because we have run out of counter space.
“You will be proud of me, Mrs. Kampfe,” Chelsi says. “I revised that family history chapter. I saw what you meant; it didn’t make much sense to me either as I read through it again. Now I can follow all the branches of my family tree, and I only shared information you wouldn’t know by looking at the family tree chart.”
“Good for you, Chelsi. I knew you would find a way to make that chapter more readable,” I respond.
Going back to my scanning of drafts, revisions, and required elements, I realize this has been a truly enjoyable senior fourth quarter. Few plagiarism issues, fewer “lost” drafts, absolutely no missing binders at all. Everyone writes with passion, with voice. Students who usually don’t hand in assignments at all, let alone on time, write thoughtful, funny, interesting narratives about previous times in their lives. Analysis of what those experiences mean to them now, as seniors, is mature and insightful.
A lump rises in my throat as I realize how far this group of seniors has come, how much I will miss their willingness to try every new strategy I discover, their fun-loving sense of humor, their absolute respect for me, their guide, as they navigate the waters of reading and writing and learning. We have spent a relaxed year in this classroom, in spite of the controversy raging outside our door due to budget cuts, RIF policies and teacher negotiations gone to impasse. We have written more than ever before. We have read and discussed a wider variety of books than ever before. We have blogged, we have visited Tapped In, we have written freewrites until our hands literally ache. We’ve written Jolly Rancher poems, created Kit Kat Valentines, and shared handfuls of White Cheddar Cheezums when the hungries attacked before our 12:30 lunch break. We have become partners in learning. This eighth year of reading-writing workshop in junior-senior English at Bennett County High School has transformed this classroom.
But it has not always looked like this.
* * * * * * *
When I returned to secondary education in 1985 after a thirteen-year child-rearing break, I was THE secondary English teacher at Crazy Horse School, just eleven miles from my farm home. One of the first eye-opening discoveries I made was that students of the eighties were not at all like the students I had begun teaching in 1968. These students wanted to know why we read the authors I chose, and when were they ever going to use this “stuff.” And they were quite adept at faking both reading and writing. So, even though I “covered” the American Literature anthology, and I assigned essays and research papers, I knew my students were not readers and they were not writers.
But English teachers teach the canon and use the literature anthologies stacked in classroom cupboards; English teachers assign writing and determine grades. So in spite of my conclusions otherwise, I did it, too, telling myself that the only problem was a lack of motivation. I told myself that these students could be helped to care about American literature even though they found little in their lives to help them connect to much of it. I decided that these students did not want to write because they had too often only written responses in workbook blanks, thus convincing themselves they could not write anything else. These students had also endured a succession of new English teachers every term for the past four years. I tried a variety of teaching strategies, kept the focus on reading and helped my students make baby steps toward becoming writers. By the end of my fourth year at Crazy Horse School, progress was being made, especially among students who had been my students all four years. Over that four-year period, my students and I discovered that daily reading and writing can make a difference. Daily reading and writing cause a transformation: we discovered we can become better at both.
When I decided to apply for, and later accept, a position teaching sophomore speech, junior and senior English at Bennett County High School in Martin, I thought everything would be different in a public high school with mostly “White” students. More students completed their assignments. More students cooperated with my insistence on more writing than had been expected of them previously. But students’ writing was boring and all but dead; essays and research papers put me to sleep. A few students in each class did the reading and discussed it with me. The rest engaged in a variety of behaviors all focused on appearing to be reading while not reading at all. I knew I was doing something wrong; I just did not know what.
Then I discovered a copy of Tom Romano’s book, Clearing the Way, published in 1987, in one of my classroom cupboards. As I read that book, I began making connections to my students who did not want to write, did not want to read. Romano suggests that if students are offered the choice of writing about a topic of their choice, writing rapidly and frequently in ten-minute stints, their comfort level with writing improves. Romano says the goal of this frequent and regular writing is “fluency and self-confidence—the parents of voice (8).” Romano also suggests that students should do much more writing than I would have time to read and “correct.” In addition, he says most of school writing should be writing done without “formal” concern for grammar and usage, that students should write most often as a way to think and learn (9).
After reading Romano, I began asking students to write journal entries about anything at all. I told students I would not read everything they wrote; I would read only the entries they marked for my attention. I used Romano’s suggestions for a quantity grade: Three pages per week earned a C; four pages a week, a B; and five pages per week earned an A journal grade. Freewriting, exploratory writing and expressive writing were all part of the journal writing requirement, so producing five pages of writing per week was not usually difficult. Sometimes I provided topics; other times I gave total choice to students. Students who focused on grades and just getting it “done” worried more about doing more than someone else than they did about what they wrote. No two students brought the same size journal, possibly in an attempt to actually write less for the same grade as someone else earned. So began the games. Students wrote larger than their usual handwriting size so they could say they had written more; they wrote lists of things they did each day, rather than discuss, think, or reflect. Others bought pocket-sized notebooks rather than the 70-page spiral bound notebooks I requested. Some wrote two-three sentences on the page, and others refused to write anything at all. So I had to do what Romano suggested, tell students they could not pass the class without doing the journal writing, nor could they pass without giving the journal writing an honest try at thinking and reflecting. I bought 100-page composition notebooks for a dollar or less when discount stores put them on sale prior to school’s opening. I then re-sold them to students at my cost, or suggested students could buy their own composition notebook, usually at a higher cost when purchased locally. We did most writing in class, brainstorming topics for students who couldn’t think of one, and sharing tidbits aloud with the whole group. Romano suggests that journal writing merit 20% of the student’s quarter grade, but in the early years when I was trying to show students the value of writing and building their writing fluency, it often felt as if all we ever did was write daily journal entries.
My students absolutely loved freewriting. Romano describes freewriting, paraphrasing Peter Elbow’s definition, as writing done to follow our thoughts wherever they go, writing in which the pen keeps moving for the entire ten-minute timed writing (7-8). My students enjoyed freewriting because they felt like they were in control of the topic, where it went, and what they said. Sometimes students used their freewriting topics for further writing, sometimes they did not. But their writing voices definitely became more confident.
I began to ask students to write their personal reaction to the reading we did, not merely focusing on literary elements, character development, or the author’s theme. When we discussed a novel, I asked questions I had been wondering about, questions I did not necessarily have answers for. At first, students weren’t quite sure what to do when I didn’t know the answer, and they struggled to think on their own without my spoon-feeding their thinking. Not all my principals were impressed. One principal wrote me a note after having observed a discussion in my classroom, “NEVER ask a question for which you do not know the answer.” Because this principal intimidated to the point of providing me a list of tasks I must do daily in every class, “if you want to work for me,” I began dropping any workshop methods he considered radical. Survival mode was a fact of life from 1997-2003, when a more open-minded principal came on board, a principal who also believed that classroom noise could be productive, that student accountability for reading and writing choices makes for authentic learning.
In my junior-senior English classroom as it has now evolved, rather than reading (or pretending to read) from an American Literature anthology, my students choose American literature titles from the classroom library I’ve amassed over the past fifteen years. They read books of their choice and write weekly response journals using various formats. We periodically share with our table groups an outstanding quotation from what we’ve read that week and our response to it, and at other times we share with the whole group—our way of discovering what others are reading. When I do a mini-lesson on some reading strategy, I use a short piece of American literature. This is the only reading we do together, as a class. I’ve found that more students read more, and fewer students pretend to be readers because they can’t pretend to read and still write a response journal about it. And no parents complain about some book I chose for the group because their child chooses his/her own reading.
Changing my classroom from teacher-sage at the front of the room lecturing about what literature means to one where we all discover together what we think literature means has been a long, slow process. Parents at first complained about my “changing” requirements; students grumbled that I didn’t know what I wanted; “you change your mind every day,” they insisted. In reality, the requirements were not changing, but they were rather open-ended, and students were often challenged by their own expectations of themselves.
Students were required to read from American Literature titles on the classroom bookshelves; they were required to write reading response journals; they were required to keep a writing journal, and page requirements for various reading grades were posted. Students were to choose what they wanted to learn about, what books they wanted to read, what topics to write about. When students asked what they should do, I repeated the requirements for various grades and suggested they could choose to do whatever they preferred, within those parameters. Portfolios were kept of all work completed by the students, and based on that portfolio, quarter grades were assessed. The problem became not knowing “what my grade is in here.” If students kept a record of grades on various assignments, they knew their progress; however, my students were used to teachers doing this for them.
Had I read Randy Bomer’s book, Time for Meaning: Crafting Lives in Middle & High School, shortly after it was published in 1995, I could have saved myself much anguish as I worked through the early years of changing my classroom practice. I, too, experienced the growing pains Bomer describes in his book, but I believed the problems were caused by my inability to do reading-writing workshop “right.” After experimenting, making mistakes and “fixing” them, and finally reading Bomer’s book in 2003, I have come to realize that the problems occurred as part of the change process, especially in what is considered “radical” change. How I was regarded by administrators in those first years mirrors what Ira Schor and Paolo Freire say in A Pedagogy for Liberation, as quoted by Bomer: “There is a lot of pressure to teach [the] traditional way, first because it is familiar and already worked out, even if it doesn’t work in class. Second, by deviating from the standard syllabus you can get known as a rebel or radical or flake, and be subjected to anything from petty harassment to firing (207).”
Bomer speaks of teachers who asked him whether he ever taught anything, or did his students just write all the time. Bomer speaks of the principal who halted a teacher observation, saying he would return when some actual teaching was going on (214). I heard those same remarks from colleagues, and principals, too. Because my workshop functioned so differently from the traditional classroom, administrators and other teachers could not understand that guiding students, working with them, was teaching. Like Bomer, I told an administrator, “the work he(the student) was doing—frequently rereading his notebook; critically reading his own drafts and those of his peers; reading poetry and memoir as a maker of poems and memoir; and maintaining his own independent reading life—was all reading and really important in his growth as a reader.” Yet, the administrator was not convinced: “if I wasn’t assigning books, telling them what the books meant, and giving tests, I wasn’t doing reading’ (215).”
Problems caused by an uncooperative student in Bomer’s classroom are quite similar to those I have experienced in my practice. My administrator, too, just wanted the problem “fixed,” rather than truly listening and learning about how a reading-writing workshop must function. Bomer says to one student’s parents: “‘I think [students] can get better at writing by writing and get better at reading by reading, so I give the class lots of time to write. They can choose what to write about and how to write it, but they have to write when it’s writing time, or else they won’t learn. Lots of times, Bobby gets tired of writing a long time before the bell rings, he refuses to get back to work when I ask him to, and then he causes a disruption and keeps other kids from working. And what starts out as a really little thing becomes a big deal’ (211).” I often tell my students, their parents, and my administrators that developing lifelong reader habits takes time, and that allotting time for students to read in class is part of modeling what lifelong reading looks like. In-class reading and writing is how habits get established, so students must read and write while in the classroom. A workshop by definition means everyone works.
To integrate reading with writing and to help students express their thinking on paper, I began to use writing-to-learn strategies. Tom Romano calls this kind of writing, “expressive—language of our daily unpressured speech, what we use to explain something for the first time.” Expressive writing is “crucial to growth not only in writing, but also to learning in general (22).” Such writing helps students connect what they already know to what they are learning. To “dig in and slug it out with knotty problems…will sharpen [students’] thinking ability and produce ‘real knowledge’ (30),” Romano says.
Romano’s suggestion that “using class time to write in secondary schools is essential” (63) gave me permission to stop requiring writing assignments to be completed outside class time and to begin using class time like a workshop where students wrote and read. Homework became something you did outside of school only if you did not finish an assignment in class. Reading is the only exception to this rule. I tell students that reading can be done anywhere, while writing is probably best done in the classroom where we have computer, peer, and teacher access. Since we only have fifty minutes in class, we cannot do it all there; some of our ‘practice’ must be done outside class. Students are free to make their own choices about reading and writing in or out of class, as long as they make responsible use of time and keep up with deadline requirements.
I hoped students would aspire to A or a B grades, since I show them how “easy” earning such grades truly is. Unfortunately, many students choose to accept whatever grade results from the work they are able to complete during class. These non-thinking students often refuse to use their study halls for English work. This attitude has been a source of continuing stress for me because I realize how much potential students have to excel in the communication arts and how valuable such skills are in the job market. Choosing to “settle” for just-passing grades over working a bit harder and taking home improved skills and a C, a B, or even an A seems a rather poor choice, but the choice is the student’s to make.
When I reread Romano’s book just prior to the 2006 Summer Institute, I realized that Romano’s advice has formed the foundation of my practice. Romano’s stock response to students who want to know how long a piece of writing must be is this: “Long enough….Be honest and take a shot. Carry the piece through to the end without shortcuts. Then the draft will be long enough (65).” To my students I say, “Long enough to say something worth your saying and my reading.” Or I say, “Every good piece of writing has a beginning and an ending and something worthwhile in between.” Most students prefer minimum page requirements, and because I want them to push themselves, I set minimum at D- and urge students to push themselves far beyond that, and most do.
I began my learning about writing workshops with the idea that I would relinquish control to my student writers. I would build up their self-esteem; I would mark only two serious mechanical errors on each draft—after the form and content were all but finished. I tried to help students take personal responsibility for their writing, but my students did not always want to think about their writing past the day when the rough draft was composed. They did not care about control so much as they cared about being done and having the writing accepted for grading. Progress was slow; some mechanical issues appeared again and again; I ran out of time to do individual writing conferences. So, I told myself I only had time for one kind of feedback, my comments on the piece. Unfortunately, all I’ve done is make students more dependent upon me (or some other editor) to “correct” their writing. Romano does agree that teachers should write comments on the final piece turned in for grading, comments that are “pointed, appreciative, encouraging, and challenging (103).” Notice, he does not say a word about marking spelling, punctuation, or usage errors. Romano is talking about an honest reader reaction to the piece, with teacher encouragement and challenging teacher suggestions. Romano says, and I know he is right, that students do not learn from those final comments on a paper; they need an honest assessment-reaction to the piece, not a critique (90).
I have tried again and again to get students to reread my response to a previous piece of writing, looking for similar problems in the next writing piece (73), but this strategy has not worked well, unless I explicitly require students to make the comparison. My students have not yet progressed to this stage of personal responsibility for their writing, but we continue to work toward that goal. In the coming year, I am going to post two more pieces of Romano-advice next to my desk:
- “It is patently false to send the message that growth in writing depends mainly upon the ability to produce perfectly edited copy (75).”
- “Teachers should not take those drafts and mark errors, point out fallacies, critique severely, and then present students with the results. Such practice should be steadfastly avoided (89).”
To establish a “safe” writing workshop where students practiced, experimented, shared and conferenced their writing has been my goal, a place where students get the instruction they need when they need it, a place where reading and writing are always connected and where students’ goal is to gradually become more adept at independently producing quality writing (123). In addition to the writing, we also read, spending Monday and Friday of every week in an all-period reading workshop. Students enjoy the reading in class; they enjoy freewriting. But no, they do not enjoy revising and finishing writing, even though they do endure it.
We talk regularly about what “good faith” participation means:
- write and interact with your writing
- read quality published writing
- share your work with peers
- talk about your process and your choices
- get timely responses and direction from your teacher
- most importantly, take advantage of frequent practice in writing more than I will ever have time to grade: freewrites, exploratory writing, expressive writing, on-time drafts, playing with words
- for a quarter grade of B, students need to complete all “good faith” assignments
- assignments done exceptionally well may raise the grade to an A
- missing work lowers the grade to a C (123).
As for determining quarter grades, I try to follow Romano’s advice: if 20 % of the grade comes from journals, and 50% comes from “good faith” participation, then 30% must come from various writing assignments–Romano suggests four-eight pieces in a semester, thus two-four per quarter, which has always been doable (123-128). Reading is also part of good faith participation. But number grades in an English class are less than satisfying ways to show student progress. Face-to-face conferences about progress, growth and development of language skills and “good faith” participation make more sense, even though they do not translate well in our online grading program. Grading continues to be a problem since I do not believe in how they must be determined, according to school policy and the DDN Campus program requirements.
Use of reading-writing workshop and independently chosen reading to satisfy reading requirements in Junior-Senior English is a continuing work in progress. Every group of juniors has its own personality so methods are continually tweaked to make the workshop more responsive to student needs. Some years, the reading-writing workshop is a dream; in other years, it is a nightmare. But certainly, reading-writing workshop is no worse a nightmare than was watching students pretend to read, discussing whole-class books with three or four students, reading writing that put me to sleep. Randy Bomer calls his classroom practice a “social journey of learning,” a journey upon which he has been accompanied by “people I met at conferences, in my reading of professional literature, and in talking about my classroom in workshops.” My journey has been similar to Bomer’s, a journey made with writer-teachers like Tom Romano, Nancie Atwell, Linda Rief, Randy Bomer, and many others whose books I have read and whose methods I have tried. Randy Bomer says it best: “We all need the long-term associations with people to whom we feel somehow accountable for our learning and our teaching. We need those people’s voices echoing in our heads as we teach. It’s the continuing conversation we have across years, across jobs, across administrative regimes, that defines us as teachers, that makes us a single solid person across time rather than a liquid one that takes the shape of its current container (222).” Growing as a teacher, a writer, a guide for and with my students is real. It is what keeps me in that classroom working with students year after year.
Works Cited
Bomer, Randy. Time For Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995.
Tom Romano. Clearing the Way: Working with Teenage Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton Cook, 1987.
Dakota Writing Project teachers from around the state participated in the 2006 Summer Institute, from June 6th through June 29th, 2006. With us—institute co-directors Nancy Kampfe and Michelle Rogge Gannon—leading the way, this able group presented demonstrations, wrote daily, did research, and experimented with various forms of technology, including weblogs, digital storytelling, and the NWP E-Anthology.