Literacy Now

#Hashtags are everywhere! They are strategically placed within television programs, promoted in advertisements, and hyped at conferences and sporting events. Recently I have seen them used for weddings and the birth of a child. For those doubting any sustainability, Merriam-Webster added hashtag to the dictionary in 2014.

A hashtag adds context to a tweet of 140 characters or less. It can identify a post as part of a larger discussion, even if we weren’t invited to join. We find encouragement by aligning our words with others who are like-minded and find freedom in the creation of an original hashtag. Hashtags can support development of skills such as vocabulary, identification of main and supporting ideas, author purpose, and sourcing. (Some teachers may have a very hard time ignoring the missing spaces between words.)

Students may not admit it, but choosing a hashtag is a thoughtful process—or it should be. The properly chosen word or phrase makes an immediate impression, in case a reader simply doesn’t have time to read all 140 characters. Much like a title, author intent is revealed immediately after the pound sign, #. Most students have some level of understanding about the use of hashtags. They can explain why they select those that they use and offer insight into why they believe some are better than others. The selection of a hashtag (to post or follow) is a thoughtful process using vocabulary, prior knowledge, key ideas, and intent. (Sounds academic, but that’s our secret.)

Hashtags and key vocabulary, or #hashtagvocab

Based on an online search, I found the following key points to consider when choosing a hashtag. If this concept is still a bit foreign to you, try replacing the term “hashtag” with “search terms,” ”key words,” “primary sources,” “informational texts,” or a term that applies to your discipline and feels more familiar.

For my #hashtag guidelines, I will answer in 140 characters, not counting spaces or hashtags. Sorry Twitter, my rules here.

What #hashtags already exist? What’s already out there? Predictable hashtags may lead to tweets introducing facts, key players, places, and causes. Follow a tweet trail and think outside the box. #mainidea #characters #setting #vocabulary #multipletexts

What #hashtag should I use? Study hashtags with the 5Ws. Then, with audience and purpose in mind, consider how the hashtag impacts your message. Do you join a train of thought or go a new direction? #authorintent #bias #relationships #explicit/implicit

Should I create a new hashtag? Hashtags lead to info, but your message is unique. You combine content knowledge, expressive vocabulary, and unique components or purpose that makes it yours. Own it! #evidence #evaluate #authorpurpose

Cindy Rich, PhD, directs the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program and teaches Literacy in the Secondary Education Content Areas in the College of Education and Professional Studies at Eastern Illinois University (EIU). Prior to that she taught at the high school level and was director of the EIU Reading Center.

When my daughter was in elementary school, she brought home a letter informing us she was going to be working on a project. “A project, Mom!” She beamed with excitement, toting a book with a happy panda on the cover.  

The word project strikes fear in the heart of parents everywhere, particularly those with more than one child. This was my third go-round with this project. She was to read a nonfiction book about an animal and then create a diorama to celebrate what she had learned.

Clearly, discussions about pandas were in my future.

Full disclosure: I really am a big fan of being “crafty.” I can adequately sew, quilt, cross-stitch, and crochet. I’ve attended local “Wine and Canvas” painting nights. I’ve been a scrapbooker. I’ve learned to make my own jewelry, and for that I now have a box of fancy beads, wires and tools and…one crooked pair of earrings. One of my Pinterest boards is devoted to the hundreds of things I’m eventually going to make, paint, sew, glue, and create in my spare time.

Even so, the thought of making a diorama with my daughter made me a bit queasy.

Now, before you start sending disapproving e-mails, please understand that I know art has a place in school. I’ve been to all the staff development on brain research. I’ve differentiated according to learning style in my classroom. Honest, I get it.

However, this was more. These dioramas would be on display. This ramps up the apprehension and concern considerably.

It’s no secret to any experienced parent that this project wasn’t really a student project. I’d seen the dioramas from previous years proudly displayed on Parent Night. At the unveiling of the class dioramas there would be plenty of moms and dads patting their child on the back for their beautiful rendition of a wildebeest habitat, complete with holding pond, a small stream, and live trees—while turning up their noses at the projects that were clearly created by students with less crafty parents, with their visible glue, smudges, and descriptions scrawled in crayon on loose-leaf paper.

I had a small panic attack at the thought of providing guidance to my daughter in making a diorama for panda in his natural habitat. (Assuming we would learn pandas live in shoeboxes.)

This project would require me to scavenge a shoebox (“small, and in good condition”) and also require no less than three financially debilitating trips to the craft store. You can’t buy just three green pipe cleaners, you must buy the entire package in a rainbow of colors. You can’t just use regular green construction paper, you must buy the fancy paper that actually looks like leaves. Who doesn’t cherish the thought of standing in the craft store paper aisle with a tearful child frantically looking for paper covered in bamboo leaves?

As an educator, I take issue with this type of project for a different reason: relevancy. Show me the adult who finishes a novel, a biography, or an article in Time magazine and proceeds to turn to another person and say, “Wow, that was fascinating. I’d love to share it with you. I need to make a quick trip to the craft store, but I’ll have a diorama ready for you tomorrow by noon.”

Did my daughter learn about pandas? Yes. She read her panda book with reverence and gusto three times. She made a list of the environmental needs of pandas. This work took about 30 minutes. Creating the diorama took more than a week from planning to completion.

Every night she worked on the project while I fought the urge to push her aside to do it for her. I reminded her again and again that this was to be her work, not mine. She raised her eyebrow suspiciously, but soldiered on. After tears and a meltdown requiring ice cream for both of us, I gave in and assisted.

Clay lumps wouldn’t hold the trees and brush in place, so we went to the craft store to purchase industrial-strength glue. The glue wouldn’t hold the pipe cleaner trees and bushes in place either, so we gave up and used staples. Unfortunately, staples are not skin friendly. Anyone who held the completed project was in serious danger of bleeding to death from staple piercings.

Granted, she learned from this project. She learned that when clay doesn’t work to use glue. When glue doesn’t work, use staples. She learned that the use of staples creates a need for bandages. She learned that a 5-inch stuffed panda is difficult to display to scale in a 6-inch high shoebox.

What did she learn about pandas? She’ll tell you she learned pandas eat bamboo, and they aren’t really bears. This is good knowledge to have.

Julie Scullen is a former president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council and is a current member of the International Literacy Association Board of Directors.  She taught most of her career in Secondary Reading Intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in Literacy Leadership and Coaching, as well as Reading Assessment and Evaluation.

We know “writing anchors reading.” So how can we let the entire summer pass without supporting student writing? That was nagging primary-grade teachers at Hollin Meadows Science and Math Focus School in Alexandria, VA. The answer: Develop an innovative weekly literacy outreach program for summer vacation called “Writing Nights” to imitate the writers’ workshop students experience daily during the school year.

Coordinated by reading teacher Sally Chadbourn and first-grade teacher Kathy Boykin for a teachers-as-researchers project, kindergarten and grade 1 and 2 colleagues collected data from “writing on demand” samples during the school year, which gave students time to write independently during writers’ workshop. Data showed writing development correlated with reading progress.

As a result of that research, each week during the summer of 2014, staff held Writing Nights to provide equivalent time to students for writing and reading. Sessions were held for students ages 5–8 at Sherwood Regional Library in Alexandria, VA, Mondays 6:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m.

Fifteen teachers, preK–grade 3, volunteered in rotating teams of five members to provide writers’ workshops to children who had never experienced classroom instruction and their parents. For this Title I elementary school of 600 students, school principal Jon Gates (another Monday night stalwart) encouraged staff to use the school’s e-mail list and robo-call system each weekend reminding families in English and Spanish to attend Writing Nights.

“We had no idea what attendance would be last summer, yet felt we had a ‘hit’ on our hands and were meeting children’s needs when the library meeting room routinely topped maximum capacity,” recalls Ann Avila, Writing Nights’ coordinator and a first-grade teacher. “We averaged 45 students plus 45 parents every Writing Night. One of the librarians expressed concern that we might even be breaking fire code regulations with so many busy people in the meeting room!”

Each Monday night, two teachers launched a carefully designed focus lesson with a read-aloud to introduce writers’ crafts to the diverse young audience: informational text about local critters, squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons; poetry with onomatopoeia; alphabet books; maps; how-to procedures for gardening. With one teacher soliciting students’ ideas and another teacher recording their thinking through shared or interactive writing, children co-constructed a mentor text to serve as an example of the featured genre and writer’s craft. During independent writing, parents imitated teacher teams and conferred with their own young author-illustrators. Finally, everyone gathered in sharing circles as children reluctantly quit drawing and writing to become peer-partners and display their work to friends and families.

“Yes, the goal for both Writing Nights and the summer book mailing program was to make sure children’s writing and reading didn’t suffer what’s known as ‘summer slide,’” stated Avila. “But we’ve also achieved another goal: developing a sense of community centered on the public library. It provides a wonderful atmosphere for families to come together on Writing Nights, talk and get to know each other, and learn.” Parents of kindergarten students praised the program for introducing them to school curriculum, instruction, and a network of friends before the school year began through the program.

The result was W Is for Writing Nights,similar to alphabet books read aloud as mentor texts. During Writing Nights, rising K–3 students wrote and illustrated their own record of the program. Students took home copies of the pages they wrote as mementos of their participation. In addition, these same students and all other rising Grade K–3 pupils receive books mailed to them four times during the summer as part of Hollin Meadows’ decade-old summer book mailing program to help families establish home libraries.

Writing Nights are now a summer tradition. The 8-week program will start June 29 with—by popular demand—an added 15 minutes each week!

Sally Chadbourn is a reading teacher and Ann Avila teaches grades 1–3 at Hollin Meadows Science and Math Focus School in Alexandria, VA.

Exactly how many days are between you and summer? C’mon, I know you know. If you’re anything like me, you’re already dreaming of your summer to-do list. (Yes, the summer to-do list—it is equal parts sad and fabulous.) In between the household to-dos (clean out that closet!) or the family fun to-dos (pick more berries together!) likely resides your list of reading to-dos (read more professional books!).

My summer reading list is epic. It includes professional books I have been fantasizing about (complete with new pens for underlining, of course). It includes deliciously breezy fiction perfect for the beach or for someone who can read only one page or two before falling asleep at night.  It includes back issues of magazines, two biographies, a recent award winner, and a stack of young adult lit that makes me want to squeal. 

I gather my future reading on my nightstand. Some nights, instead of reading, I peruse the titles, rearranging and organizing them into a “next at bat” stack. My husband considers this a very nerdy pastime, but I don’t care. I know what I love as a reader, and it is reflected in my prized (yet slightly unwieldy) stack.

Which brings me to my point: How many of our students truly know themselves as readers? I think one of the saddest things is a reader who is unable to name a favorite book, genre, or author. 

In your final days and weeks with your students, consider working with them to shape or revise their own reader selves. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Talk to your students about creating an “at bat” pile of books that are waiting to be read.
• Start a “Wall of Summer Reading” and collect titles students are excited to read over the summer. Make a take-home copy of this list.
• Ask students and families to tweet their favorite titles with a common hashtag (such as #room201faves).
• Provide students with library card applications for their families.
• Compile a list of favorite authors, titles, or genres from the school year to share.
• Help students set a goal for how many books they would like to read this summer with a quick and easy way for them to keep track of their progress.
• Collect a group of popular books that are appropriate for your class. Gather your students in a circle and give one book to each student. Let them read each book for 1 or 2 minutes, then ring a bell and tell students to pass the book to their left. The goal is to encourage students to create a list of books that interest them while giving them the opportunity to look through a large number of titles.

Mrs. Mimi, aka Jennifer Scoggin, is a teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of Be Fabulous: The Reading Teacher's Guide to Reclaiming Your Happiness in the Classroom and It's Not All Flowers and Sausages: My Adventures in Second Grade, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

When I was a high school English teacher, I would drive to the local bookstore on Friday nights, refusing to leave until the stack of junior research papers were marked up with red, purple, green, orange, or blue pens. The colorful pens were about the only thing that got me through. The relief I felt when I finished the tome was dampened on Monday after I passed out papers and students threw their papers in the trash can on the way to lunch. Needless to say, I have found grading students’ writing assignments to be one of the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of teaching.

Initially, I was angry because my students did not seem to care about my feedback. After having time to reflect on these practices, I realized what the real problem was—My assessment practices were not helping students become better writers. And that was my fault, not theirs.

After some time (years) to reflect on my practice in addition to some advanced coursework on composition theory, I have made a lot of progress in terms of how I think about writing feedback and assessment.

So when one of my student teachers asked how she was going to grade 120 essays in one night, I thought I would offer some feedback and assessment strategies to her and to you with the intention of helping you become more efficient and your students become better writers, which is, of course, our ultimate goal.

These tips may not replace assessing and providing grades for all of your students’ essays at certain points in the year but they might help you think of ways to vary your feedback and assessment practices.

Look for trends in representative sample drafts. Read a few pieces from a selection of students across the class or periods. Create a list of strengths and areas of improvement, supporting your findings with evidence from these student examples. Present your list (student anonymity is best here) to each class. Discuss strengths and areas of improvement and ask students to consider their own work. Have them make writing goals for their own final drafts based upon the student samples. Not only does this tip keep you from assessing each student’s draft but it also helps students engage in metacognition as they reflect on their work and make writing goals for their final drafts.

Ask students to identify two elements on which they want feedback. I have found that limited, focused feedback works best. Pointing out too many areas of improvement to students runs the risk of overwhelming students and decreasing their confidence as writers. By targeting two areas only, we can offer focused feedback for students. After you have offered specific revision advice on these particular areas and students have had time to revise their work, ask students to highlight the changes they made based on your feedback and to write howtheir second draft is better than the first. This student-centered tip facilitates a way for you to cater feedback to areas that are important to the writer—without feeling the pressure of making suggestions based on every error you see. I have already anticipated your question, “What if a student has a particular area of writing in which he or she needs to improve but the student never mentions this area?” In this case, you could have the student select one area of feedback and you create the other one.

Share your experience as a reader during conferences instead of on students’ papers. This helps students consider how their piece is received by a reader and they can understand what you’re thinking and any praises or recommendations you may have as you read along. You can also help your students do this with each other during writer’s workshop. It’s a great way to help student writers gain experience in something that is difficult for many writers to do: anticipating an audience. This also prevents you from taking hundreds of papers home for a weekend! Students are not learning how to write while you are grading papers at home, in the local coffee shop, or in the car while your kid is at soccer practice!

Help your students learn to grade peers’ papers holistically. I have not tried this method personally, but some of my colleagues have found this to be quite successful. Based upon what I have heard, here’s how I see this process working in the secondary literacy classroom: You select three anchor texts that exemplify what an “A” paper looks like, what a “B” paper looks like, and what a “C” paper looks like. (What particular papers at certain grades look like should be established on the basis of a predetermined holistic rubric.) After helping students understand why these anchor texts earned the grades they did, allow students to assess each other’s papers. Each paper should be read by two students (who do not know who the author is) and given scores should not be discussed by students during or after the grading process. Calculate the average of these grades to determine the student’s final grade. Of course, you need to spend time helping students learn how to assess peers’ pieces, but this process in and of itself helps students engage in metacognition about the writing and assessment processes, which can, in turn, have a positive impact on their own writing. If you feel uncomfortable about how this might work, try it with drafts versus final drafts first.

Plan mini-units during your grading time if you need to grade each writing assignment. By allotting one or two weeks to grading, you don’t feel pressured to return papers the next class period and your students get some time away from their writing (which is what real writers do). If you take this route, give students class time to consider feedback they receive.

Have students consider their feedback and write reflections to hand in with final drafts. In these reflections, students should address the feedback provided by both you and their peers on earlier drafts. If they adjusted according to feedback, have them write about how and why. If they chose not to incorporate feedback, have them write about why. You are not only helping students consider carefully the feedback they receive but you are also providing an opportunity for student writers to build autonomy as writers.

To my student teacher who asked about grading 120 essays in one night, I answered: Don’t!

Obviously these tips are not aimed to fix every writing feedback and assessment woe, but hopefully they have provided some food for thought and will encourage dialogue about offering feedback and assessing in today’s writing classrooms.

Kathryn Caprino is a doctoral candidate in English education at the University of North Carolina’s School of Education. She is also earning a minor in English, focusing specifically on rhetoric and composition. She teaches the middle grades methods course and supervises English student teachers. Before returning to graduate school, she taught middle and high school English.