If you read one article this summer, my mentor Holly might suggest this one:

Are modern standards breeding a decline in cultural literacy?

I highly recommend it, too.

This post is getting messy. Filled with bits of type and text, like overcooked alphabet soup. Consider it a link festival, full of rabbit holes and mad hatter tea parties. The question presented is now that CCSS is established in many states, what have we lost or gained?

Reminder to read and understand how to move forward with CCSS in ELA/SS:

CCSS

Back in 2013, Dr. Gentry published an article, “Will Common Core Wreck Writing in Schools?”

First, I am wondering if we even have a sense of what is ‘teaching writing?’ It doesn’t seem to exist. There is the editorial/grammatical end to the whole language approach of ‘any mark is a good mark on the page’.

Some of the fears:

How Common Core Might Not Support Real Writing

The worry among good teachers of writing is that if interpreted and implemented incorrectly, Common Core Standards might put an end to many of the practices espoused by Graves and in effect, destroy real writing in schools. Here are some of the concerns and quotes teachers share with me:

Writing is shifting back to a product approach.

Students aren’t given choice of topics.

Children are forced to write from rubrics or templates that stifle creativity.

Ownership for children is out the window.

Common Core says every teacher is a writing teacher but we haven’t been trained to teach writing.

Teachers neither have the time nor the training for teaching the writing process.

Too much test prep and testing take time away from time for writing in school.

Our state writing test is based on strict rubrics and products—creativity doesn’t count.

Our state writing tests are scored by computers—add more sentences and the score goes up.

Teachers no longer teach conventions like spelling and handwriting.

One teacher told me, “It’s hard to see the ‘vibrancy of life’ in children’s writing when all we care about is the score on the state writing test. That’s a product.”

Most of these fear seem to be the opposite outcome from Common Core. I’m not quite sure what the rumors were, or where the fears came from. But the testing part does seem to have some merit at first glance. Later this weekend I’ll be completing a Prezi that contains the brief write rubrics for Common Core writing assessments, and they are valuable for any content area. 

Some of these fears are truly odd: since when have standards given students specific topics? And since when have standards ‘taught teachers how to teach writing?’ 

And on what metric is creativity? I’m not sure. I’m still a bit baffled. 

Contrasting to Gentry’s article, the Atlantic published an article about how the CCSS revitalized and revolutionized writing in schools by Peg Tyre: 

New Dorp’s Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students—especially low performers—are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. It also yielded extraordinary results. By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-­history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes—cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement—from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.

The critical difference between pre-CCSS and emerging CCSS is writing argumentative and explanatory pieces.

In the coming months, the conversation about the importance of formal writing instruction and its place in a public-school curriculum—­the conversation that was central to changing the culture at New Dorp—will spread throughout the nation. Over the next two school years, 46 states will align themselves with the Common Core State Standards. For the first time, elementary-­school students—­who today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction—will be required to write informative and persuasive essays. By high school, students will be expected to produce mature and thoughtful essays, not just in English class but in history and science classes as well.

The NCTE provides their take, which correlates to the analytical approach, and appears more inclusive instruction.

Writing grows out of many purposes

Writing is not just one practice or activity. A note to a cousin is not like a business report, which is different again from a poem. The processes and ways of thinking that lead to these varied kinds of texts can also vary widely, from the quick email to a friend to the careful drafting and redrafting of a legal contract. The different purposes and genres both grow out of and create varied relationships between the writers and the readers, and existing relationships are reflected in degrees of formality in language, as well as assumptions about what knowledge and experience are already shared, and what needs to be explained. Writing with certain purposes in mind, the writer focuses attention on what the audience is thinking or believing; other times, the writer focuses more on the information she or he is organizing, or on her or his own emergent thoughts and feelings. Therefore, the thinking, procedures, and physical format in writing are shaped in accord with the author’s purpose(s), the needs of the audience, and the conventions of the genre.

And the NWP weighs in with their suggestions for ‘teaching writing.’ I’ve labeled each suggestion to make sense of what skill it may be adressing.

NWP: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

1. Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing. brainstorming/ideas
2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book. literary connections
3. Use writing to improve relations among students. audience/purpose
4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl. organization
5. Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary. vocabulary/word choice
6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors. RAFTS (role, audience, form, topic, strong verbs)
7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry. revising/craft
8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing. self-assessment
9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model. craft
10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading. self-assessment
11. Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.  brainstorming/ideas
12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
13. Practice and play with revision techniques.   grammar/revision/editing –conventions/mechanics
14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies. workshop/mentor
15. Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency. craft
16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
17. Require written response to peers’ writing. workshop/craft/revising
18. Make writing reflection tangible. annotating, self-assessment
19. Make grammar instruction dynamic. grammar/revision/editing –conventions/mechanics
20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
21. Help students ask questions about their writing. self-assessment
22. Challenge students to find active verbs. RAFTS (role, audience, form, topic, strong verbs)
23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade. audience/purpose
24. Ground writing in social issues important to students. audience/purpose
25. Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing. structure/craft
26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
27. Think like a football coach. RAFTS (role, audience, form, topic, strong verbs)/mentor texts
28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing. mentor texts
29. Use home language on the road to Standard English. word choice/sentence fluency
30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service. audience/purpose

Evolving from the fears of the CCSS writing standards to the present, what changes do you think have been most effective, and where are some areas educators are still confused? What is most beneficial to students, or is an understanding that writing is complex, and approach with patience and grace the most important thing?

Scholarly articles if you’re really bored this summer:

http://www.albany.edu/cela/publication/article/writeread.htm

http://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/teaching/first-year-writing-pedagogies-methods-design/integrating-reading-and-writing

http://readingandwritingproject.org/about/research-base

http://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/twelve-tips-to-teach-the-reading-writing-connection/