#Rhizo15: My First Thoughts

Oh, yes. Look at me, posting twice in one week... like I said, it's been a slow week because of testing. 

And speaking of testing, I learned about #Rhizo15 in my Twitter travels this morning. My very uptight and anxious nature is completely uncomfortable with the concept of Rhizomatic Learning, developed by Dave Cormier. It's one of these things that sounds intriguing to me but also makes me squirm with insecurity. Where's my roadmap?!

But there is only the sketchiest vision of a map. I can work with that, though.

Back in 2004, I took a road trip through the Andes with a few friends. We rented a pick-up truck in Quito, Ecuador and took off for Guayaquil. Have you ever driven through the Andes? Probably not, because it is not possible to drive through it. You have to drive around it. Around and around and around and around. Higher and higher and higher, then lower and lower and lower. You get the picture. Here in the US, we have the luxury of well-lit highways and road signs every few miles that reassure us that we're headed in the right directions. You can pull off the road if you need to pee and grab a bag of gummy worms. In the Andes, not so much. Those curvy roads are the width of a one-way street but are meant for two-way traffic. And there are no lights. And there are no road signs. The "map" we got was a picture of some lines that showed approximate locations of some major cities. Were there even any distances on it? I doubt it.

It got darker and darker as we wound our way around the mountain. Then, it got foggy. Driving through a cloud forest in the dark on a twisty road with no guardrails is not for the faint of heart. Also, we were fighting off feral dogs that kept trying to jump into the truck bed. (Not kidding.) So, what did we do?

 Mike drove, and I leaned out the window shouting "right, left, right, left," so that we would not take a nosedive off the side of the mountain while Sue and the other Mike fended off the dogs. Then, a truck with bright headlights appeared behind. We quickly pulled to the side to let the truck pass and then followed that truck's lights all the way down the mountain, matching it's every turn until finally we coasted into a sleepy town on the outskirts of Guayaquil, in the earliest hours of a new day.

That was a nice anecdote, but where was I? Oh, testing. This week, Dave asks what kind of learning can't be measured?  What should we be counting?  The very nature of my job requires me to measure and track everything, as a writing interventionist. I count how many words students write in a given period of time, I count how many different types of sentences students construct in a piece of writing. I count how many words have been spelled incorrectly. I count how many pieces of punctuation have been missed. And I track it all, looking for upward improvement.

But is there anything valuable about writing intervention that can't be counted and charted? Maybe. How about the realization that adding an exclamation point completely changes the tone of a sentence? Or that a comma can alter the meaning of a sentence? How do I measure the intensity of the lightbulb that flickers on in those moments? I don't think I can, but I'm sure it counts!

Emily Purser asks:

Meanwhile, the powers that be at my institution are of the 'questionable' variety of view that a valid indicator of our 'performance' as educators would be to count the number of hits on our website.... if only they were kidding. Not only that, but it's a website we didn't design, and that doesn't represent my work in ANY way that I find meaningful or accurate! please. But what are they supposed to do? - they're being given silly spreadsheets from on high will boxes to fill with numbers. They could stop being so compliant, and shout "a pox on your box!"... but then maybe there is something sensible to measure, that we can supply instead? 

Is the trouble with the tools, or the tradesmen?

I say, it's a combination of both. True, valid measurements of what students are learning requires time, money, and wherewithal. School administrators are typically short on all three.  Packages and programs produced by publishing companies are alluring. It makes things neat, systematized, standardized, reproducible and easier to think of skills as widgets. I get it, I really do and I freely admit that having a program makes my life easier too. After all, I get twenty minutes a week or every other week with each student. Efficiency and effectiveness become important, even when I know that kids need time and space to delve into the messy work of writing. I strive for balance, and work around this by focusing on the micro elements of writing-- the sentence, the word, the puncutation.

Shaping A Vision for Push-In Writing Intervention

A working lunch. 

It's been a slow month for me at the middle school, because of SBAC testing, so I've had a lot of time to reflect on my first year as a writing interventionist, and how I will use what I've learned so far in the next school year. Yes! It's only April but I'm already thinking ahead to September. Why? Because this next month and a half presents limited opportunity, amidst our busy schedules, to connect and plan with the literacy coach before we part ways for the summer.

When I came into this role back in October, I was at somewhat of a disadvantage. First, I wasn't around for the first month of school and didn't have the opportunity to connect with the grade-level teams or plan ahead with the literacy coach, or assist her in identifying students who needed Tier 1 or 2 support.

Secondly, I was a replacement hire. The teacher that was originally in my position served in this role very differently and had a different relationship with the English teachers. (The job description changed at the time I was hired.) So, this meant that I had to negotiate a new understanding of the writing interventionist role with the classroom teachers, while at the same time, no one was really 100% sure what my role would look like, since it was a new position.

Third, and most significant, I was and am transitioning from being a full-time classroom teacher to a part-time writing interventionist that works with a small group of students on a narrow scope of writing skills individualized to each student. What does this mean? It means that when I taught high school English, I was more of a generalist. With 175 students, I inevitably gravitated towards teaching to the middle or upper middle of my classes, with very little time for differentiation, despite my best efforts. I also spent much of my time in a reader response mode with the students, and instead of delivering explicit writing instruction, I taught the 5 paragraph essay and "taught" writing via margin notes on papers and the use of "formulas."

As a writing interventionist, I do what every English teacher wishes she could do in the daily running of her classroom. It's basically a dream job but I've had to shift gears-- I still think in terms of the big picture but I also have the luxury of zooming in on the little details within the picture that help students with the micro elements of writing--the sentence and paragraph level, in other words. It's like the Slow Movement of education.

This year, I did a combination of push-in and pull-out, though it did take me awhile to figure out what push-in for writing support might look like, since students typically don't spend a whole period working on writing, nor do many teachers have any regularly scheduled writing routine. This, I understand from my classroom teaching days but now, with the benefit of hindsight, experience and observation, I see that there are probably many ways to make writing happen every day in the English classroom, even under the constraint of 45 minute periods. Some of this writing might be low-stakes and some might be high-stakes. Steven Covey says we should schedule our priorities, and not the other way around. If we value and prioritize writing, then it can happen everyday and there are many, many teachers who do exactly that. All writing counts! I had to remember this, in order to realize that push-in works with low-stakes writing too. Journaling or doing sentence exercises at the beginning of class, during the Do Now, presents an opportunity to reinforce the skills and strategies that students have been working on during intervention.

So, what does push-in look like for a writing interventionist?

• Non-intrusive
• Non-disruptive
• Follows the lead of the teacher and the flow of the classroom
• Sometimes, I'm crouching desk-side, supporting students with a specific part of a task, like sentence construction. 
• Sometimes, I'm sitting with a small group of students, all working on the same task, and offering guidance as they work through it. 
• Sometimes, I am walking around, ready to assist any student, not just the ones I see for intervention. 
• If possible, I check in with the teacher before I come in, or as I'm entering the room. 
• Sometimes, I am sitting in the back of the room, observing the lesson and taking notes, so that I can model the same language used by the teacher and teaching points during intervention sessions. 

That last bullet point is particularly important, as it is helpful to know what students are doing in class, so that I can be consistent and provide continuity during intervention sessions, in order to avoid confusion. Whatever strategies I give to students, those strategies must work within the framework the teacher uses in the classroom. 

I have another month and a half (thanks to all the snow days!) to work on this model of push-in support for writing intervention, to learn more lessons about balancing push-in with pull-out, and to begin to develop toolkits that students can access during class, whether or not I'm in the classroom. (I'll share what I've learned about toolkits, specifically in an intervention setting,  in a future post, as that is still under development!) 

So Little Time. So Much Intervention.

Photo Credit: PearsonSchool.com

One of the challenges of being a part-time writing interventionist is that I'm only available to students twenty hours a week, and not even all of those hours because of their class schedules. Since I started this job, I've fallen into the habit of comparing my current position with my former one as a full-time classroom teacher. One of the luxuries of being a full-time teacher is being able to experiment and try out new ideas, knowing that there's always another period, another day, to reflect, take stock and decide what direction to go in. When I see a student for 20 minutes a week, I don't have the luxury of time and getting it right feels more critical, more urgent. As a teacher, I'm used to developing my own materials and drawing on my own experiences to create meaningful lessons and opportunities for learning. As a writing interventionist, I'm learning to rely more on materials that have already been published. Instead of using my creativity to construct materials, I focus on delivery and engagement.  Even there, I feel pressure to get it right the first time. Maybe that seems unfair, to put that kind of pressure on myself, but with only 20 minutes a week for each student or each group of students I see, it feels imperative to stick my landing, so to speak. And I'll admit, I am less amenable to the idea these days that I should take my work home. Quite frankly, for the money I make, I am going to leave my work at work. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, my job occupied so much space in my brain, and I spent hours upon hours outside of work thinking about my students, developing materials and planning delivery.

My secondary task as an interventionist is monitor the progress of my students, and when it comes to writing, that can be a bit of a challenge.  First, I have to figure out what skills my students need to improve, then I have to figure out how to quantify or measure those skills, in order to show an improvement of those skills over time. For some skills, like spelling, that's pretty easy. Using a Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) approach, I can simply count up correctly spelled words (CSW). Other things, like organization, are more open to interpretation and require a qualitative analysis, such as looking for logically ordered ideas. In that case, there might be more than one answer, so I have to decide whether the student grasps the concept of organization in an essay and point to specific lines in the student's writing that demonstrate this, and of course, this will be different for every student.

In my school, we are following an Response-To-Intervention (RTI) model, which is new to me so that has been another challenge in this position. Not only am I learning about this model but I also have to figure out how it applies to writing. There is a wealth of information online about using RTI with reading and math intervention, but less of it for writing, I'm finding.

But as I've said, I'm really excited about these new challenges, and I'm happy to have been able to find a position doing what I always wanted to do when I was a classroom teacher--work closely with students and give them the attention they need and deserve.

A (Real) Teacher

I wasn't sure what I was going to write about today because, if I'm being honest, I haven't been writing true "slices." But today, I think I have a slice for you. 

I said something that I shouldn't have said. 

The big buzz around the English Department this week is the upcoming NCTE convention in Washington DC. I spied the program on a teacher's desk and as I was flipping through it, I offhandedly remarked "Oh, I used to go every year when I was a real teacher." 

As the words left my mouth, I knew I wasn't being fair--to myself or to other instructional paraprofessionals. I mean, what is a "real" teacher? It's more than just degrees and certifications. Instructional paraprofessionals know their subject matter. They are skilled at helping kids turn the lightbulb on. They are tasked with the difficult challenge of working with kids who "don't get it." 

So, this is my lesson for today: own my professionalism. I am absolutely a "real" teacher. I have always been and always will be one. 

{See more Slices in the comments over at Two Writing Teachers.}

Back in the Saddle Again.

Yup, back in the saddle again. When I left teaching in 2008, I was ready for a break from the classroom and to concentrate on my growing family. I still felt a pull to education and teaching, so I started my little tutoring business, and wondered what my teaching career would look like down the line.
I envisioned myself working closely with students and teachers in some capacity, maybe as a coach. Last year, I decided it was time to get my Connecticut teaching license, in order to be able to take advantage of any opportunities that might come my way.
One of those opportunities was a position in a neighboring town as a writing paraprofessional. I wasn't 100% sure what such a role would entail but I had a good idea, plus it was only 20 hours a week. I knew I had to try, so I just went for it.
Getting the call to come in for an interview was a thrill, and getting hired the same day was even more of a thrill. I gave myself a week to get my affairs in order, figure out childcare and get my head in the game.
And here I am, about a month into my new job, and really loving it. I'm experiencing a level of autonomy and independence I never had as a classroom teacher, and I spend a good chunk of my day doing what I love best-- developing materials, coming up with lesson ideas, working with individual and small groups of students, and talking to teachers about how to help kids become confident writers.
It feels good to be here.

See the comments in this post for other SOL posts!