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The College, Career, and Community Writers Program in the Middle School

Image from Pixabay user Kidaha: https://pixabay.com/en/users/Kidaha-6465786/.

The middle school animal is a breed of its own.  Those who work with students in lower or higher grades look at middle-schoolers and shudder.  One can almost hear the audible ‘Ughhhh’ accompanying that shudder.  Middle-schoolers revel in being loud, verbal, and demonstrative in many shapes and forms.  One often wonders if they are teachable at this age.  After all, one queries, how could a screaming, pushing, fidgeting preteen sit still and be quiet long enough to take anything in?  Well, that’s the in: the College, Career, and Community Writers Program encourages and relies on discourse.  And believe you me, middle schoolers love to talk.

Routine argument writing, a continuous and informal C3WP element, begins with such short, carefully scaffolded lessons that it is accessible to students of all abilities.  Students might participate in “writing sprints,” “loop writing,” or a “human continuum;” or they might identify the argument in an image or complete a checklist.  And then, voila, they get to turn and talk! First with a partner, then with the whole group, where students raise and shake hands violently as they await their turn to verbalize their thinking.  Using sentence stems like “I believe ….,”  “I agree with so-and-so…” and  “I see what so-and-so is saying, but I also think…,” they learn to participate in a civil discourse that even the adults in their lives are often unable to do successfully. Continue reading “The College, Career, and Community Writers Program in the Middle School”

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Write With Them; Write For Them: The Power of Teacher-Created Mentor Texts

Spitfire and He 111 during Battle of Britain 1940. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

In the April 2014 edition of Educational Leadership, renowned reading and writing teacher Kelly Gallagher writes about the power of mentor texts and how teachers can use them to help students improve their writing.  The article, entitled “Making the Most of Mentor Texts,” begins with an anecdote about how George Lucas and his special effects team solved the issue of how to make the space battles in the Star Wars films more realistic.  To do so, they relied on airborne dogfight footage from WWII documentaries as their ‘mentor text.’  Gallagher goes on to say that this process — the act of watching and analyzing someone or something that already encapsulates the outcomes that we want — is “how we learn how to do something unfamiliar.”

However, Gallagher also notes (and is echoed by many others, including Nancie Atwell, Penny Kittle, Donald Graves, and Lucy Calkins) that when it comes to student writing, we can’t just hand students a mentor text and expect them to know how best to imitate it.  We have to guide them through the process of analyzing those texts multiple times if we want to see the true power that they can have.          

After reading Gallagher’s article for the first time, I sat back in my chair and let his words marinate.  Continue reading “Write With Them; Write For Them: The Power of Teacher-Created Mentor Texts”

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Why You Should Do a Writing Institute

Thunder rolled.  The lightning stuck.  And I woke up 40 minutes before my alarm was set to go off.  Woke up widely with the same giddiness I feel upon waking on a party/big event day, or a painting/redecorating my house day, or new-project-that-you-know-is-going-to-rock-at-school day.  Why — in the name of Garth Brooks — why?  

I just wanted to sleep for 40 more minutes, but my brain turned on and immediately stopping, planting, and pointing like an Irish Setter, I was focused on the list I had made the previous day…   You are about to read the best top 10 list (This is not the list that woke me up; keep reading.) of reasons why you should take part in any National Writing Project Invitational Institute. (Find one here!)  

10) Remembering what it feels like to be a student.  The chairs are really uncomfortable, sitting still is really hard, and listening and focusing simultaneously for any length of time is also really hard. Continue reading “Why You Should Do a Writing Institute”

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From the College, Career, and Community Writers Program to the SAT Essay: A Simple Step

The nuanced claim, authorizing, illustrating, and borrowing:  These are some of the moves used in argument writing as promoted by Joseph Harris in Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, a foundational text of The College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP), sponsored by the National Writing Project (NWP).  After teaching and reinforcing these moves with my sophomores and juniors during the fall 2016 semester, it was a simple step to prepare them for the SAT essay, because all of these moves are easily applicable.

Standard instructions for the SAT essay from https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/inside-the-test/essay.

The SAT on-demand essay, as anyone who has prepped students for taking it knows, is a 50-minute written rhetorical analysis of a non-fiction article. This rhetorical analysis is the final test in the SAT exam – when students are already drained and hungry. Last year, when I prepped my students, I focused on Aristotle’s appeals of persuasion –  logos, ethos, and pathos – to look for in the article they were to analyze. This year, I improved the SAT practice opportunities by combining Aristotle’s appeals with the Harris moves from the C3WP, and the outcome, I believe, will be a better SAT essay from the students. Continue reading “From the College, Career, and Community Writers Program to the SAT Essay: A Simple Step”

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A Visit with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

On August 25, the Chippewa River Writing Project welcomed Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein — authors of They Say, I Say:  The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing — to Central Michigan University.  During the morning, they led a roundtable discussion of approximately twenty-five CMU graduate assistants and writing/writing intensive faculty.  After lunch, they led a similar roundtable for approximately fifteen teachers 6-12 who represented school districts across the lower peninsula.  From 3:30 – 5:00, Graff & Birkenstein gave a public talk in French Auditorium of the EHS Building, followed by an informal reception.

What follows is Liz Brockman’s introduction to Graff and Birkenstein’s public talk:

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein with Liz Brockman at CMU

My name is Elizabeth Brockman, and I’m an English professor here at Central Michigan University and a founding co-director of the Chippewa River Writing Project.  On behalf of the writing project, I’d like to begin by thanking our partners in the sponsorship of today’s event:  the CMU Writing Center, the College of Humanities and Social & Behavioral Sciences, the College of Education and Human Services, and the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Continue reading “A Visit with Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein”