Making Values Visible

Last week I was the Middle School rep on the Strategic Planning Task Force for our school. The SPTF consisted of representatives from all stakeholder groups: school board members, administration, teachers, parents, and students. As a group, we reflected on our school's mission and belief statements, identified values, and wrote strategic goals with indicators. 

Conversations were rich and varied as we each approached the tasks with our own biases and perspectives. Amazingly, there was very little bickering about what is important to us as a community. I found this to be a positive sign that we have a shared view of what our school wants to be, and that we are consistent in moving toward that vision. 

Today, I read a blog post by Christopher Lehman, a member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project of Columbia University, called "Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve (and Walls and Actions and)" (Feb. 10, 2014). In this post, Chris challenges us to take a critical look at our school and see if what we value is reflected on the bulletin boards, in our teaching, and in our communications. He specifically suggests:

"Step back and take a look:

• When you look around your classroom, what do you see the most of?  Is it what you value?

• When you look through your students notebook and folders, what does their work say to you? Do you see evidence of why you are an educator? Evidence of why you love what you teach?

• When you walk through the hallways of your school, what do classrooms and displays have in common? Can you see the heart of your community or is it unclear?

• If you talk with your colleagues, is your community’s heart visible in conversations?"

Lehman's challenge made me connect back to the Strategic Planning conversations and wonder: If I were an outsider taking a tour around our school, what values would I see reflected? Would I be able to see the same things that the SPTF identified? So I took a look.

The walls of my classrooms display lots of books. One bulletin board is devoted to book recommendations from other students and me. Shelves hold books both spine out and face out, and book holders display recommended books on tops of surfaces. Signs promoting themes, genres, and lifelong reading surround these displays. I think it's obvious I value reading.

Another bulletin board displays anchor charts from our current English Language Arts unit. These stay up throughout the unit because students refer back to them for strategies while they work on their personal projects. Surrounding these charts are signs with the enduring understandings and essential questions for the unit. This board shows that we are a community of learners and that learning is a process. 

A third bulletin board holds posters, vocabulary words, and a timeline for Social Studies. Enduring understandings and essential questions are posted alongside the visual display. The most interactive piece is the timeline, to which events are added as students learn about them. To be honest, this board shows that I have materials related to the topic, but it is mostly a display for decoration more than anything else. Perhaps this board shows that I value a decorated classroom!

As I walk through the hallways of the middle school, I see a lot of photos of students engaged in learning or service activities as well as displays of student work. I see posters advertising upcoming service initiatives. I see announcements and schedules. I see art projects and the student newspaper. I see recycling bins and trash cans. These displays reflect our community's focus on student learning, service, and the need for middle school students to stay organized!

I feel pretty good about how our school wears its heart on its sleeve. Our building is old and not particularly attractive, but we know what we hold dear and we show that in our displays. We are proud of our students and their achievements. The SPTF identified areas for growth and improvement, and as a reflective and forward-thinking institution, we will meet our targets.

In the meantime, I need to re-think my Social Studies bulletin board!

Reflections on Revision in the Poetry Unit

Big sigh. We have come to the end of our two-month-long poetry unit (first month- reading, second month- writing). I don't know why, but the poetry unit seems to fit so well into the third quarter of school. There is a lot of tough stuff to dig into (assonance, consonance, figurative language, symbolism, allusion), with an overall sense of playfulness and rule-breaking. Students are comfortable with each other in the class and with me, so are willing to write poems from their hearts. As eighth graders, the world of Shel Silverstein is left behind while they tackle extended metaphors by Langston Hughes and Longfellow, the cryptic language of e. e. cummings, and the sound devices of Poe. This mix of challenging curriculum within the context of short accessible texts and manageable writing expectations lifts the confidence and skill of nearly every student in my room.

Students submit two poetry anthologies as their assessments during the unit: a reading anthology of poems they analyze for meaning and music, and a writing anthology of their own poems, two of which are analyzed for meaning and music. Each anthology finishes with a closing statement reflecting on their learning. I learn so much about students from the closing statements: their process, their thinking, their discoveries, and their attitude. As I read closing statements from the writing anthologies yesterday, I was struck by how many students mentioned the value of revising and how the hard work of revision paid off in much better poems. Here is a sampling from the fifteen I read yesterday (names withheld to protect anonymity):

"One of the most important things I learned was that my first draft will never be my final product. After I had written my poem, I initially found it hard to edit and revise because in my mind I felt that my poem was good just the way it was. When I started revising, I was able to make my poems much better"

"I wrote lots of poems this unit, but I only chose a couple to revise and make worth reading. There were lots of different ways I chose to revise. For example one way was to completely scrap the poem and start from the beginning, but still write about the same idea. Another way I revised was to change the line breaks to add or take away emphasis to words. When I was writing poems, I took a lot of time just picking the right words to fit into each line."

"Throughout this unit, one of the biggest things I learnt was that revising will do marvelous things for my poems! Before this unit, I was very lazy and closed minded about revising poems. After I learnt new ways to revise and tried them, I realized that a poem can turn into exactly what I imagined after revising!" 

"The revising process for writing poetry is pretty hard, but once you revise you will get a feeling of accomplishment that you don’t get very much. A good tip of advice would be that not all poems make it through, some poems are not going to work as well as others and some will not satisfy you. I threw away 17 poems because I spent so much time revising them and they didn’t convey the message I was hoping to have them convey. Poetry is hard, but if you write enough you will discover that some topic work better with you than others, and that is when you write a great poem."

"One thing that I think was very cool that I did during this unit, was transforming a first draft I wrote into something completely different and new. My poem: ‘Eyes’, originally was a mentor poem that had a completely different meaning, about how much I liked and also hated blank pages. After some major editing, that simple poem turned into a symbolic poem about life."

"Sometimes, it was hard for me to actually bring myself to go back and edit my poems because I generally thought they were good as they were. By going back on my poems I learnt that revision is really important because even the small changes such as different punctuation and word choice can make a big difference. I also went back and made other changes such as trying to add in different poetic devices, and creating line breaks so change the flow of the poem itself. Doing those sorts of edits really helped me enhance my poems."

"It took a while to come up with these ideas. They all started as mere ideas that had only a bit of potential to be bigger and better poems. Revising them was hard, as at first they seemed like regular poems that couldn’t be changed to make better. Later on, it became clear that they had to be changed. So I worked harder on these poems compared to most of my other poems and they ended up as some of my best work. I learned a lot from this. I realized it’s hard to edit poems to make them a lot better than before. When you first write a poem, you feel like it’s the best that it could ever be, and that you can’t really change it to make it better. After learning multiple techniques of revising poems, it became a lot easier to revise them, as you become more educated in using strategies to change. The longer and harder a poem is worked on, the better it becomes and the more it changes into becoming a better poem." 

I know! I was actually as stunned as you are at the willingness eighth graders had toward revising their poems. Only writers who are committed to their ideas will work that hard to make their writing as good as it can be. This is the first time all year I have seen that kind of commitment, and maybe the only time I'll see it. Poetry is a special genre, and has great power for middle school students. 

I need to end this with a quote from one of my most reluctant (male) writers, a boy with the typical "school sucks" eighth grade attitude, who scoffed at every "try-it" poetry generating idea, who covered his paper as I walked by:

"I have learned that poetry is within everyone and everyone gets something out of it. Like me. I get to write the truth and I get to get happiness out of it. I think that everyone would be more happy if they wrote poetry more in their life and realize what life really is and how wonderful life is just with a little poetry."