Author Archives: dogtrax

Creating a Cross-Grade Writing Rubric

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Writing Rubric
ELA Conventions Rubric
Our school is in the midst of a two year Literacy Initiative, which has led to such things as a Literacy Conference hosted at our school last year and a move into the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment and many conversations about reading and writing and literacy (although not so much around New Literacies).

Last year, as we shifted into a Standard-based Reporting System (no more grades), I realized that I needed a reading response rubric that would align with that new system and allow me to have conversations about what we expect from our writers when they are responding to literature. The principal agreed to pay for enlarging the rubric into a huge poster for all of our sixth grade classrooms, and now that is a common tool we all use. Then, our associate superintendent walked through the room earlier this year, commented on the rubric, and asked that our principal provide copies for other schools and also for other classrooms.

Now, that reading response rubric hangs in most of the grades three through six classrooms in our school. I can’t say if it is helping or hindering other teachers, though. I am hopeful that it will lead to more exposure to open response, critical thinking questions. All of our test score data shows an across-the-board weakness in open response from our students, in math as well as ELA.

But what about writing? What about personal narratives, short stories and other forms of longer composition that does not fall under the heading of reading response?

Last week, we began the first steps towards creating a similar rubric for writing and composition for grades three through six. We made pretty decent headway, I think, but it is more difficult than it seems to create a document flexible enough to be useful for a third grader as well as a sixth graders, without being so general that it means nothing.

We decided to break off the ELA Conventions as its own rubric and then, with the Writing/Composition Rubric, we focused in on some specific areas:

  • Clarity
  • Explanations
  • Details
  • Development of ideas
  • (to be added) rich vocabulary

One teacher had a great suggestion with this draft that a small group of us presented: create a third column on the rubric for grade-specific skills. This would allow for us all to have some common language around literacy, but still allow that flexibility for what is expected in each grade — building skills as the students move upward through the school.

We’ll also be reformatting these rubrics with more bullet points, as opposed to sentences, so that the rubric makes more sense visually for students. Eventually, each classroom will have three large rubric posters: reading response, writing/composition, and conventions.

Since I was given the charge of creating the draft of the rubric (which I am sharing here), I purposely used the word “composition” instead of writing in the rubric, and I explained to my colleagues that this word better covers all elements of literacy — use of digital tools to create work as well as composing an essay. I noted, too, that the Common Core standards are heavy on use of media for learning and creating and so I hoped that word “composition” would be flexible enough. No one argued that point.

Peace (in the rubric),
Kevin

Books Reviews: The Red Pyramid and The Tiger Rising

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The Red Pyramid

One of these books — The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan — I read aloud to my six year old and the other — The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo — I read as part of our independent reading unit in the classroom (Yeah, I read with my students and talk through what I am thinking as I read).

Boy, I wanted to like The Red Pyramid more than I did.  I dove in, all ready. The book never really delivered, which was hugely disappointing (particularly since the thing is more than 500 pages long). It occurs to me that Rick Riordan may have taken on one too many writing tasks in the past two years. Along with his book, which is the first in his Kane Chronicles, he launched an offshoot series of The Lightning Thief with the book The Lost Hero and has contributed to the 39 Clues series.

It’s not all bad. The Red Pyramid tells the tale of two children who are blood descendants of Egyptian Pharaohs, and who must save the world from destruction by using new-found magical powers, and allegiances to an array of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. Like his use of Greek Mythology in The Lightning Thief, Riordan grounds the story is Egyptian Mythology. But it seems to much. There are more names to follow than you can imagine. I kept hoping Riordan provided a glossary at the back of the book (which would have been quite helpful).

There are sure glimmers of a good story here, as the kids (bi-racial siblings who spent their childhoods apart and drawn into adventure in the aftermath of their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance) tell the story in alternating chapters in their own voices.

Unfortunately, all to often, the story got bogged down. We wanted more excitement! More adventure! More, eh, clarity of story! Even so, my son and I are looking towards the next installment of the Kane Chronicles, which comes out in May. There was enough here to make it worth a possible dive back into the Kane kids and the world of Ancient Egyptian magic.

Meanwhile, I just finished a short, but beautiful book by Kate DiCamillo entitled The Tiger Rising. DiCamillo is a wondrous writer, and if you read The Tale of the Despereaux (the book, not the movie) or The Magician’s Elephant or any of her other books, you know she has a talent of weaving stories together.

Here, she brings us into the world of Rob, an adolescent now living in a run-down motel in Florida with his father. Rob’s whose mom died (is this a theme or what?) and his father refuses to grieve, or let Rob grieve. So all of his sadness and emotions are locked down tight (in a “suitcase” that Rob imagines he drags around with him). Into this world comes spunky and thoughtful Sistine, a girl of Rob’s age who has her own problems: her father cheated on her mom and they have come to live in Florida, too. Like Rob, Sistine is completely out of place.

The tiger is an animal they find caged up in the woods. It’s the property of the owner of the motel, where Rob’s dad works in a low-paying job, and Sistine is determined to free the tiger, much to Rob’s initial dismay. They eventually do free the animal, only to have Rob’s father shoot the tiger and kill it. That tragedy finally opens the door for Rob and his father to grieve over their own loss of mother and wife.

This is not necessarily a tidy book (and not as strong as The Tale of the Despereaux either), but that untidiness is a good thing to me, as a reader. Not everything gets put in its place by the end. The story risks the artifice of a “lesson learned” as opposed to a “story told” and I feel that DiCamillo found a certain balance.  Sistine still feels abandoned by her father. Rob still is an outcast. But Rob and his father do finally find each other, and Rob has found a true connection with a new friend, Sistine. The language here in The Tiger Rising is lovely and the pacing, just perfect.

I quickly passed this book on to a student, who has since passed it on to her sister.

Peace (in the books),
Kevin

Considering the ‘Academically Adrift’

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A newspaper headline caught my eye this morning, and had me searching around for information about this book, Academically Adrift, which seems to indicate that for many students, the University is not all that rigorous nor is it enhancing their learning. I don’t confess to know all the ins and outs of the study, and the newspaper article did note that some had called some of the methods of the data collection into question.

But (according to an article in Inside Higher Ed) the study finds that:

  • Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge — while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
  • Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
  • Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.”

The result?

According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. — from the book blurb.

So, what are we to make of this?

It seems to me that critical thinking and pushing students to solve problems, as opposed to rote learning, is one way to increase the rigor of our academic environments. I suppose we, in the public school field, have to wonder if we are doing what we need to do to prepare our students for the University. Is too much of the first part of the college experience just bringing students up to a certain standard?

I think the data also indicates that our push for social engagement (online or not) takes away from academic engagement, and is that good or bad? I remember many benefits from the social elements of college (connections that are still strong) but I surely rushed through some assignments or did not go as deep as I should have in order to have time for the non-academics.

Lots of questions emerge from this kind of study, I think, particularly as we think about how we are strengthening our educational system from top to bottom, and everywhere else. I often feel as if there are too few conversations between professors in the University systems and teachers in the high schools, although the National Writing Project has consistently been a place where I HAVE heard those conversations taking place.

Peace (in the successful student),
Kevin

Teacher Challenge: All About Me is really All About You

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This blogging  activity, as part of the Edublog Teacher Challenge, is to consider the use of “Pages” as opposed to “posts” on a blog. Essentially, a page is a static site (sort of like a common webpage) while a post shows up as the homepage, in reverse chronological order. Specifically, we are being asked to examine our All About Me pages and think about the message it sends, and maybe do a little spring cleaning.

I did a similar preview a few years ago, too, and although today I made some quick tweaks to the language there (I used to moderate every single comment and now I have it set differently, so returning users don’t need to be in my moderation bin), it is still a pretty inviting message,  I think. My All About Me page is actually All Ab0ut You (the reader).

You can view my All About Me Page here.

I’ve avoided using too many pages because I feel like it clutters up the blog homepage site. The only other pages that I used to use was for an ongoing short story called Mac’s Music Shack (and is really The Canterbury Tales, retold through music themes), and I was working to embed video introductions to each chapters and podcasting the chapters. (You can tell it’s a bit dated because I was using Google Video).  It was an experiment around using audio and video and writing, and the static quality of the Page made sense to me at the time. The page is still there, if you are curious, but it remains a Page Under Construction and is not currently linked on the homepage.

You can view Mac’s Music Shack here.

Peace (in the reflecting),
Kevin

Book Review: Sergio Aragones’ Mad View of the World

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Image of MAD's Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works

Anybody who says Mad Magazine was for just kids didn’t ever read it.  Or didn’t read it carefully. I was reminded of this recently when I bought a book that featured five decades of the drawings and cartoon work of Sergio Aragones, who is the master of creating biting, funny critiques of all sorts of topics with pictures but very few words. (The book is MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Work). In fact, you have to read his work on a whole other level than you might expect, interpreting every nuance of every space of his comics.

Sergio has called his brand of art “pantomime humor” and in a short interview that introduces this collection, he talks about how this style came about partly because he immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and struggled with language. He decided that his art would not be fixed in an oral language tradition, but in the realm of visual literacy. His “outsider” status also allowed him to fix a critical eye on American culture, which informed much of his wacky insights.

And Mad Magazine was a true home for Sergio and his offbeat vision of the world, allowing him freedom to explore not only fun topics (video games, cell phones, mothers, etc.) but also some pretty serious social topics, too. (Later, he also created the Groo graphic novel series, which my older son just loves.) I went through and highlighted just a few topics in this hardbound collection that might surprise the casual reader:

  • Illegal Immigration
  • Racism
  • Gun Control
  • Sexual Harassment
  • Terrorism
  • Education
  • Double-speaking rhetoric
  • Airport Security
  • Summer Camps

OK, so that last one isn’t quite in the league as the others, but still, Aragones skewers everything and everyone and comes across as pretty balances in his humorous looks at our lives.

One of the things that I loved about his work with Mad Magazine, too, is that he was charged with doing all of the little cartoon drawings in the margins of the pages. These are tiny masterpieces of art, really, and often ignored. Luckily, in this collection, he has replicated dozens of these margin artworks onto a poster. You realize quickly that literacy is not just words, not just written language, but also art. One small image by Sergio Aragones packs a lot of punch.

Is this book appropriate for the classroom? Eh, no. Not at all. Too much nudity and too much content that might offend most sensibilities. But you could pick and choose from this collection, I suppose, and talk about telling a story with no words. Aragones is a master at that (did I say that already?)

Peace (in the toons),
Kevin


Book Review:The Best Technology Writing 2010

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Some people have pilgrimages that they go to every year — some place in the world that strikes their fancy or addresses some need they have for the year. Me? I have a few book series that I look forward to each December into January of each year, and one of my anticipated series has become The Best Technology Writing series put out by Yale University Press. This year, the editor is Julian Dibbell and the collection, as usual, is very strong and interesting and certainly food for much thought. What I like, too, is that this is not a cheerleading manifesto or love letter to technology. It’s an exploration of the good and the bad and the unknown as technology infuses all of our lives.

Here are some of the articles collected in this book:

  • Evan Ratliff writes an interesting piece (from Wired) about slipping away from the grid and trying to hide in an experimental piece done with the magazine. His task was to remain hidden from the prying eyes of technology (credit cards, electronic records, etc/) but still live a sort of life for an extended period of time. The article, “Vanish,” brings us both Ratliff’s reflections while “on the run” while also giving us his rich, reflective perspectives of how connected to the electronic world we really are. He really has to work to stay hidden. Meanwhile, the article also keeps track of the many Wired readers who were trying to track him down through crowdsourcing and databases and GPS systems, and how they eventually did find him.
  • Lawrence Weschler profiles the artist David Hockney and his passion for creating art on his iPhone. The article, from The New York Times Review of Books, goes into the concepts of artistry changing in this modern age, and how mobile devices can both limit and expand what we consider art, and what we consider art distribution.
  • “Handwriting is History” by Anne Trubek, from Miller-McCune, was a fascinating look at the history of handwriting and how technology is changing those perceptions of how we write with our hands, scribbling on paper. I am one of those people whose mind is more connected to my keyboard because my fingers keep up better than when I am trying to write with pen and paper. Trubek explores this idea of the mind connected to how we write.
  • David Carr’s column from The New York Times entitled “The Rise and Fall of Media” is not quite a postmortem on newspapers and magazines, but close. Or least, newspapers and magazines as we have traditionally known them. Carr ponders what is happening to media these days and wonders where it is going in this Age of Disruption.
  • The book ends with a Tweet by astronaut Michael James Massimino as he orbits the planet. “From orbit: Listening to Sting on my ipod watching the world go by — literally.”

And that is just a small bit of what is in this book. If you have an interest in technology in the bigger picture — the wide angle lens, so to speak — then I would recommend this book collection.

Peace (in the books),
Kevin

Hello Old Friend: Day in A Sentence/Haiku-

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dayinsentenceiconIt’s been a long time since I have had my old friend, Day in a Sentence, back at my site for hosting. Bonnie has been overseeing the collaborative writing feature, and doing a great job inviting so many other bloggers to both host and to add their own reflective thoughts to the mix each week.

And now, I get it back for this week. But I can’t do it alone. I need you. Please consider joining this week’s Day in a Sentence, with the theme of HAIKU. That’s right: A Day in a Haiku. Now, if you know anything about my site, you know I am no stickler for rules. So, while the traditional Haiku format is 5/7/5 and all about nature, you go on ahead and do it the way that feels right to you.

Here are mine (I wrote two, which I will explain in a minute). The first is about puppet plays that have been in progress for a bit too long and still are works in progress, even though they will be performing them this week for younger students:

Our classroom’s a mess.
All this week, they’ll try their best
Behind (the) puppet stage

And I had another haiku reflection, more somber, as one of the fathers of a child on my son’s basketball team passed away suddenly this past week in what I can only say is a strange accident while he was on vacation. The team won a nail-biter game yesterday, with the son playing as way to temporarily escape his grief and team rallying around him. I am the team scorekeeper, and this dad and I had a warm conversation just last weekend about the game and about his son. That conversation lingers with me.

The last time we spoke,
we chatted about the stats
and praised his son’s game.

You can add your Day in a Haiku by using the comment link right at this post. They will go into my moderation bin.  I’ll be collecting all of the haikus and releasing them into the world together in some form sometime next weekend. If you are a returning Day-er, it will be great to see your words again. If you are new, then welcome.

Peace (in three lines),
Kevin

Three Stories I Wrote Yesterday ….

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Some days, the stories just unfold.

Yesterday, I wrote four 25-word stories and I really liked three of them. The fourth was, OK, but not great. Interestingly enough, two of the stories were directly inspired by tweets in my Twitter stream. I read what two of my friends (Bill Ferriter, @plugusin; and Brian Fay, @brianfay) posted, caught a glimpse of a story and wrote it out. The third story just came out of nowhere, but it turns out to be the one I like best of all.

First of all, Bill was posting some thoughts about using a Livescribe pen, which is a nifty transcription tool that can create podcasts from writing and more. So, I wondered, what if the pen didn’t do what it was supposed to do, but did something a little … odd (I may have had Twilight Zone in my mind.)

Thus:

She realized the Livescribe Pen was writing something other than the transcription. It dawned on her then what was happening.

Then, later, Brian was writing about using his wife’s computer. He has been experimenting with the new Google Chrome netbook, which is entirely cloud based, and he was noting how odd it now felt to be living off the desktop instead of in the browser. I like the double meaning of cookies here, and wished I could have played off that a bit more. The constraints of the story didn’t allow that.

Thus:

Near the bookmarks, inside the cache & just out of reach of the cookies, she made a little nest & went to live in her browser.

But the story I really thought I nailed was this next one. I think an NPR story about Wikipedia I listened to the other day was still rolling around in my mind. And I had this idea of connecting a wiki to tattoos, for some reason (I can’t remember the connection I was thinking of now, so I guess it doesn’t really matter). With 25-word stories, remember, it is all about what is not being said, and trying to get a little “kicker” in there. It’s difficult to pull off. I think I did it with this one that, in just a few words, says all you need to know about this relationship. I think the word “tartly,” which I added only in the last moment, makes all the difference in the world here, don’t you?

“What if my body and spirit are nothing but a living wiki,” he wondered. She replied tartly, “You’d have a lot of edits.”

Peace (in the hint fiction),
Kevin

PS — The story I didn’t like so much, even though it hit closer to home?

The taxi rolled up, on schedule. Their eyes never left the cell phones. They opened the door. “Home?” “Duh. Of course, dad.”

Edublog Challenge: Deconstructing an Effective Blog Post

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The most recent challenge with the Edublog Teacher Challenge is to find a blog post that we admire and write about it. I am choosing one particular post by my NWP friend, Andrea Zellner, entitled “A Community of Readers.” I am hoping she won’t mind me deconstructing her post a bit. (Actually, she just tweeted her OK. )

Andrea begins this particular blog post with a recent news item (Kindle sharing of ebooks and the reaction that the move has received) and then branches off into how we develop our community of readers that we can turn to for advice, suggestions and feedback. Finally, she ends by asking us, her readers, to write about their own reading community and its value.

What I like here is that her wedge issue — reading and technology — became a stepping stone for something larger — how people read and how reading remains important to our lives, even with the transformative qualities of technology.  She also nicely addresses her own mixed feelings about ebooks and physical books. And then, she reminds us that technology has the potential to expand our reading community (via Goodreads, social networking, etc.) in interesting ways, although this technology should supplements and not replace our reading communities.

I love this bit from her post:

Reading, after all, is a solitary experience. Yet we yearn, especially after reading something profound and transformative, to turn around and thrust the book into the hands of those we know.  “Read this,” we implore.  We can’t contain ourselves. — Andrea Zellner

She also quotes from other sources, and provides valuable links. These are important elements to a good blog post because I can travel ahead or stay behind, whatever I want. I sort of wish more readers had responded to her (maybe you will? Go ahead.) and hope that that will still happen. She posed a question that is open-ended enough to spark comments and discussion, with no real time limit. (The limit? Exposure to more readers.)

In the end, she had me thinking and wondering. Yes, reading is solitary in the act of reading but the desire to share what we have read, and to find like-minded readers (and maybe, not so like-minded readers) is a powerful urge that most readers have. Technology and social media can be part of that community building, but I agree with her final thoughts about physical books being precious in their own special way, in part because they are something we can put into someone else’s hands and hope for a similar rich experience.

I realize now that I am doing the same here, passing her blog post along to you. So, maybe I am conflicted about it, too. That’s OK, as long I keep reflecting on it.

Peace (in the post),
Kevin

Book Review: Hint Fiction

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For a few months now, I have been writing 25-word stories and posting them to Twitter as part of the #25wordstory hashtag. I’ve been enjoying the experiences of this flash/quick fiction and more folks are now also writing and posting their stories, too. I recently picked up this book — Hint Fiction, edited by Robert Smartwood — and found it to a truly lovely little tome about small stories. Smartwood called 25 word stories “hint fiction” because the stories are designed to merely point to, or hint at, larger stories that are not being said.

“… a story of twenty-five words or fewer can have as much impact as a story of twenty-five hundred words or longer,” Smartwood writes in the introduction, later adding: “It’s my belief that the length of the story does not determine the credentials of the writer.”

Smartwood put out a call for these hint fiction stories and was overwhelmed by the response (from published and non-published writers), so this book represents just the tip of the iceberg of folks writing these pieces. There are plenty of great stories in here, such as:

The Strict Professor
by John Minichillo

A card in the mailbox: “Withdrawal: student deceased.” She remembers the name, the only essay in the stack she’ll really read.

And

The Return
By Joe R. Landsale

They buried him deep. Again.

And

Noah’s Daughter
By Shanna Germain

“Can’t you count I said two of each. This ” — he shook the squirming fluff of black and white in front of her — “is three.”

And

Ransom
By Stuart Dybek

Broke and desperate, I kidnap myself. Ransom notes were sent to interested parties. Later, I sent hair and fingernails, too. They insisted on an ear.

Tell me you don’t get a kick out those. The book contains dozens more.

Sure, on one level, they are quick read. But most will make you pause and think, and wonder about what is going on just outside your field of vision. I notice how the use of titles here (as opposed to on Twitter, where space is a real issue) makes a difference for some of these stories. Here, most titles are part of the story, and if you miss the title, you may miss the story. That’s interesting — how important the title is.

Peace (in more than my 25 words),
Kevin