I would love to know what you're doing and how I could be a part of it. I am a high school principal but i'm also working on my doctorate and one of my key interests is college readiness in the area of writing, specifically how teachers are prepared and knowledgable about writing instruction.

I appreciate your effort to collaborate with K-12 teachers in order to create your workshop.  I would love to create a workshop like yours here in the Central Valley of California.  One of my goals as a high school English teacher is to prepare my students for college writing, and what better way to reduce a potential gap with a workshop!  I would love to hear more about your workshop and of course learn of the outcomes of your workshop!

Thank you!

Forgot to say that I'm in Texas also. Will be in San Antonio in early August in fact. Contact me at klee@normangeeisd.org to share more about your program.

I will try to respond to both comments since I don't see a way to reply to individual posts.

Cathy and Kristi,

One of the things I love about NWP is my contact with teachers from different levels and in different contexts. Yet despite visiting high school and middle school classrooms, talking about writing and teaching with my friends in the San Antonio Writing Project, I still feel that my teaching context at the college level is so different from what my colleagues face in the public schools, that I have to try and learn as much as I can from them. I don't want to pitch what I am doing in an inauthentic or irrelevant way.

This wil be the fifth summer we have had an Open Institute focused on college readiness in writing, and they all have been wonderful. Last year, interestingly, was sponsored by our local Educational Resource Center for GED teachers. The GED test is being revised also with more rigorous, college-ready standards, and these teachers were hungry for help. Mostly, I have tried to immerse teachers for a short time in what college is like and what college-level writing teachers do, so that college is demystified and they have a better sense of what these "college readiness" standards are pointing toward.

I have created a resource site from these Open Institutes I call "Crossing2College" that has a lot of good stuff in it, even some assignments created by past participants:  http://www.sanantoniowritingproject.org/crosstocollege/default.html

Cathy, you are in California, so you should have access to one of the best resources I know of: the Cal State Early Assessment Program and its 12th grade English course in Expository Reading and Writing. Here is an overview of it: http://www.calstate.edu/eap/englishcourse/materials.shtml

I know from looking at the website that  they have workshops on teaching the course around California the rest of this summer. I believe John Edlund at CSU Polytechnic had a lot to do with crafting this huge effort. You may know more about it than I and whether it seems to be working. Looking at the course and its design from a distance, I am very impressed. I have contacted him before, and he is always very helpful.

You ask about how teachers are prepared and knowledgable about writing instruction, and I don't think I am far off base in saying teachers are not prepared. Few Teacher Certification programs devote a course to the teaching of writing, and if it is it is lumped with reading in a literacy class where writing gets short shrift (the "neglected R" syndrome). Even in my context at the community college, most teachers have MAs in literature and then end up teaching almost exclusively writing classes. So teachers wing it, they endure professional development at their school, or they reach out and find NWP.

Kristi, maybe we could get together when you are in San Antonio. I love the fact that you are a Principal who is also part of NWP. Here is my email: llirvin@gmail.com

~Lennie

Lennie--

Your request about what preparation teachers need for addressing college readiness in writing involves so many aspects of teaching writing! Before even getting to "college readiness" there's a whole range of skills within the composing process, and another whole set for teachers in how to support children as they learn it, along with how to organize the classroom to maximize the help that a teacher can give. And then there is the range of types or genres of writing, the range of audiences for writing, etc.

At the Illinois Writing Project, we've conducted workshop series (beyond just our summer institutes) on all this for many years. The range of knowledge that teachers bring to the workshops varies tremendously. Some progressive school districts provide a lot of PD, and the teachers are all using writers workshop and are now looking to advance further and find solutions to specific challenges (like teaching argument). In other districts, most of the faculty is still at square one. So the first task is to find out where teachers are along this spectrum, and work with them where they are.

In our Project, as with others in NWP, the most important step is having teachers write and reflect on their writing. This addresses yet another aspect of teachers learning, which is simply to begin understanding how writing works for writers, what the challenges are, and what kinds of support are needed.  Teachers can then draw many of their own conclusions, so we don't need to be telling them everything, but rather empowering them to learn, themselves. And in sharing reflections, teachers learn from one another and benefit from the expertise that is usually present in the room. And of course in getting participants started with writing, and organizing the group as a writers workshop, we are modeling strategies that participants adopt and adapt  for themselves.

In regard to the specifics of "college readiness," once this kind of base is developed, looking at models and mentor texts, modeling processes for developing academic arguments, etc., is easy enough. But without it, and without the comfort and confidence about writing that evolves from this base, information about academic writing -- or anything else for that matter -- doesn't really take.

But perhaps I'm just reciting things you already know. In any case, best wishes for success with your program.

  --Steve Zemelman, Illinois Writing Project

Hi Lennie,

Thanks for your contact info in San Antonio. Perhaps we'll be able to meet there.

To answer your original question in the post, I would say that teachers I know don't know how to teach writing that doesn't end up seeming formulaic. So much of what makes a good writer is being a good reader, or at least being a reader at all. Better yet, having had life experiences that fuel one's imagination or help to build a rich vocabulary or enhance understanding of culture and people ... These are all things a writer can draw from.

But when you are teaching a group of students who don't necessarily have varied life experiences from which to draw (perhaps due to poverty and the like), then some teachers can resort to teaching the formula. 

Pin addition, I would say that being a good teacher doesnt imply being a good writer yourself. You could even be a giod English teacher and not be very good at writing. Couple that with the fact that there is hardly any instruction during pre-service on how to teach the writing process or any professional development for teachers that helps them in this area. So they do the best they can.

These are just some thoughts for your consideration. Hope it helps!

Kristi 

As a teacher for grades 4 and 5 for the past eight years, I would say that the chief concern I have for teaching expository and persuasive writing, is finding a topic that the kids care enough about to follow through with the writing piece.  They will also need experiences with the topic to be able to write persuasively about their topic.  One such topic that has been successful has been about bullying.  Scholastic's language arts magazine, "Storyworks" helped to create a great environment with their articles on bullying and being a bystander in a bullying situation.  We used the article and our experiences to try to write  a persuasive essay about whether or not  you should get involved as a bystander in a bullying situation.  Students created an argument based on the article and their experiences. It was a great opportunity for me, as their teacher, to gain some insight as to what they had experienced and how that would influence their decisions.  Because kids had personal experiences with this topic, they were able to be more persuasive towards their point of view. Another successful topic that students had experience to match with another article read, was whether to trash the television or not to.  Again, students have enough experience with the topic to challenge their reader to see their point of view. 

Please keep us updated on your conference, and thank you for asking your question.

Yours truly,

Cynthia Andrews, Eastern Michigan Writing Project

I recognize that I am a little late to the party, but at SCWriP here at UCSB we've been using "The Frameworks for Success in Postsecondary Writing" to support these conversations. We use the Habits of Mind list to think about our own teaching. Where are we supporting the acquisition of these habits?

I thought I would share one creation from our Open Institute on college readiness and writing. This set of "holistic" goals and objectives for a CCR curriculum comes from looking at a set of college writing assignments to see what sorts of skills and tasks they require, a set of diagnostic essays from Developmental English students to see what characteristics in their writing might define them as "not ready" for college writing, and then a set of essays from students (both remedial and freshman comp) talking about what they think is important for being ready for college level writing.

Holistic Goals and Objectives of a CCR Curriculum

--from2011 and 2012 San Antonio Writing Project Open Institutes on College Readiness in Writing

Seek to engage students in writing activities that call on them to:

• Write to communicate for a reader/audience with a purpose
• Write often and at various points within Peter Elbow's Map of Writing
• Experience flow in writing and the creative energy of expressing and developing their own ideas freely
• Write based from readings, to engage in the reading process as the foundation for the writing process (learning to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate both what they read and what they write)
• Think and re-think, particularly surrounding problems or questions where they must entertain multiple possibilities and differing view points
• Engage in the writing process—invention, planning, drafting, feedback/response, revising, editing, publishing (especially revision based upon re-thinking)
• Write with a focus and structure
• Write essays (thesis-support development and organization)
• Construct “arguments” (evidence based support for interpretations or positions)
• Learn to understand a writing prompt and correctly represent the task
• To develop their writing more (i.e. learn to get more content and support, appreciate detail and description and the general principle of showing and not telling)
• Work hard and write longer pieces (develop the capacity for the longer assignments of college)
• Work on improving their sentence skills and grammar
• Begin to learn to handle and document outside voices and information in their own writing
• Research and learn to differentiate what is important and what is not and evaluate sources
• Reflect upon their writing and how they write

I'd be happy to send the hand out and the Elbow Map of Writing if anyone is interested.

Lennie