All the good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way.
—ANNE LAMOTT
Teaching and writing are labor, and only those involved in birthing research projects in chaotic classrooms can understand fully what the experience is like. We remember some years ago talking to a man whose wife had just spent twenty-six hours in labor giving birth to their first child. We were clucking about how hard that must have been for the woman. He brushed aside our concerns, saying, “Hey, it’s not that bad. It’s not like she was in labor all the time. I mean, you have a pain, but then you get a break for five or ten minutes. Heck, you can practically take a nap or read a magazine during those breaks.”
We write and teach, but we don’t work full time as teachers in K–12 schools, so we’re giving advice from the outside, and we risk being as clueless as that spouse. The view from the outside doesn’t acknowledge what the teaching process is like for those on the inside in the midst of busy classrooms. Teachers are often told that weekends are the perfect time to revise the drafts they’ve been working on in the classroom. We might just as easily tell them to read a magazine or grab a nap in the author’s chair in class during those moments when they aren’t actually teaching their students throughout the day.
We do know a couple of teachers who write beautiful essays and books in the midst of their teaching day; they grab moments here and there between lessons and workshops. But this certainly isn’t the norm. Writing, like labor, is a slow, hard process for most teacher-researchers. It requires a fair amount of time outside the classroom—quiet, unstructured time to let your thoughts percolate.
Teacher-researchers have a response for the experts who say writing can easily be integrated into the teaching day: it’s much harder than you think. Teachers are in labor all day long, and no matter how nice the person is who holds your hand, the experience can be understood and described only by those who go through it. The rhythm of any good teaching day includes rapid and steady bursts of insight, delight, and unease about students’ learning and our role in it.
Writing and teaching take such different energies that many argue that it isn’t necessary for teachers to write up their research. Just the process of collecting the data and trying to analyze it will bring them new learning and understanding. Adding the layer of writing to the findings and bringing them to a larger audience is a step many teacher-researchers don’t want or need. And yet… we’ve had our own professional lives transformed by a few great teacher-research studies. We bet you, too, can identify books that marked your own emergence as a confident teacher—books such as In the Middle by Nancie Atwell (1987), Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963), Reading with Meaning by Debbie Miller (2002), Reading Reasons by Kelly Gallagher (2003), and The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller (2009).
We see quiet, persistent changes in our teaching over the years, changes that would not have happened without our having read the detailed accounts by other teachers about the learning in their classrooms. Even more transformative for us are the bits and pieces of writing done by teachers in the midst of research, like the snippets included in this book. This text is peppered with the writing of teacher-researchers, writing we wouldn’t have had access to if they hadn’t done the labor of writing about their research.
If we’re honest enough to acknowledge that writing up research is difficult, we hope you trust us enough to consider the possibilities anyway. We need more voices from teachers on the Web, in journals and in books, more accounts of how complicated and exciting learning can be when teachers look closely and aren’t afraid to write about what they are seeing. The practical advice that follows is culled from the experiences of teacher-researchers who have managed to write and publish their work; they tell us that no other experience has brought them more professional growth.
When we wrote the first edition of this book almost fifteen years ago, it was a different world for teacher-writers. E-mail was starting to become part of our daily lives, but the World Wide Web was rightly nicknamed the World Wide Wait. We had hints of what possibilities there were, but it would take so long for any Web sites with images on them to load that few people had the patience for surfing. There was no Google, there were no blogs, and the 800-pound gorilla among browsers was Netscape.
What a different world it is today: technology has opened up myriad new options for teacher-researchers to write up their work. Our own writing lives have been transformed by the Web, with most of our daily writing now devoted to online venues. Ruth and her daughter, Meghan Rose, publish their writing at their site Lit for Kids (http://litforkids.wordpress.com/); Brenda writes feature articles as part of her weekly e-newsletter The Big Fresh (www.choiceliteracy.com).
If you’re a teacher-researcher, there is no better way to get started writing up your work than participating on the Web. You can start anonymously by commenting on writing you like from other teachers who blog, or by contributing to education Web sites. Even if your role involves far more lurking than commenting, you’ll learn a lot about the norms for posting, responding, and being a good citizen on the Web by considering which teacher-authors are most relevant to you.
We’ve spent years now writing about our learning on the Web for others, as well as coaching other teachers as they begin to write up their research in Web venues. Here are some tips for getting started with writing up your research on the Web:
1. Find a writing partner. It’s not surprising how many teacher blogs and Web sites that endure for years are written by teams. A Year of Reading (http://readingyear.blogspot.com/) is coauthored by Mary Lee Hahn and Franki Sibberson; Two Writing Teachers (http://twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/) is written by Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz. Life always intervenes over the long haul with big writing projects, and a partner is invaluable for sharing the load when one or the other collaborator has to tend to home or school crises.
2. Stick to a routine. As Paul Silvia explains in How to Write a Lot (2007), “The secret is the regularity, not the number of days or the number of hours…. Finding time is a destructive way of thinking about writing. Never say this again. Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write” (83). Ruth and Meghan have posted a minimum of two entries a week on their blog for years; Brenda sends out her newsletter every week. Having weekly and daily deadlines is essential for building the habit of writing. Monthly deadlines are tougher to stick to, if only because there is too much time between them.
3. Be a good citizen on the Web. Cheer on the teachers you enjoy by commenting on their posts and linking to them. If you don’t know where to start in finding those kindred spirits, the Kidlitosphere www.kidlitosphere.org/) is a great place to start.
4. Don’t vent. For every teacher like Natalie Munroe (Goanos 2011), the Pennsylvania teacher who became a dubious folk hero for raging against her “rat-like” students, there are dozens who are suspended for unprofessional writing on the Web. It’s tempting in challenging times to let loose, but that’s what journals with locks on them are for.
5. Capture moments. The “slice of life” writing you do from your classroom is perfect for the short formats that work best on the Web. These quick pieces will not only resonate with colleagues, but will be the catalyst for long pieces and keep your writing centered on concrete, showing-not-telling writing about your students.
6. Be patient. It takes months or even years to build an audience, and that’s not even the primary purpose of writing on the Web for many teacher-researchers. The discipline of writing regularly is what will build your skills, as well as generate a wealth of raw material to work with later when you write up your work as a longer article or even a book.
If you write regularly in any kind of Web forum, you’ll soon find the lessons about how you are changing as a writer spilling over into your classroom in unexpected ways. Karen Terlecky, a fifth-grade teacher who blogs with her colleague Bill Prosser, explains:
How often do we have the student who just does not know what to write next or what book to read next? I empathize with those students now. I now know that when it is time to launch a new piece, with either a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen in front of them, students are taking a risk that might feel monumental to them.
I share my own uncertainties about what to write next with my students. I explain that I’ve learned to keep a notebook full of possible topics to write about, so that if I get a good idea I don’t forget it. I let them know that there is risk involved, and sometimes out of risk, comes our best learning and writing. I might share with them the volume of blog posts I’ve written, and that not every piece is excellent, but the sheer volume that I write helps me become a better writer. My students see me as a writer through the blog, and that is a wonderful model for them. (2010)
If you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to write up your findings in a journal article, thesis, or book, the first thing you’ll need to do is organize what you have to work with—the raw materials you’ve collected over the past months or years. Gather all this stuff, lay it out, and look it over. Your materials might include writing and reading logs by the kids, your notes or teaching journal, printouts from your blog, kids’ projects, data-analysis code sheets or charts, or photographs.
As you go through everything you’ve saved, look for the breakthrough moments, the instances when you discovered something about your kids and yourself. Begin to compile lists of those key incidents or events. Flag them in your notes; pull them off the transcripts. You need gallons and gallons of sap to make a cup of maple syrup: you need to look over all the raw stuff you have before you can distill it into the story of your classroom.
Technology is great for flagging, cataloging, and logging information, but sometimes there is no replacement for seeing everything across a larger canvas. We’ve often commandeered the living room from family members to lay out reams of notes, photos, and video clips with teachers who are starting to draft conference proposals, books, or articles. Writer Annie Dillard (1989) explains this process well, in The Writing Life:
How appalled I was to discover that, in order to write so much as a sonnet, you need a warehouse. You can easily get so confused writing a thirty-page chapter that in order to make an outline for the second draft, you have to rent a hall. I have often “written” with the mechanical aid of a twenty-foot conference table. You lay your pages along the table’s edge and pace out the work. You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with full hands like a gardener. (46)
Once you pull out some of those breakthrough moments, you need to start writing. When you’re drafting, it’s probably not going to be a linear movement from page one to page two, from section one to section two. It’s usually best to write about some of those moments of insight from your classroom in small chunks and as vividly as possible. What were students wearing? Saying? The smallest details will be critical for making those moments come to life. If you get stumped in trying to re-create a scene, give yourself prompts: “I saw…,” “I heard…,” “I felt…”
Many times it’s the seemingly insignificant details that can make the scene come to life. Bonnie Friedman (1993) writes about the importance of details:
You may paint a soul only by painting a knuckle. You may convey terror or longing or regret or exhilaration only by giving us the color of someone’s hair and exactly what she ate for lunch, and red high heels, and an attaché case’s handle stained dark by the oils of a human hand, and a skinny buck-toothed girl singing “Yes We Have No Bananas” on a black-and-white TV, and olives, and three o’clock, and the Scotch-taped hem of a Bergdorf Goodman dress, and venetian blinds, and a woman’s eyes fixed for many minutes on a scarred tabletop, and a tin spoon ringing against the side of a mug. There are no shortcuts. (87)
Photos and videos are a wonderful way to get ideas for freewriting about the classroom. Use some of your photos as writing prompts, and you’ll be surprised at the memories that are sparked because you’ve got a full-color reminder of an event right before your eyes.
Once you’ve got some pieces of the story—strong, clear writing on critical incidents in your classroom—you can begin to see how these will fit together to tell a larger story. It’s helpful to remember that we are writing the stories. Author and writing teacher Roger Rosenblatt (2011) stresses that everything we write is essentially a story:
Stories are central to life. They’re everywhere: in medicine, a patient tells a doctor the story of his ailment, how he felt on this day or that, and the doctor tells the patient the story of the therapy, how he will feel this day and that, until, one hopes, the story will have a happy ending. (18)
These powerful stories from your classroom, whatever meaning is taken from them, are the glue that will hold all your data and analysis together, making the reader want to get to the end of your piece to see how it all turns out.
The best writing coaches are often “distant teachers”—the authors of your favorite books and blogs on teaching and learning who relate the stories of their classrooms. Terri Austin, author of Changing the View (1995), credits her ability to write her classroom research to learning from a “distant teacher” whom she had never met:
In terms of style, I have to say that I learned to write by reading Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle. I taught myself how to write like that, not that I’m anywhere near her ability, but that book probably is the most influential book for me because it came right at the time I became a teacher-researcher and when I was struggling not only to be a researcher, but to be a writer. It flowed like a story. I still have her original book in its original pink cover…. I have it marked out—this is how she introduced this, this is how she explained her record keeping, this is how she wove in the stories of her students. I taught myself how to write with this book. (1998, personal communication)
We encourage you to reread your favorite books by teachers—not as an educator, but as a writer. Look at the leads to chapters. How do the authors draw you in? How do they lay out information on the page to make it inviting? How do they balance classroom incidents and anecdotes with practical advice? What kinds of materials do they put into their appendixes? Once you start reading like a writer, your favorite books will seem brand new and full of practical tips to improve your own drafts.
You won’t be far into the process before you’ll wonder if you really have something worth saying. As you lay out your raw materials, you’re going to see big gaps in what you need. And as you begin to write up those moments of insight, you’ll get discouraged about your writing ability. Know that all teachers who end up writing wonderful articles and books feel this way early in the process. Your first drafts, even if they look good to other readers, will seem pretty awful to you. Everyone writes terrible first drafts. That’s the beginning step in writing up your research. Writer Anne Lamott (1994) describes why it’s important to hold your nose and keep writing:
All good writers write shitty first drafts. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. (21–22)
Even if your work doesn’t get published in a traditional book or journal format, we hope the process of writing it up brings you to a new understanding of your classroom. That’s why teachers write—not to transform the field, or to be famous, or to get a book published. We write to understand our classrooms, our students, ourselves. Wrestling with words on the page, we finally understand why our research and teaching matters, and what we need to carry away from one year into the next. We see ourselves and our classrooms anew, in ways not possible without the intense reflection that writing demands.
Abandon any pressure you feel to write something great or something that’s just perfect for a certain journal or book publisher. Many of the most widely read teacher-authors today publish only on the Web, and that avenue is open to anyone. Write first to learn more about your classroom through the writing. If you have that as your goal, you’re much more likely to write something many other teachers will want to read.
Once you do have some drafts of writing, even if they are just a few pages recounting random incidents, you’ll need to get some response from others. Before you send what you’ve written to a journal or book publisher, you should share it with at least a couple of close teaching friends and get their advice for what you should write next and what revisions are needed.
Who is the best person to respond? Brenda Ueland, in her classic and recently reissued book If You Want to Write (2010), explains who that person is:
For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, free and not anxious. The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is: “Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.” (33)
Once you have that friend or colleague who will respond to your writing, here’s the key question you’ll want to ask: What’s the story here? Where is the narrative thread that can hold this all together? Finding that narrative thread will help you figure out what needs to stay in the writing and what needs to go.
When you get response from others, stifle the urge to accept or reject their advice immediately. As Robert Frost said, “Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing—that’s voting.” Mull over the responses, negative and positive, and see what you can use from them to make the writing better. We also like Peter Elbow’s (1997) advice about conferring over writing: “When you get conflicting reactions, block your impulse to figure out which reactions are right. Eat like an owl: take in everything and trust your innards to digest what’s useful and discard what’s not. Try for readers with different tastes and temperaments—especially if you don’t have many readers” (118).
Tips for Writing and Getting Published
• The best way to start writing is to write as if you are writing a letter to a dear friend you’ve been out of touch with for a while. It’s much easier to write a letter than it is to write an article. And before you know it, the imaginary letter will become the real deal.
• There is never a “good” time to write. Now is as good a time as any.
• Write every day, even if it’s only a few words or phrases. Writing to and with your students counts, too.
• Get an outsider’s view of the journal or publisher you want to work with: submission guidelines, upcoming themes.
• Get an insider’s view of the journal or publisher you want to work with: tone of response, time for response, quality of response.
• Follow the rule of three: allow an article or proposal to be rejected at least three times before thinking seriously about revising it.
• A negative, hostile response from a journal says plenty about the insecurity of the editor and nothing about the quality of your writing.
If you’re feeling courageous, ask someone outside of education to read something you’ve written. People with a little distance from the teaching culture can let you know immediately what jargon or phrasing gets in the way of the story you are trying to tell, and they can give you a sense of how wide an audience there is for your writing.
Many researchers we’ve worked with find the experience of presenting their work at a local in-service meeting, or a state or national conference, invaluable for drafting and improving their writing. Applying to present at a conference gives you a forced deadline for beginning to pull together a narrative.
Writing a proposal of one or two pages will get you organized for longer writing tasks. And presenting your work orally allows you to read cues from your audience. Their questions will push you forward in your thinking and help you go back to your classroom, writing, and thinking with an audience in mind. Noting when listeners seem engaged or bored can also help you decide what should remain in your writing and what should be cut.
Tips for Organizing a Writing Retreat
There is a long tradition of writers retreating from the busyness of their daily lives and carving out stretches of time where they can immerse themselves in their writing in a community of other writers. Many teacher-researchers are finding that weekends devoted to writing with a trusted group—and even better, weeklong summer writing retreats!—are a practical and enjoyable route toward making sense of their data and writing it up for their intended audiences. Many of the teacher-researchers in this book have found this a far more do-able alternative to rising at 4 a.m. to write, or trying to fit in time in the evening after responding to student work.
After taking part in several writing retreats ourselves, we’re hooked. We encourage you to consider including at least a weekend with your teacher-research group that’s devoted to writing and sharing your work. These tips, culled from teacher-researchers from Maine to Alaska, can help get you off to a successful start. Happy writing!
• Plan and organize. Choose your dates far enough in advance so that you can find times that will work for the most members of your group and that give you enough lead time to be working toward the goal of having the necessary data and books on hand.
• Choose a place away from school—an environment where you can be a writer. The place is important, which is another reason to plan ahead. This gives you a chance to poll friends and colleagues about possible cabins, off-season rates for retreat centers, and bed-and-breakfasts with reasonable rates, or even to write a small grant or request staff development funds. We’ve been at successful retreats at out-of-the-way bed-and-breakfasts, retreat centers, and the home of a group member who banned her family for a long weekend and scattered sleeping bags around the house.
• Have meals catered or provided by someone else. “Breaking bread together” is a central aspect of writing, talking, and thinking, but the preparation can really cut into your time. If your budget doesn’t permit catered meals, you can enlist the support of a friend, family member, or even one member of the group who agrees to take on the responsibility on a rotating basis. It’s an amazing gift to emerge from your writing cocoon to an already-prepared meal and colleagues ready to dig in and discuss your work in progress.
• Try for at least three days away. It can take a while to get started and into the rhythm of daily writing.
• Schedule long, unstructured blocks of writing time. It’s easy to get sidetracked with lots of discussion. We have found it helpful to get together the first evening of the retreat and negotiate a tentative daily schedule, with at least two inviolate hours of writing time in the morning and another two in the afternoon. Some members might want to plan on an early-morning walk to get the day started, a special time for reading before or after lunch, or conference times. Create a schedule that works for your group’s needs. But keep the writing time central. It’s surprising how much more writing you can accomplish when you are in the midst of a group of committed writers!
• Have set goals. Plan what will be accomplished before the retreat begins, and distribute these group and individual goals in advance.
• Bring lots of writing supplies. Make sure there’s at least one printer that you can hook up to your laptop computers or tablets. Access to a copying machine is also a convenience, if possible. Bring pens, pads of paper, sticky notes, highlighters, and whatever else your writing rituals depend on; don’t assume you can just pick them up on-site. And don’t forget books—novels, poems, essays—whatever good reading you enjoy for that before-bed downtime and early-morning preparation for writing. We have found that the language of these novels and the good talk around texts finds its way into our final writing results.
You can often return to your research plan itself to give you a framework for your proposal. The origin of your research question is usually a good place to start. Another bonus of writing up a proposal is that the deadline forces you to consolidate your thinking and get it on paper and out the door.
You may want to present your work as part of a panel presentation (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). This gives you a chance to plan together, talk through your ideas with others, and assemble a presentation that draws on the connections in your research. Some presentations are better suited to one person, with more time for in-depth explanations of the work or more audience participation, of course.
The accepted proposals in Figures 7.1 and 7.2 can serve as models for you as you think about presenting at a local or national conference. Both presentations allowed these teachers to talk their way through what they had learned from their research projects and what would connect them with a larger audience.
Writers depend upon other writers for response. If you want to receive helpful response to your writing, you’ll need to learn how to give useful feedback to colleagues. The process of responding to others will give you clues about what kind of response can be most helpful to you.
We’ve learned that vague comments can often lead to worse second drafts by researchers, and any initial response to writing needs to be tempered with a keen awareness of how much criticism the writer is ready and able to hear.
Figure 7.1 Presentation Proposal
Figure 7.2 Presentation Proposal
Some years ago the editorial team for the Teacher Research Journal got together and compiled guidelines for reading and responding to writing by teacher-researchers. You can use these as a starting point for developing strategies for responding to writing within your own research community.
Reading the Manuscript
• Read the draft at least twice. We have often been surprised by what we discover during the second reading. The first time through, try to get a sense of the whole piece without thinking about how to fix it.
• Note the areas of the draft you want to know more about. Jot down what strikes you, and indicate questions you have.
• Ask yourself questions as you read:
What am I learning?
What’s new here?
Can someone on staff benefit from this piece?
What would other teachers learn?
Is this written in a teacher-to-teacher voice?
Is there any tension in the piece (rather than a tone of “I have seen the light!”)?
Responding to the Manuscript
We want these teachers to continue to research and share their discoveries. Frame your response so that the author will see what worked well in the draft and what worked less well. What would you say if you were going to have a writing conference with him or her? Try to keep in mind the kind of coaching that has been the most helpful to you as a writer.
• Be specific in your comments. Include direct quotes (with page numbers) in your examples of what worked and what didn’t. Try to provide one or two concrete examples for every assertion you make, regardless of whether it’s a strength or a weakness.
• Avoid educational jargon.
• Concentrate on the most important issues you’d like the author to address. You don’t have to suggest ways to improve all aspects of the piece.
• If you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying your comments to the author in person, don’t write them.
We have found that if you schedule a time to share drafts in a group, the best starting point is to have the author tell the group what type of advice will be most helpful. Some authors will be in the final stages of writing, ready for copyediting and response about word choice; others will wither if they hear anything but the most global responses to what works and what doesn’t in their initial drafts. If you ask first, you’re more likely to give the author advice that will really be used.
We need to give a word of warning here about receiving responses to your writing from journals and book publishers. We’ve received much helpful advice from caring editorial board members and reviewers from publishers. But we’ve also received pages of snotty insults from reviewers that drove us to tears. A vicious or just plain lousy response to your work isn’t a reflection on your writing—it’s a reflection on the pettiness and unprofessionalism of the reviewer. We urge you to write to the editorial board of a journal or publisher if you think a review of your work crosses the line from critique to attack. We all have a responsibility to make our profession more caring and responsive to teachers’ writing.
Even a kind rejection of writing hurts. It’s hard to separate our classrooms and our psyches as teachers from the writing we do about them. Because we are all fragile as writers, it’s helpful to know which journals have the most supportive editorial boards. Read journals you might submit your work to, and see if the tone of their published authors matches yours. We made the mistake early in our writing careers of submitting our work only to the largest journals in our field. We sometimes waited months for a response, only to get rejections with little or no editorial assistance for improving the draft.
It was only after we began submitting to regional and state journals in our field that we began to receive quicker, more positive responses to our writing. Consider submitting your work to smaller forums at the start—local newspapers as op-eds, a district newsletter, a state interest group’s annual collection. As your confidence builds, progress to larger outlets for your writing.
It’s ironic, too, that many of these organizations are accepting more writing for their Web sites, which may be a better venue for your writing anyway. If your writing is rejected by the print journal, publication on the Web can lead to a larger audience if it strikes a nerve and goes viral across teacher Web sites and blogs.
But the most important advice of all is to carve out some time to write. Though it can be daunting to start, writing will take you to deeper layers of meaning in your research and will transform your identity as a teacher and researcher.
Ruth Shagoury
We sat together one evening in December, a group of teacher-researchers who had been conducting case studies in our classrooms. As we laughed and ate and prepared to share our final drafts with each other, we decided to reflect on what the process of writing up our research had been like. What emerged in our ten-minute free-writes was the discovery that what had helped most of us make sense of our data was the actual writing itself. We shouldn’t have found this remarkable. As Donald Murray (1982) writes, “Your world is the universe you describe by using your own eyes, listening to your own voice—finding your own style. We write to explore the constellations and galaxies which lie unseen within us waiting to be mapped with our own words” (7).
During this process, some found surprises in the data, such as Jean, who wrote, “What I thought had been the focus of my study became just one piece after I began writing.” Or Ann, who said, “As I was writing, I was surprised to hear myself writing that giving my students time to speak in class led to better writing.”
Margie reflected on how writing had led her to see the pattern in her findings: “It wasn’t until I laid out data, wrote and rewrote, that I could see a pattern—the real significance of the notes I had.”
We decided that setting a deadline—having a date to bring our final (for now) published pieces to our group to share—had helped us analyze and bring together in new and unforeseen ways the piles of data we had collected. Besides providing a way to share what we knew with other teachers, writing our case studies had helped us discover what we knew. Writing up our research is an important tool for researchers, guiding us to insights that otherwise might have eluded us.
The words of the poet Diane Glancy can encourage teacher-researchers to turn to their data with a new vision. In her published journal, Claiming Breath (1992), she writes, “In writing, life sinks/rises like the moon with new visibility. Another dimension. Seeing what is not seen in a different way than if we’d seen it” (54).
Teachers who have found avenues into writing share their suggestions in the following paragraphs. Perhaps their insights can help you and the teacher-researchers you work with bring your work onto the page.
1. Use writing to help you brainstorm what you know and what you still need to find out. After several weeks of collecting data on one student’s learning, Monique Bissett found it helpful to give herself the goal of listing five things she knew about the student and five things she needed to find out. She wrote them in two columns in her teaching journal. When other teachers in her support group tried this strategy, they found it helped to point out themes that were emerging, as well as holes in the data.
2. Make the time to write for ten minutes on what you are noticing and keep these anecdotal notes for later reflection. In reflecting on what had helped her conduct her case study, Tiffany Poulin noted, “The best thing I did was to take anecdotal notes early. Reviewing the narratives I had written at the end of one month helped me to remember in greater detail. In a sense, reviewing what I had written helped me to see what I had really been seeing.” Lila Moffit agreed; she found that setting time for herself at the end of a school day works best: “Having a computer and taking a few minutes each evening to ‘revisit’ Max gave me huge amounts of data with which to understand his literacy journey. I couldn’t write in class. I needed time and quiet to discover the meaning of his contribution to my day.”
Some teachers, such as Laura St. John, discover that in order to find that writing time, they need to set aside a few minutes within their teaching day. “What works in conducting my case study,” Laura wrote, “is to specifically set ten minutes per day for writing. I remove myself from circulating and ‘privately’ do my work.”
Find a way that fits your working style to write those brief anecdotal notes and reflections that can help uncover what you are seeing in your classroom.
3. Write brief memos or narratives about the themes that you see emerging. “One surprising discovery I made in writing up my case study is that I associated the term risk taker with Max,” wrote Lila. “I decided to center my write-up on that one literacy theme. Max was living it daily, expressing it in everything he did and said in the classroom.”
Memos might be two or three pages long, or as brief as a paragraph, like this memo Rick Osborn wrote that helped him bring together multiple data points to confirm a finding:
I was surprised at how well my initial interview with my case study prepared me for examining her writing. After talking to Stephanie about some of the basic or elemental things that she does in her writing, I am able to see the same patterns in her writing itself. For example, Stephanie talked about how she would always write some quick notes down before she stopped writing so that she could remember where she had left off and what her thought pattern was. In her paper, I can see right where she has done this. Then, when I interviewed her again, I was able to confirm this. Stephanie has really opened up to me and allowed me to see quite a bit of what she is thinking.
4. Write a letter to a teaching friend about what you are learning. This can help put together what you are learning in new ways as you explain it to a new audience.
Gina Brandt, a high school science teacher, complained that she was stuck when she tried to write up all that she knew about Mariah. To help herself get over this obstacle, she thought about a teaching friend who would be genuinely interested in the issues she was grappling with in working to understand the way Mariah learns, and she wrote that friend a letter. In her letter, she was able to write in her own voice about her concerns, delights, and surprises, and wonder on paper about how she could best meet her student’s needs. When she finished the letter, she had a working draft as well as a letter to a friend.
5. With your support group, experiment with writing different kinds of leads. The leads you find that work to start your paper will help give you a frame for it and establish its tone. At one of our meetings, we brought in examples of anecdotal leads, “telling quotes,” and setting up contrasts. In the ten-minute free-write that followed, social studies teacher Tom Ustach wrote the following anecdotal lead:
I entered the rectangular room, sat at the rectangular table, and was introduced. The walls around me were as stale and white as the experts seated at the table. The psychologist opened the meeting by announcing, “Let’s get this LDT going. Jim qualified LD, PS, handicapped over the past few years. How’d he do last week, Academic Specialist?”
“His current WISC-III is verbal—73, Performance—98, and FSIQ—83. His academic results were Reading—7.6, Math—5.4, and Written—3.2. I’ve never seen a high school student score so low. He has problems calculating simple addition and subtraction. He can’t do basic counting.”
“Speech Pathologist,” the psychologist called.
“Well, I’m embarrassed to say,” answered an elderly woman wearing milk-yellow 1970s mineral rock jewelry, “I inaccurately calculated his score. I used the wrong birth date. I can go up and redo it real quick. Right now I got 74.”
“No, that’s okay. If it’s 74, then the new one will be even lower,” said the psychologist. “Go on.”
“Well, his CELF-R was really low, too. I’ll get it to you as well.”
“Where’s his ERC case manager?” asked the psychologist.
“Not here.”
“We’ll get to him later, then, but I’ll pass the B-5 around.”
Yes, these educational specialists are talking about my case study, who is not a lab rat or an astronaut, but a fifteen-year-old young man who is struggling with writing. He’s really not struggling just with writing, but in surviving in a school system that structurally sets him up to fail. A working-class student, especially if he is a minority student, is rolling loaded dice each time he comes to class in today’s public schools. My case study, Jim, has never hit a number in ten years of public schooling, and all the blame is placed on him.
When Tom shared his lead with our group, it was clear that he had found the way to frame his paper, drawing us all into his case study, which he went on to title “Playing the Numbers: Winning and Losing in Public High School.”
Collect a range of examples of a variety of leads and experiment with them. As Ralph Fletcher (1993) writes, “The lead is more than the first step toward getting somewhere; the lead is an integral part of the somewhere itself. The lead gives the author his first real chance to grapple with the subject at hand…. The author writes for herself and she writes for her audience” (82).
Taking just ten or fifteen minutes to try a new lead and share it with your group or with a research partner can unearth new ways to frame your thinking, as it did for Tom. It’s also a small enough task to put on a teacher-research group agenda and still leave time for lots of feedback that can help keep your writing going.
6. Set a deadline for a finished draft. This is perhaps the most important suggestion of all. Setting those deadlines forces us to use the writing to put our thoughts on paper for an audience. It gives us that all-important opportunity to think through our data, make choices, and find a focus.
Fletcher, Ralph. 1993. What a Writer Needs. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Glancy, Diane. 1992. Claiming Breath. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Murray, Donald. 1982. Learning by Teaching. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.
Julie Housum-Stevens
I am an expert on deadlines. In fact, I am such an expert on them that I am writing this article on deadlines one week after missing my own. I couldn’t find the turquoise notebook that had the notes I needed to write the article. That’s a lie. I wasn’t even sure which of the twenty-five binders and two hundred notebooks and legal pads scattered (neatly) all over my house and my classroom contained them, never mind what color the darn thing was.
If you never find yourself in this position, skip the rest of this article—you are way ahead of me. But if missed deadlines ever cause you to duck into the bathroom to avoid your principal, if you suddenly decide that you must clean your bureau and your closet instead of responding to that giant stack of journals, or if you can’t even start doing your taxes because you’ve misplaced your W2s, I may be able to help.
At the very least, I can empathize. Setting and meeting deadlines are two of my biggest struggles, which means I am on a continuous quest for tips and tricks and tools that will both improve my organization and give me practice at meeting my goals—on time and in a reasonably sane state.
This past summer, I was with a group of teachers designing research studies to carry out in our classrooms this fall. As we were considering what kinds of support we would need to be successful, I said that I would need help setting and meeting deadlines to analyze my data and share my findings. Suddenly, everyone was recommending wonderful, simple, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that ideas, which I frantically began scribbling down.
“These should be in an article!” I blurted, and just like that, I had a deadline to practice meeting. With thanks to my compatriots for sharing their good ideas, here they are:
1. Post a large calendar where you will see it frequently, and write down due dates, and article, class, and grant deadlines.
2. Break long-term goals down; put several smaller due dates on the calendar instead of one final one.
3. Tell everyone you know about your deadline, especially nosy folks and your mom, all of whom will surely check up on you.
4. Use deadlines you already have—the end of the quarter, for example.
5. Tie as much of your work as possible to something you already do—a graduate class, a committee, and so on. Make integration work for you like it works for kids.
6. Sign up to do a presentation as part of a group. This will force you to prepare, because you won’t want to let your peers down, but you won’t be alone.
7. Do less regularly rather than more sporadically. Avoid setting yourself up for failure—start small and add.
8. Avoid giving yourself an out or an excuse (such as losing your notebook). Self-sabotage doubles your misery.
These ideas may not seem like much, but my hope is that you will find them useful and doable, and that perhaps you will realize that no matter what you struggle with as a teacher-researcher, you are likely not alone. Write to me in care of Stenhouse if you have found tools around deadlines and organization that have been particularly helpful to you—I’m thinking of keeping this article going forever, or at least until I meet my deadline the first time around!
If you’re wondering where or how to start with your writing, you can follow the lead of scores of teachers who have started their own blogs in the last decade. Experienced teacher-researchers Mary Lee Hahn (author of Reconsidering Read-Aloud) and Franki Sibberson (coauthor of Beyond Leveled Books) have spent years collaborating on the popular children’s literature blog A Year of Reading. They share a wealth of practical advice and encouragement for teacher-researchers who want to start their own blog.
Mary Lee Hahn and Franki Sibberson
Blog. Blog because it is reflective. Blog because we need you to share what you know with us. Blog because it is good to remember how it feels to be judged by others. Blog because you have a unique view on the world and by sharing it, we all have another piece of this puzzle that is life.
—iLearn Technology (http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=2938)
Who knew when we started our blog years ago what blogging would do for us? When we began our blog A Year of Reading (http://readingyear.blogspot.com/) in January 2006, we weren’t really sure what we were getting into. We just knew that we wanted a place to have a conversation about the books we loved. We wanted a place to record our thinking and our conversations, but we soon realized that having a blog is about much more than writing. Blogs are about becoming part of a larger community of people who are interested in things that you are—building or becoming part of a new network of learners.
We started by learning from others. We had favorite blogs, such as Read Roger (http://readroger.hbook.com/) and Fuse #8 (http://blog.schoollibrary journal.com/afuse8production), which became our mentors for writing about children’s books. We found Jen Robinson and her Cool Girls of Children’s Literature blog (http://jkrbooks.typepad.com/blog/coolgirls.html). Her list inspired us to create 100 Cool Teachers in Children’s Literature (http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2006/12/100-cool-teachers-inchildrens.html). Once we created that, we seemed to find our voices and began to write for the dependable audience that was emerging, people who were visiting the blog regularly.
Blogging is one of the best tools for collaboration that we know. Not only do we work together to create the blog, but we have connected with many other people who love children’s books. These connections help our thinking about books, teaching, and reading grow.
You’ve been hearing about blogs for quite awhile now, and you’ve caught yourself thinking, “Maybe I should start a blog.” That’s the first step you need to take if you want to blog.
1. You need to want to blog.
This breaks down into the smaller steps of sharing your stories and thinking and learning from others.
• You love to write, or you at least want to work on your craft, and you’re not afraid to go public with your work.
• You aren’t afraid of work, because keeping up a blog and building a voice, a blogging identity, and a readership are hard work.
We know that blogging often becomes addictive. When you get into the habit of writing regularly, you need time… and you need a topic that you won’t tire of eventually.
After you’ve decided to start a blog, there are a few steps to take before you jump in and get started.
Your blog doesn’t have to be connected to your teaching. Maybe you have something else that you want to blog about: a passion, an interest, a hobby. A good friend of ours was inspired to start a cooking blog (Cooking With Aldo’s Daughter, at http://cookingwithaldosdaughter.blogspot.com/) after a trip to Italy last summer. Another friend is a teacher whose blog is focused on English language learners (http://learnlovegrow.blogspot.com/). The I.N.K. blog (http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/) focuses solely on great nonfiction for children. There are so many options out there!
If you are going to blog about children’s books (or teaching or coaching or cooking or whatever), what will make your blog unique? To help you figure this out, move on to the next step.
3. Read lots of blogs of the type you want to start.
• Find yourself some “mentor blogs.” Read them with a writer’s eye. What is it that you like about them?
• Start commenting on blogs so that bloggers from the corner of the blogosphere you plan to join will get to know you.
• Gather contact information from the blogs you like so that when you launch your blog, you can let your potential readers know.
• Start a Twitter account and follow your mentor bloggers. Twitter is a great place to get links to new blogs, and it will be a great place for you to publicize your blog, build a readership, and find your place in the blogging community you’ve chosen.
4. When you know what you want to say and how you want to say it, you need to choose a blogging platform.
Try Blogger (www.blogger.com), Tumblr (www.tumblr.com/), LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com/), WordPress (wordpress.com/), or one of the many other blogging host services. Do some research: some are free, and others charge nominal fees.
5. Name your blog.
Choose several names that reflect what you’re planning to have as the theme or focus of your blog. You might not be able to use your first choice; you’ll need to do a search on the Web of the names you’ve chosen to make sure there aren’t any other blogs by that name.
All of this background work will pay off in the end. It’s just like painting a room. Choosing the color, buying the supplies, moving the furniture, masking, laying down drop cloths, and priming all take up way more time than actually painting the room.
Now that you’re really ready to start your blog, it’s just a matter of following the directions, writing the first post, and hitting the “publish” button. Welcome to the blogosphere!