Creative Nonfiction: an Introduction

Today in class we read an article about creative nonfiction (and the focus on private lives) entitled "Delving into Private Lives" by Gay Talese.  Talese says, "I believed then -- and I believe now even more -- that the role of the nonfiction writer should be with private people whose lives represent a larger significance."

No Child Left Untableted - NYT

This Sunday the NY Times published "No Child Left Untableted" in their magazine section.  Find it here.

Great Paragraphs

From The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane

This is a beautifully written book, filled with well-wrought paragraphs like the second one below.  I'm including the first because it provides context and is remarkable, too.

These were the markers, I realised, of a process that was continuously at work throughout these islands, and presumably throughout the world: the drawing of happiness from landscapes both large and small.  Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of 'happiness': hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquillity and others.  Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places.

Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map.  But they became special by personal acquaintance.  A bend in the river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along -- these might be enough.  Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: a sparrowhawk sculling low over a garden or street, or the fall of evening light on a stone, or a pigeon feather caught on a strand of spider's silk, and twirling in mid-air like a magic trick.  Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial.  I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby-Dick about the island of Kokovoko: 'It is not down in any maps; true places never are.' 

Adventures in Anaphora

What a rich collect of teaching materials over at Poetry Foundation's online Learning Lab!

Under the heading "Essays for Teachers and Students" there's one called "Adventures in Anaphora" where author Rebecca Hazelton argues that "students write better when they repeat themselves."  One great reason to check this posting out is the huge number (and range) of examples of anaphora (from MLK to Obama to Churchill to Ginsberg to Whitman to Mumford and Sons to Homer Simpson (and many in between)) and her clear way explanations of the purpose and effect of anaphora.

I especially like the lesson (towards the end of the article) where she describes how students write poems modeled after Joe Brainard’s book-length poem I Remember.  

With these examples in mind, I show students model poems and ask them to write imitations, keeping the anaphora but letting their imaginations run free. I choose examples that reinforce different aspects of poetry as well. For instance, these excerpts from Joe Brainard’s book-length poem I Remember create the atmosphere of a remembered time and place through specific detail:

I remember a piece of old wood with termites running around all over it the termite men found under our front porch.

I remember when one year in Tulsa by some freak of nature we were invaded by millions of grasshoppers for about three or four days. I remember, downtown, whole sidewalk areas of solid grasshoppers.

I remember a shoe store with a big brown x-ray machine that showed up the bones in your feet bright green.

After reading this, I have students write an “I remember” poem about a specific place and time, requiring them to focus their poem’s subject. I suggest they choose a place they know well, such as their hometown, the house they grew up in, their high school. Brainard’s poem, with its concrete descriptions, encourages sensual and specific details. The anaphora asks us to return again and again to the well of memory and, like the “I spy” games of their childhood, to articulate what they see there.

Teachers in Oregon to grade students only on academic mastery

A change in state law this year will require Oregon teachers to grade students solely on academic mastery -- a culture shift for schools accustomed to docking points from late or missing assignments and offering extra credit to boost grades. Chronically late work will prompt a meeting with parents or other nonacademic responses. "My philosophy has been that it's good to give parents information about whether their child is working hard and turning in work, but academically, they need to know, really, where their child is," said Amy Wood, a middle-school science and math teacher. The Oregonian (Portland) 

(from ASCD Smartbrief)

On Settling by Robert E. Goodin

On Settling by Robert E. Goodin (Princeton University Press, 2012)

The American Dream for most is achieved by working hard, persevering, overcoming obstacles: by striving.  You might expect that a book called "On Settling" would be down-right anti-American.  If striving isn't thought of precisely as a socialist trait, it's often thought of as a loser's trait, as "giving up."

Or is it?

Goodin argues in this book that "settling" is a necessary compliment to striving.  And is in itself good for such things as planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric.

This book reminded me of "Staying Put," the great essay by Scott Russell Sanders on the importance of roots in our restless world.  And it reminded me of Wendell Berry's work.  But Goodin's work is more philosophical and more structured argument.  It's good fun to watch the argument take shape.  In one chapter he defines the term settling in how we commonly use it in positive senses, like "settling down," and "settling in," and "settling up."  Next he demonstrates why we value these settlings.  In another chapter he argues that settling is distinct from "compromising," "conservatism," and (most interestingly to me) "resignation."  In a short last chapter Goodin re-sees striving and settilng in a common context.  There he says, "We ought to settle some things, precisely in order better to strive for others."

Striving v. Settling

Beginning with Thomas Hobbes' famous line: "a general inclination of all mankind...., a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death," Goodin provides many examples of how humans have memorialized and celebrated "striving" in history, including French Revolutionary Danton's ralliyng crying "to dare, to dare again, ever to dare!" to Goethe to Tennyson (the last line of 'Ulysses' - "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'".  It's not hard to think of modern examples, from Nike's "Just Do It" to the Olympic's credo "Higher, Faster, Stronger."

To "rescue" the notion of "settling" in our current cultural context, Goodin examines a variety of modern usages of the word settling, including: Settling Down, Settling In, Settling Up, Settling For, Settling One's Affairs, Settling On.  None of these, he will argue later in the book, are like compromising or resigning.

What should we settle for?

People plan their lives on the assumption that the things they take to be settled in their own lives will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period.  In their dealings with others, they likewise plan on the assumption that crucial facts about those people, too, will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period.  In all of that, they furthermore plan on the assumption that crucial features of their larger social environment will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period.

That's the value underlying all settling -- it's an necessary aide to planning and agency, it's the settled trust we have in each other and in the law of the land.  And it's important in our own identities.  This is my favorite part of the book:

The point about commitment is just this.  People are not merely bundles of beliefs and desires.  They also have (and want to have, and are better off and better people for having) sympathies and commitments to people, principles, and projects.  Those commitments specify what a person cares about, and in so doing define who the person is.  Given who we see ourselves as being -- the desires with which we identify (as Harry Frankfurt would put it), the people, principles, and projects to which we are committed (as Bernard Williams would) -- there are some things that we just cannot do, or even seriously consider as live options.  They lie outside our "narrative identity" thus constructed. 

We need to settle to strive

Goodin claims in the last chapter that "If we do not settle on some things -- our goals -- then we will have nothing to strive for.  If we settle everything too firmly -- if we resign ourselves too completely to the world as we find it -- we have nothing to strive for, and nothing to live for.... We ought to settle some things, precisely in order better to strive for others."  We need to settle, he says, "to clear the decks and free up resources."  We need to settle on things we will not strive for.

You need to treat other things as given, fixed for a time; you need to put pursuit of those other things on hold; you need to treat those other things as true, for present purposes.  In that way, you free up time and attention and other resources with which you can pursue whatever it is you have settled on as the thing(s) that you next want to strive for.

This seems to me the philosophical explanation for Stephen Covey's work.  The mantra of "First things first" is another way of saying "imagine that everything but the first thing is settled for now."  It gives a philosophical weight to saying that you can't do x, y, or z, because your deck is full.  Otherwise, everything is "unsettled."

Also in the last chapter Goodin tries to address the questions of "when do you know to stop striving" and "when do you know when it's time to stop being settled."  Goodin's answers are weak and unsatisfactory: when something comes up, when reasons accumulate, when time runs out, when big events happen.  None of that seems to explain much.

So, it's OK to settle -- if you're settling down, up, on, or for.  Settling is a necessary precondition to most of life and our sense of self.  And settling even helps us become better in our strivings.

Transformative Assessment by W. James Popham

I love the first two sentences of this book:

This is a book about classroom assessment, but it's not about giving tests.  Really, it's a book about instruction, because classroom assessment can fundamentally transform the way a teacher teaches.

Acknowledging that such claims about fundamental transformation usually means that you're "dealing with an author in need of reality therapy," Popham supports it later with data from a Black and Wiliam meta-analysis (1998) which reports an effect-size between 0.4 and 0.7.  (and explains that an effect-size "in a recent...study of mathematics would have raised the rank of a middle-of-the-pack country to one of the top 5 nations.)

The Case for Formative Assessment

Popham provides his definition of formative assessment:

Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students' status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.

What's so special about formative tests?   There's actually no such thing as "a formative test."  "It's not in the nature of the test that earns the label formative or summative but the use to which that test's results will be put.  If the purpose of Test X is to provide teachers and students with the evidence they need to make any warranted adjustments" then it's part of the formative assessment process."

This definition is particularly important, according to Popham, because companies are trying to sell "benchmark tests" as "formative assessment."  Too, Popham warns that there is currently no-evidence that district-developed or state-developed assessments boost student achievement.  The effect size noted above is reserved for "classroom formative assessment" -- teachers figuring out what kind of (perhaps very quick and dirty, perhaps elaborate) assessment will produce evidence of learning.

Learning Progressions

Popham claims:

Formative assessment is all about decision making.  Those decisions, made by both teachers and students, invariably revolve around the following two-part question: "Is an adjustment needed, and if so, what should that adjustment be?"

But what the context for making adjustments?  Theoretically, you could be making adjustments after every piece of incoming data.  How do you decided where the "decision-making assessments" belong?  Popham says it's "learning progressions" which are composed of the step-by-step building blocks students are presumed to need in order to successfully attain a more distant,  designated instructional outcome."  

A couple caveats...
A learning progression isn't unerringly accurate.  It's teachers' best thinking, hypothesizing.  It's "instructionally defensible."
A particular learning progression isn't suitable for all students.  It's a hypothesis of how the greatest number of students will learn.
A learning progression isn't necessarily better because it's more complex.

And a few ideas about how to build learning progressions

1. When should the teachers assess the sub-skills found at one of these building blocks?  Before proceeding to the next building block.
2. How many building blocks should you build?  only those for which you plan to collect assessment data. (and CAN collect measurable data!)
3. Which building blocks are truly requisite?  those that, "if unmastered, you'd really need to reteach it."
4. When developing assessments, think about creating "behavior-difference situations,"  "settings in which individuals would behave differently depending on whether they have or haven't already mastered the target curricular aim under consideration."

Levels of Implementation
Popham talks about four levels of formative assessment.  Level 2 is when students' are self-assessing and changing the procedures they're using.  Level 4 is schoolwide implementation.  Neither of these were as helpful as Level 1 and Level 3.

Level 1: Teachers' Instructional Adjustments
Teachers collect evidence by which they decide whether to adjust their current or immediately-upcoming instruction in order to improve the effectiveness of that instruction.

Is a teacher good at immediately diagnosing, by sight, the needs of classroom a good formative assessor?  No.  check this out:

Teachers often make on-the-spot instructional adjustments.  If, in the middle of Mr. Howell's explanation to his class of 4th graders, he takes students' glazed-over expressions as a hint that this particular segment of his explanation is confusing, he is likely to make an instant decision to return to that apparently murky explanation in order to do a better  explanatory job.  Such on-the-spot adjustments are usually defensible because teachers have a way of inferring that such instant changes will be beneficial.  These sorts of adjustments, though commendable, are not what the first step of Level 1 formative assessment is all about.

Instead, teachers should look to the pre-decided learning progressions and pre-set "triggers" for what is acceptable evidence of mastery on specific assessments.  The assessments do not have to be pencil-and-paper affairs, either.  Popham talks about letter-card responses, key questioning during discussion (with random responses), whiteboard responses, traffic-signal techniques, etc.

All of this already paints a picture of a highly skillful practitioner.  Popham suggests that the most skill, though, is in HOW to adjust instruction.

Whether  major or minor, adjustments in a teacher's instructional design typically require the teacher to draw on personal pedagogical expertise.  Here's where teachers need to show just how instructionally astute they really are.  This is the moment when top teachers shine.

Level 3: Classroom Climate Shift
Teachers consistently apply formative assessment to the degree that its use transforms a traditional, comparison-dominated classroom, where the main purpose of assessment is to assignment grades, into an a typical, learning-dominated classroom, where the main purpose of assessment is to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

Popham says that you'll notice a teacher who has undergone the shift from Level I to Level III by observing the classroom:

1. Learning Expectations.  Do all assignments, activities, and assessments reflect the teacher's belief that all students will master all curricular aims?  Do students' behavior and actions suggest that they believe success is within their grasp?
2. Responsibility for learning.  Do assignments, activities, and assessments place significant responsibility for learning on students, as individuals and as members of a community of learners?  Do the students' actions and behavior show that they're assuming meaningful responsibility for their own success and the success of their classmates?
3. The role of classroom assessment.  Is classroom assessment consistently employed to generate evidence of learning with the goal of informing teacher and student adjustments?  do both students and the teacher see it as the means to improve learning rather than the means for ranking and comparing students?

These changes can also be seen in students:

• Students need to believe the teacher is invested in having all students succeed -- not just those who are the "best" students.
• Students need to believe the teacher is using formative assessment's test results exclusively for improved student learning -- not for allocating grades and not for determining who is a "smart" or "good" student and who is not.
• Students need to believe the teacher is genuinely seeking their collaboration in assuming responsibility for their own learning.

That's about it.  There's more about how to implement this school-wide.  But that's not my focus now.  There's a chapter on what formative assessment can't do (raise current standardized test scores) and why.  This is a polemic about the current focus on high stakes accountability testing.

One last great Popham quote (from the chapter on Level 2 Formative Assessment)
"None of the assessments functioning as part of the formative assessment process ought to be graded."