Using Writing Contests to Prepare Students for State Writing Tests

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Danielle DeFauw (University of Michigan/ Dearborn) acknowledges the need to prepare students for cold writing prompts in state assessments, despite the fact that students usually get to select their own topic when they write in school. DeFauw suggests a way to “teach to the test” that really helps students: submitting their work to writing contests. Entering a writing contest, she says, shares three characteristics with writing in a state test: (a) they have to respond to a prompt; (b) the audience is distant and unknown; and (c) it’s about competition, evaluation, and perhaps enjoyment. Here is her recommended procedure for 2-5 days of writing workshops: • Stage 1: Genre exploration – The class reads winning contest entries together, using them as mentor texts. • Stage 2: Modeling – The teacher chooses a contest prompt, reads the guidelines, rules, and rubric, selects a personal topic, and thinks aloud as he or she responds to the prompt. • Stage 3: Students write – The teacher provides students with a writing contest prompt and has them apply what they have learned about writing to produce a draft, self-evaluate based on the contest guidelines and rubric, and decide whether to submit their work. • Stage 4: Sharing and feedback – Students read each other’s writing with a partner, in a small group, or to the whole class, and the teacher then collects and gives students feedback on the writing. DeFauw concludes by recommending ten websites that have no-fee writing contests or publishing opportunities (many of them post winning and exemplary entries): Creative Communication: A Celebration of Today’s Writers for grades 3-12, essays up to 300 words, deadlines in February, August, and October: www.poeticpower.com The Grannie Annie Family Story Celebration for grades 4-8 – Students interview family members about events that happened before the student was born, 275-500 words by February 1st each year: www.thegrannieannie.org The Legacy Project’s Listen to a Life Contest for students 8-18 years old writing about an interview with a person who is 50 or older about his or her life experiences, dreams, goals, challenges, or successes: www.tcpnow.com/contests/winners.html Letters About Literature, Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, for grades 4-10 writing personal letters to an author, living or dead, whose work has influenced their view of the world or of themselves: www.lettersaboutliterature.org Magic Dragon from the Association for Encouragement of Children’s Creativity for elementary students; not a contest, but poems, stories, essays, or artwork on any topic may be published: www.magicdragonmagazine.com Optimist Club for students under 19 by the end of February, 700-800 words, sharing an opinion through persuasive, explanatory, or narrative prose in response to a prompt: www.optimist.org/e/member/scholarships3.cfm PBS Kids Writers Contest for K-3 students, a story with at least five illustrations, 50-200 words for K-1 and 100-350 words for 2-3: http://pbskids.org/writerscontest/contest.php Scholastic has multiple contests through the website and magazines (Scope and Storyworks): http://clubs2.scholastic.com/programs The Writing Conference has a January deadline and welcomes all students to write in narrative, poetic, or expository genres to a specific prompt: www.writingconference.com/contest.htm Young Voices Foundation: Mentoring Young Writers has an annual poetry contest and three themed fiction/nonfiction contests for K-2, 3-6, and 7-12: www.youngvoicesfoundation.org/youngvoiceshome.html

 “10 Writing Opportunities to ‘Teach to the Test’” by Danielle DeFauw in The Reading Teacher, April 2013 (Vol. 66, #7, p. 569-573), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.1161/abstract; the author can be reached at daniellp@umd.umich.edu.


 Stephen Anderson

Dealing with a Defiant Student

“When children are defiant, their goal is not to annoy, disrespect, or frustrate us,” says Margaret Berry Wilson in this article in Responsive Classroom Newsletter. “Rather, their goal often is to feel significant.” Teachers sometimes get into power struggles with defiant children, she says. “But teachers never win power struggles. Once you’re in one, you’ve lost. And so has the child: No one wins a power struggle.” What’s the alternative? Orchestrating things to prevent defiance in the first place, says Wilson, and if it occurs, calmly working with students in ways that address their need to feel significant – while holding them accountable for following the rules. Some specifics: • Build positive relationships. Potentially defiant students need to know that you’ll still care about them whatever happens. Focus on positive attributes, learn about their interests, and channel those strengths into playing an important role in the classroom – for example, a student might be the expert at fixing jammed door locks. • Reinforce progress and effort. Notice and give specific praise for positive, cooperative behaviors, however small. Wilson believes teachers should avoid saying “I like”, “I appreciate”, and “I want”, which convey the idea that it’s about pleasing or complying with the teacher rather than doing the right thing. Such language may also make a student feel manipulated. Better to talk about positive results – for example, “When you helped Kevin this morning, I think he felt valued.” • Teach how to disagree respectfully. “It’s empowering for all children – especially those who struggle with authority – to know that they may disagree with adults,” says Wilson – as long as it’s done appropriately. Students should be taught to use phrases like “I feel that” and “I suggest” when they believe something is unfair or should be changed. • Channel children’s energy in positive directions. If students are fired up about an issue, they should be encouraged to write letters to the school or community paper, get involved in service projects, or do their own research on it. • De-escalate defiance. The goal is to keep the child safe and cool things down. Wilson suggests: Avoid pushing the student’s buttons; don’t do anything that will heighten stress or invite more resistance. Don’t try to reason or make an emotional appeal when the child is too angry to process it. Slow down. Taking a few minutes before saying anything raises the probability that the child will listen. After the incident, reflect on what the trigger might have been – an unexpected schedule change, perhaps? • Intervene early. At the first sign of defiance, set clear limits. The earlier the teacher intervenes, the less likely the child will be to dig in and escalate. Use brief, direct statements, speak in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, avoid questions, and keep body language neutral – for example, “Andrew, take a seat. You can read or draw for now.” • When using consequences, offer limited choices. Because students who have escalated to defiance are often seeking power, it’s smart to give them a selection of consequences – for example, “Anna, either you can come with us now, or I can have Mrs. Bell come sit with you. Which do you choose?” • Avoid negotiating in the moment. Once a teacher has decided on a consequence or redirection for a defiant child, it’s wise to stick with it. “Negotiating during the incident will invite further testing,” says Wilson. “It also sends the message that children can avoid a redirection or consequence by resisting.” And don’t get into a power struggle. “Max, we’re done talking about that for now. Everyone, get your writing journals out and start on your stories from yesterday.” • Give the child time and space. Once a consequence has been given, it’s best to step back and give the child space to comply in a reasonable amount of time. Asking for immediate compliance invites further defiance.

 “When Children Are Defiant” by Margaret Berry Wilson in Responsive Classroom Newsletter, Summer 2013, http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/article/when-children-are-defiant


 Stephen Anderson

Classroom Management 101

In this NJEA Review article, Tracey Garrett (Rider University) refutes three common myths about classroom management: (a) that it can’t be taught and must be learned by experience; (b) that it’s a bag of tricks; and (c) that it depends on giving students extrinsic rewards. In fact, says Garrett, one of the major success stories of educational research in the 20th century was establishing a set of principles and strategies that can be taught, observed, and emulated. Here’s her take, with a major focus on preventing discipline problems from happening in the first place: • Develop an organized physical layout for the classroom. Purge the classroom of all unwanted clutter. Personalize the classroom so it communicates information about the teacher and students. Plan pathways to avoid congestion. Plan adequate space for students to line up by the door. Make it clear where materials belong. Provide space for both academic and social tasks. Display students’ work. Involve students in the design of the classroom. Locate the teacher’s desk in an appropriate place. • Develop clear rules and routines. Create 4-6 classroom rules that clearly specify appropriate behavior. Consider involving the students in generating these rules. Write the rules using positive language. Post classroom rules and refer to them as necessary. Develop routines to provide direction about how different classroom tasks are accomplished. Teach and demonstrate classroom rules and routines as specifically as you do academic content. • Establish caring relationships with and among students. Get to know something personal about each student. Be aware of students’ accomplishments and comment on them. Send positive notes, phone calls, or e-mails home. Be sensitive to students’ moods and concerns. Praise more, criticize less. Hold high expectations. Be a “real person.” Maintain a sense of humor. • Plan and implement engaging instruction. Match the physical layout of the classroom to the teacher’s style. Have all materials organized and ready before the start of each lesson. Establish an attention-getting signal. Adapt content and activities to students’ interests. Ensure students work at the appropriate level of challenge or difficulty. Give students the chance to exercise autonomy and make choices. Give students the opportunity to finish and display their work products. Show enthusiasm for the curriculum • Address discipline issues when they arise. Use nonverbal interventions such as proximity, eye contact, hand signals, and facial expressions to redirect misbehavior. Ignore minor misbehavior, if possible. Use brief, concise, and specific verbal interventions to redirect misbehavior. Use positive teacher language to tell the student what to do rather than what not to do. Implement logical consequences to help students learn something about why that particular misbehavior was inappropriate.


 “Classroom Management: It’s More Than a Bag of Tricks” by Tracey Garrett in NJEA Review, Oct. 2012 (Vol. 86, p. 17-19), http://bit.ly/Qsy5CV (spotted in Education Digest, May 2012)

 Stephen Anderson

What Art Did for One Child

“My vivid and colorful imagination turned me into a hopeless daydreamer in elementary school,” recalls award-winning New York art teacher Michele Sommer in this poignant Harvard Educational Review memoir. “Once, in first grade, I was so completely absorbed in a daydream that I didn’t notice all the children had been dismissed. I found myself sitting completely alone at my desk, my teacher glaring at me… I was keenly aware even as a child that the adults in my life regarded my daydreaming as a defect, and so I was deeply ashamed of it. I worked hard to learn to pay attention and follow directions like everyone else. What I wouldn’t give today, as an artist, to once again have that extraordinary mental capacity!” In second grade, Sommer had difficulty with subtraction, so one day she drew vertical lines through all the subtraction signs, turning those problems into addition, which she knew how to do. Her teacher was not fooled and put a big red F on her paper. On the way home, Sommer disposed of the paper under the neighbor’s pine tree. “My earliest failures in school set the tone for my entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade education,” she says. “The negative academic expectations were somehow passed on from grade to grade, teacher to teacher. I felt I could never be an A student.” As she went through elementary school, Sommer did well in art and was praised for her ability. But was it a gift she might lose? “I have a distinct memory of the moment of terror I experienced entering the fourth grade,” she says, “wondering if I ‘still had it’ or if I had somehow lost my artistic ability over the summer months. What if I couldn’t draw anymore? How would I get through the school year?” In junior high school, she still felt “dumb, humiliated, and worthless” as a student. But on graduation day, she was astonished to hear her name called by Mrs. Kiester, her art teacher, to receive an award for a colored-pencil drawing she had done of a geranium. The teacher’s note on the back commended her for her work – for “the satisfaction and happiness it has brought to me and others who have known, loved, and marveled at your creativity while you joined us here.” “My art teacher saved my life that day,” says Sommer. “The feeling of success and the knowledge that I had a valuable skill that I could share with others did buoy me and set me on the path to my bright future… Art continues to save my life every day. I need the elements of art like I need food and water; to me these elements are the basic building blocks of life.” As an art teacher, she continues, “I often get to see another side of a student who is struggling in academic subjects. For parents and teachers of these students, having someone witness this side of them is extremely valuable in working toward a deeper understanding of a child. I have an important role in discovering how children learn and how they see and feel about themselves and the world around them. I know that every child can experience success and become excited about learning. Art education has the power to make that happen.”

 “The Cream Does Not Always Rise: The Plight of Visual-Spatial Learners and the Power of Art Education” by Michele Sommer in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2013 (Vol. 83, #1, p. 40-42), www.harvardeducationalreview.org


 Stephen Anderson

The Wisdom of Maya Angelou

In this interview with Alison Beard in Harvard Business Review, author Maya Angelou talks about how she learned courage from her mother: “I realized that one isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things – in the way that if one sets out to pick up a 100-pound bag of rice, one would be advised to start with a five-pound bag, then 10 pounds, then 20 pounds, and so forth, until one builds up enough muscle to lift the 100-pound bag. It’s the same way with courage.” Angelou also talks about what she learned from watching her mother and grandmother run businesses: “That it’s wise to be fair, and it’s unwise to lie. That doesn’t mean tell everything you know. Just make sure that what you do say is the truth. There are people who say I’m brutally frank, but one doesn’t have to be brutal; one can tell the truth in such a way that the listener really welcomes it.” She shares what she does about writer’s block: “I sit on the hotel bed with a deck of cards and play solitaire to give my ‘little mind’ something to do. I got that phrase from my grandmother, who used to say, when something surprised her, ‘You know, that wasn’t even on my littlest mind.’ I really thought that there was a small mind and a large mind, and if I could occupy the small one, I could get more quickly to the big one. So I play solitaire.” Finally, she’s asked about what she’s learned about leadership from her encounters with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama: “A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.” “Life’s Work: Maya Angelou” an interview by Alison Beard in Harvard Business Review, May 2013 (Vol. 91, #5, p. 152), http://hbr.org/angelou Stephen Anderson

Spotting Students Who Are Suffering from Depression

“Depression is a quiet crisis in schools,” say John Desrochers (Fairfield University, CT) and Gail Houck (Oregon Health and Science University) in this article in Principal Leadership. About 11 percent of adolescents experience depression serious enough to require expert help. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people; in 2009, there were 1,934 suicides in the 5-19 age bracket. Desrochers and Houck tell the story of a ninth-grade girl who attempted suicide. She appeared to be popular, high-achieving, and involved in school and community activities, but upon further investigation, it turned out that as early as elementary school, she had periods of moodiness and withdrawal and a psychological evaluation documented occasional depressed behavior. In the weeks before her suicide attempt, several teachers noticed that her class participation, grades, and social engagement had fallen off. Her English teacher mentioned “dark themes” in some of her writing, and the school nurse said the girl had visited her with vague physical complaints that were followed by absences. The girl also quit the volleyball team, dropped out of all her school activities, and was no longer singing in the church choir. “To recognize and effectively address depression and other mental health problems, schools must have systems in place to connect the dots and provide appropriate support,” say Desrochers and Houck. “Depression is a developmental process. Early (even mild) episodes of depression left untreated make it more likely that major depression will develop later. Early intervention is essential.” The authors recommend a multi-tiered system of supports paralleling Response to Intervention (RTI) and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS): prevention and wellness promotion for all students, universal screening for academic and behavioral barriers to learning, effective interventions that increase in intensity as needed, monitoring students’ responses to interventions, and systematic decisions about services. Even if a systematic approach like this is not in place, principals should work with their mental-health team to: • Review current problem-solving structures and identify how they can help spot and intervene with students suffering from depression. • Facilitate planning by and close collaboration among school mental-health professionals. • Establish some form of universal screening for depression and other mental-health disorders. • Provide parent education sessions and professional development for school personnel on signs, symptoms, outcomes, and how to refer students who are showing signs of depression. Here is a list of symptoms (of course, not all students who show these are clinically depressed): Disengagement from family and friends; Difficulty with interpersonal relationships; Increased irritability, anger, sensitivity to criticism, and classroom misbehavior; Excessive time spent with video games and other solitary activities; Lack of interest in activities that had been giving enjoyment; Declining school achievement; Changes in eating habits, frequent physical complaints, fatigue, or sleep disturbance; Increased tardiness and absence from school; Lack of grooming or self-care; Feelings of boredom, apathy, sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, or worthlessness; Low self-esteem; Self-destructive thoughts or thoughts of suicide or death; Crying; Difficulties paying attention, remembering, completing tasks, or making decisions.

 “Depression: A Quiet Crisis” by John Desrochers and Gail Houck in Principal Leadership, April 2013 (Vol. 13, #8, p. 12-16), www.nassp.org


 Stephen Anderson Principal,

“Essential Questions”

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins on “Essential Questions” In this important new book, backwards curriculum-unit design gurus Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins further explain the use of “essential questions”, including lots of examples. Here is a sampling: • In history and social studies: How can we know what really happened in the past? What is worth fighting for? Whose “story” is it? • In mathematics: When and why should we estimate? How does what we measure influence how we measure? How does how we measure influence what we measure (or don’t measure)? What do good problem solvers do, especially when they get stuck? • In language arts: Why am I writing? For whom? How do effective writers hook and hold their readers? How are stories about other places and times about me? • In science: How are structure and function related in living things? Is aging a disease? How do we decide what to believe about a scientific claim? • In the arts: What influences creative expression? What’s the difference between a thoughtful and a thoughtless critique? If practice makes perfect, what makes perfect practice? • In world languages: What should I do in my head when trying to learn a language? How do native speakers differ, if at all, from fluent foreigners? How can I sound more like a native speaker? How can I explore and describe cultures without stereotyping them? McTighe and Wiggins believe good essential questions have seven key characteristics: They are open-ended; there isn’t a single, final, correct answer. They are thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate. They call for higher-order thinking – analysis, inference, evaluation, and prediction. They point toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines. They raise additional questions and encourage further inquiry. They require support and justification, not just an answer. They beg to be revisited over time. McTighe and Wiggins go on to clarify how three kinds of questions are useful in teaching but are not essential: Questions that lead – They point to a single, correct answer – for example, Which letters in the alphabet are vowels? Questions that guide – These are a little more robust than leading questions, but they still point students toward previously targeted knowledge and skills – for example, Can you state Newton’s 2nd Law in your own words? Questions that hook – At the beginning of a lesson or unit, a teacher uses these to grab students’ attention and provoke wonder – for example, a science teacher in an Alaskan village asked students, Are we drinking the same water as our ancestors? Should essential questions be posed at the beginning of every lesson, as some principals require? McTighe and Wiggins think not. Essential questions are designed for the curriculum unit; they are “too complex and multifaceted to be satisfactorily addressed within a single lesson,” they say. “In particular, essential questions are meant to focus on long-term learning and thus be revisited over time, not answered by the end of a class period. Not only would it be difficult to come up with a new EQ for every lesson; the predictable result would be a set of superficial (leading) or, at best, guiding questions.” Why use essential questions? “For the majority of learners,” say McTighe and Wiggins, “school is a place where the teacher has the answers and classroom questions are intended to find out who knows them. Ironically, many teachers signal that this is the game even when they don’t intend to communicate it – for example, by posing questions that elicit only yes/no or single right answers, by calling only on students with raised hands, and by answering their own questions after a brief pause.” Essential questions, on the other hand: Signal that inquiry is a key goal of education; Make it more likely that the unit will be intellectually engaging; Help clarify and prioritize standards; Provide transparency for students (Where are we going with all this?); Encourage and model metacognition; Provide opportunities for intra- and interdisciplinary connections; Support meaningful differentiation. Essential questions are also important in professional learning community discussions of interim assessment results and student work – for example: Are these the results we expected? Why or why not? Are there any surprises? Any anomalies? What does this work reveal about student learning and performance? What patterns of strengths and weaknesses are evident? What misconceptions are revealed? How good is “good enough”? What actions at the teacher, team, school, and district level would improve learning and performance?

 Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (ASCD, 2013)

 Stephen Anderson