A study examined peer response groups in two ninth grade English (gasses. The study specifically ... more A study examined peer response groups in two ninth grade English (gasses. The study specifically investigated research considerations including: (1) the teachers' use of response groups; .(2) the kinds of response the students give themselves in response groups; and (3) the connection between student response and the teachers' directions to the groups. Subjects, 60 students in two schools in the San Francisco area, were observed for 17 weeks. Data CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WRITING
This study explores a constellation of factors that contribute to the retention of teachers in hi... more This study explores a constellation of factors that contribute to the retention of teachers in high poverty, urban schools. It focuses on one cohort of the University of California (UC) at Berkeley’s Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE) Credential and MA Program, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to track the careers of 26 novice teachers through their fifth year after receiving their credential. The authors reconsider the categories traditionally used to determine whether teachers stay or leave and offer ways to track those who stay or leave high-poverty urban schools, including the use of a category of “movers” to describe teachers who leave urban classroom teaching yet remain active in urban education. They conclude with a discussion of factors that seem to contribute to teachers’ staying in high-poverty, urban schools and educational settings. Besides a state scholarship program, these include: (a) a sense of mission, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (b) a disposition for hard work and persistence, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (c) substantive preparation that included both the practical and the academic and harmony between the two; (d) training in assuming the reflective stance of a teacher researcher; (e) the opportunity, given the high demand for teachers in high poverty schools to be able to change schools or districts, yet still remain in their chosen profession, and (f) ongoing support from members of the cohort as well as other supportive professional networks across the years. In It for the Long Haul 3
The document has been reproduced as waved 'from the person or organtiatem ongmating it Minor chan... more The document has been reproduced as waved 'from the person or organtiatem ongmating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of mess or upenons stated in this (fool Trent do not necessarily represent Ithcial NtE position or policy
The two lead recipients of this year's Purves Award reflect on their work on "Teaching English in... more The two lead recipients of this year's Purves Award reflect on their work on "Teaching English in Untracked Classrooms" (2005) and look to the conceptual horizons of their ongoing work. People's ideas change when they get new ideas or new information, or see somebody's perspective. .. My thinking has changed throughout the year. .. [it has] changed when I read people's logs, and when we had discussions in class. It's why I had so many embellishments.-Charlotte, Verda Delp's 8th-grade English student
Writing teachers and educators can add to information from large-scale testing and teachers can s... more Writing teachers and educators can add to information from large-scale testing and teachers can strengthen classroom assessment by creating a tight fit between large-scale testing and classroom assessment. Across the years, large-scale testing programs have struggled with a difficult problem: how to evaluate student writing reliably and cost-effectively. Indirect measures, direct assessments, "holistic" scoring, and primary trait scoring (as used by the College Entrance Examination Board, the Educational Testing Service, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress) all have serious limitations. Even though not well defined, the portfolio movement provides a potential link between large-scale testing and classroom assessment and teaching. Several large-scale portfolio assessment programs are currently in place: (1) the Arts PROPEL program, a Pittsburgh school-district portfolio project in art, music, and imaginative writing; (2) the "Primary Language Record," a kind of portfolio introducing systematic record-keeping about language growth into all elementary classrooms in the United Kingdom; (3) a draft, statewide plan for portfolio assessment in Vermont; and (4) the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GSCE) in language and literature, in which British students choose either a timed writing test plus a portfolio of coursework or simply a folder of coursework. However, just collecting and evaluating portfolios will solve neither the assessment problems not the need to create a professional climate in schools. By coupling assessment and instAtction in increasingly sophisticated ways, educators and teachers may be able to make a real difference in education. (Seventy-three references are attached.) (RS)
To gain insights into what makes student/teacher conversations about writing more and less succes... more To gain insights into what makes student/teacher conversations about writing more and less successful, a sample of freshman composition teachers was asked to tape record all of their writing conferences. In addition, student writing samples were collected. In all, the tape recordings of 48 writing conferences were transcribed and prepared for analysis. Each idea unit was transcribed on a separate line, and conversational turns were marked by an indication of a change in speaker. The topics of conversation were grouped into six clusters: 11) logistics and procedures; (2) general talk and talk about attitude6; (3) oral language, reading, writing relationships; (4) talk about text at the discourse level; (5) talk about text at the level of syntax or mechanics; and (6) talk about cognitive processes. The analysis revealed that, most often, students seemed to direct the differences that occurred in the conference conversations. The female end nonwhite students focused more of their talk on logistics and on the micro levels of the discourse; the male students focused more on the macro levels of discourse. The teachers, on the whole, were very even in their differences in topic focus. They individualized on one variable, cognitive processes and they did not individualize according to ability level, gender, or ethnicity; rather it seemed that they individualized according to student need. (Appendixes include a list of topic codes and clusters of topics, an analysis of topic clusters across conferences, and supplementary papers using conference data.) (HOD)
Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used f... more Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used for learning in school and life. Research done by Anne Haas Dyson and Carol Stack has indicated that many low-income African American children may bring resources to school that are often overlooked. Matthew Downey moves from Dyson's findings about how children first learn to write to examine how writing can help spark the interest of third graders in history. Robert Calfee is studying the growing use of portfolios of elementary school student work to evaluate writing. John R. Hayes and Karen A. Schriver are studying innovative ways to evaluate the effectiveness of writing both in the classroom and in "real world" situations. Sandra Schecter's research explains the effects on teaching that derive from writing teachers' own research concerning classroom learning. The research by Guadalupe Valdes and Sau-ling Wong has shown that most new immigrant students who speak little English are already proficient writers in their first language. Much of the Center's research dealing with improved educational practice, from kindergarten to adulthood, points to new strategies aimed at reducing educational failure and providing the nation with a more literate generation, able to cope with new demands on the work force. (A list of 11 research projects and project directors is attached.) (RS)
This study examines how students interact during a key instructional activity designed specifical... more This study examines how students interact during a key instructional activity designed specifically to encourage talk about writing: the peer response group. It takes place in two ninth-grade English classrooms, where groups play different but central pedagogical roles. During a 17-week period, 95 group meetings were observed and audiotaped. Also collected were daily field notes, tape recordings of whole class activities, interviews with teachers and students, and some samples of student writing. Data were analyzed first from the outside-in, to characterize the intended functions of groups and the instructional context surrounding the groups, and then for 37 of the groups, from the inside-out, to characterize response group talk. Data indicate that the frequency of response groups relative to other kinds of groups varied across classrooms, as did the relative amount of response that occurred in the group context. Within groups guided by response sheets, students focused 60% of their talk on the response sheets. For some of this talk, they directly discussed the topics raised on the sheets, but for most of this talk they avoided negative evaluation and helped one another complete the sheets just to get the work done. For the other 40% of their talk, for the most part, they spontaneously and informally discussed the content of their writing. In one class in which writers read their work aloud, students engaged in self-response that occurred as asides during reading. In both classes, students had difficulty discussing matters of form or mechanics. Results suggest that future research on response groups should carefully describe the groups under study, specifying the constellation of activities and interactions that surround them. Future researchers also should look systematically for the conditions that stimulate the most productive kinds of peer talk. Similarly, teachers should observe response groups in their classrooms and carefully evaluate students' interactions in the groups against the overall goals for the groups and what students do well together.
Included in this paper is an outline for the book "Multiculturalism in the Mainstream: Teacher Re... more Included in this paper is an outline for the book "Multiculturalism in the Mainstream: Teacher Researchers Build Multiethnic Literacy Communities in Urban Multicultural English and Social Studies Classrooms." The paper presents full descriptions of the chapters; a draft of the first chapter; a draft of a completed teachers' chapter; and a sample of an approach to creating multiauthored teacher chapters, which will be used in the final draft as a way of consolidating a number of the proposed individual teachers' chapters as well as the work of teacher participants not represented in the book outline. The editors of the book outlined in the paper plan to use this multiauthoring as a way to highlight key themes that are prevalent across all sites. Although the sample multiauthored chapter focuses on one site only a.el on the issues of doing teacher research rather than on teaching and learning in multicultural settings, the multiauthored chapters in the book outlined in the paper will span the four sites and will focus on the issues that are focal to the teachers' research. (RS)
The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write.... more The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write. Success in the,. conference cad !cm ' connected both to its structure (who can talk when and how much,'aild what types of ,talk are sequenced in what ways) and to the content,withinthat structure (what topics'ere discussed, the amount of collaboration between student and teacher in sustaining topics, and so on). In one study of such conferences, tape recorded conversations between one teacher and four'students were analyzed for content and structure. The analysis of the first introductory conference revealed that the conferences were teacher controlled and centered around a discussion of the student's past experiences with writing and a review of the student's first writing sample. The substantive topic that the teacher 4nitieted most frequently differed for the stronger students and wetket students mnd:differed according to ethnic group. For the strong.-students, most of the teacher-initiated talk centered-rouad idea development. FOr the weaker students, talk centered around mechanics, revision, and issues of strategy. Another intereStins diffeance in the topics of conversation was affective. The teacher spent a great deal of time praising the stronger students and very little time, if any, praising the weaker sZudepts. Stronger students knew how to initiate but the weaker itpdents behaved and spoke in a manner that might have alienated the teacher. (HOD) cb
To move composition research forward into the 21st century, research conducted at the National Ce... more To move composition research forward into the 21st century, research conducted at the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy will benefit by continuing to be inclusive-of a diverse population of learners, taught by a diverse population of teachers, using approaches that allow for a diversity of ways of learning. The initial theory underlying the Center's research program was a socio-cognitive theory of writing based on the work of L. S. Vygotsky. Using a Vygotskian theoretical frame, the Center in 1985 conducted a 'tudy that compared learning to write in inner city schools in the United States and Great Britain. In the end, Vygotsky's concept of social interaction proved much too general to account for the teaching and learning of w;:iting. By 1990, the Center had expanded its notions of social proceses and social interaction to give greater consideration to the cultural meaning of students' experiences. A current project explores the dynamics of learning to write and writing to learn in urban multicultural classrooms. The project involves a national collaboration with teachers who work with Center personnel to conduct research in their own classrooms. The Center's sociocultural frame is proving particularly important in helping researchers understand the needs of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse populations of learners. (Contains 13 references.) (RS)
A ',naturalistic,' study of eight college students enrolled in a freshman writing class was condu... more A ',naturalistic,' study of eight college students enrolled in a freshman writing class was conducted to determine what 4ariables are critical to the learning process. After observing and tape recording four individual conferences with each of the students, the recorded transcripts were analyzed to determine the one or two is DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH EDUCATION I. 'NELF ARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION 00
The evolution of Rwanda's language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critica... more The evolution of Rwanda's language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critical role in social reconstruction following war and genocide. Rwanda's new English language policy aims to drop French and install English as the only language of instruction. The policy-makers frame the change as a major factor in the success of social and education reforms aimed at promoting reconciliation and peace and increasing Rwanda's participation in global economic development. However, in Rwanda, the language one speaks is construed as an indicator of group affiliations and identity. Furthermore, Rwanda has the potential to develop a multilingual educational policy that employs its national language, Kinyarwanda (Ikinyarwanda, Rwanda), to promote mass literacy and a literate, multilingual populace. Rwanda's situation can serve as a case study for the ongoing roles that language policy plays in the politics of power. Keywords Language-in-education policy Á Rwanda Á French Á Kinyarwanda Á Africa Near the end of 2008, some international news coverage focused on Rwanda's announcement that it was discarding French as one of its three official languages.
A study examined peer response groups in two ninth grade English (gasses. The study specifically ... more A study examined peer response groups in two ninth grade English (gasses. The study specifically investigated research considerations including: (1) the teachers' use of response groups; .(2) the kinds of response the students give themselves in response groups; and (3) the connection between student response and the teachers' directions to the groups. Subjects, 60 students in two schools in the San Francisco area, were observed for 17 weeks. Data CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WRITING
This study explores a constellation of factors that contribute to the retention of teachers in hi... more This study explores a constellation of factors that contribute to the retention of teachers in high poverty, urban schools. It focuses on one cohort of the University of California (UC) at Berkeley’s Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE) Credential and MA Program, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to track the careers of 26 novice teachers through their fifth year after receiving their credential. The authors reconsider the categories traditionally used to determine whether teachers stay or leave and offer ways to track those who stay or leave high-poverty urban schools, including the use of a category of “movers” to describe teachers who leave urban classroom teaching yet remain active in urban education. They conclude with a discussion of factors that seem to contribute to teachers’ staying in high-poverty, urban schools and educational settings. Besides a state scholarship program, these include: (a) a sense of mission, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (b) a disposition for hard work and persistence, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (c) substantive preparation that included both the practical and the academic and harmony between the two; (d) training in assuming the reflective stance of a teacher researcher; (e) the opportunity, given the high demand for teachers in high poverty schools to be able to change schools or districts, yet still remain in their chosen profession, and (f) ongoing support from members of the cohort as well as other supportive professional networks across the years. In It for the Long Haul 3
The document has been reproduced as waved 'from the person or organtiatem ongmating it Minor chan... more The document has been reproduced as waved 'from the person or organtiatem ongmating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of mess or upenons stated in this (fool Trent do not necessarily represent Ithcial NtE position or policy
The two lead recipients of this year's Purves Award reflect on their work on "Teaching English in... more The two lead recipients of this year's Purves Award reflect on their work on "Teaching English in Untracked Classrooms" (2005) and look to the conceptual horizons of their ongoing work. People's ideas change when they get new ideas or new information, or see somebody's perspective. .. My thinking has changed throughout the year. .. [it has] changed when I read people's logs, and when we had discussions in class. It's why I had so many embellishments.-Charlotte, Verda Delp's 8th-grade English student
Writing teachers and educators can add to information from large-scale testing and teachers can s... more Writing teachers and educators can add to information from large-scale testing and teachers can strengthen classroom assessment by creating a tight fit between large-scale testing and classroom assessment. Across the years, large-scale testing programs have struggled with a difficult problem: how to evaluate student writing reliably and cost-effectively. Indirect measures, direct assessments, "holistic" scoring, and primary trait scoring (as used by the College Entrance Examination Board, the Educational Testing Service, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress) all have serious limitations. Even though not well defined, the portfolio movement provides a potential link between large-scale testing and classroom assessment and teaching. Several large-scale portfolio assessment programs are currently in place: (1) the Arts PROPEL program, a Pittsburgh school-district portfolio project in art, music, and imaginative writing; (2) the "Primary Language Record," a kind of portfolio introducing systematic record-keeping about language growth into all elementary classrooms in the United Kingdom; (3) a draft, statewide plan for portfolio assessment in Vermont; and (4) the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GSCE) in language and literature, in which British students choose either a timed writing test plus a portfolio of coursework or simply a folder of coursework. However, just collecting and evaluating portfolios will solve neither the assessment problems not the need to create a professional climate in schools. By coupling assessment and instAtction in increasingly sophisticated ways, educators and teachers may be able to make a real difference in education. (Seventy-three references are attached.) (RS)
To gain insights into what makes student/teacher conversations about writing more and less succes... more To gain insights into what makes student/teacher conversations about writing more and less successful, a sample of freshman composition teachers was asked to tape record all of their writing conferences. In addition, student writing samples were collected. In all, the tape recordings of 48 writing conferences were transcribed and prepared for analysis. Each idea unit was transcribed on a separate line, and conversational turns were marked by an indication of a change in speaker. The topics of conversation were grouped into six clusters: 11) logistics and procedures; (2) general talk and talk about attitude6; (3) oral language, reading, writing relationships; (4) talk about text at the discourse level; (5) talk about text at the level of syntax or mechanics; and (6) talk about cognitive processes. The analysis revealed that, most often, students seemed to direct the differences that occurred in the conference conversations. The female end nonwhite students focused more of their talk on logistics and on the micro levels of the discourse; the male students focused more on the macro levels of discourse. The teachers, on the whole, were very even in their differences in topic focus. They individualized on one variable, cognitive processes and they did not individualize according to ability level, gender, or ethnicity; rather it seemed that they individualized according to student need. (Appendixes include a list of topic codes and clusters of topics, an analysis of topic clusters across conferences, and supplementary papers using conference data.) (HOD)
Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used f... more Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used for learning in school and life. Research done by Anne Haas Dyson and Carol Stack has indicated that many low-income African American children may bring resources to school that are often overlooked. Matthew Downey moves from Dyson's findings about how children first learn to write to examine how writing can help spark the interest of third graders in history. Robert Calfee is studying the growing use of portfolios of elementary school student work to evaluate writing. John R. Hayes and Karen A. Schriver are studying innovative ways to evaluate the effectiveness of writing both in the classroom and in "real world" situations. Sandra Schecter's research explains the effects on teaching that derive from writing teachers' own research concerning classroom learning. The research by Guadalupe Valdes and Sau-ling Wong has shown that most new immigrant students who speak little English are already proficient writers in their first language. Much of the Center's research dealing with improved educational practice, from kindergarten to adulthood, points to new strategies aimed at reducing educational failure and providing the nation with a more literate generation, able to cope with new demands on the work force. (A list of 11 research projects and project directors is attached.) (RS)
This study examines how students interact during a key instructional activity designed specifical... more This study examines how students interact during a key instructional activity designed specifically to encourage talk about writing: the peer response group. It takes place in two ninth-grade English classrooms, where groups play different but central pedagogical roles. During a 17-week period, 95 group meetings were observed and audiotaped. Also collected were daily field notes, tape recordings of whole class activities, interviews with teachers and students, and some samples of student writing. Data were analyzed first from the outside-in, to characterize the intended functions of groups and the instructional context surrounding the groups, and then for 37 of the groups, from the inside-out, to characterize response group talk. Data indicate that the frequency of response groups relative to other kinds of groups varied across classrooms, as did the relative amount of response that occurred in the group context. Within groups guided by response sheets, students focused 60% of their talk on the response sheets. For some of this talk, they directly discussed the topics raised on the sheets, but for most of this talk they avoided negative evaluation and helped one another complete the sheets just to get the work done. For the other 40% of their talk, for the most part, they spontaneously and informally discussed the content of their writing. In one class in which writers read their work aloud, students engaged in self-response that occurred as asides during reading. In both classes, students had difficulty discussing matters of form or mechanics. Results suggest that future research on response groups should carefully describe the groups under study, specifying the constellation of activities and interactions that surround them. Future researchers also should look systematically for the conditions that stimulate the most productive kinds of peer talk. Similarly, teachers should observe response groups in their classrooms and carefully evaluate students' interactions in the groups against the overall goals for the groups and what students do well together.
Included in this paper is an outline for the book "Multiculturalism in the Mainstream: Teacher Re... more Included in this paper is an outline for the book "Multiculturalism in the Mainstream: Teacher Researchers Build Multiethnic Literacy Communities in Urban Multicultural English and Social Studies Classrooms." The paper presents full descriptions of the chapters; a draft of the first chapter; a draft of a completed teachers' chapter; and a sample of an approach to creating multiauthored teacher chapters, which will be used in the final draft as a way of consolidating a number of the proposed individual teachers' chapters as well as the work of teacher participants not represented in the book outline. The editors of the book outlined in the paper plan to use this multiauthoring as a way to highlight key themes that are prevalent across all sites. Although the sample multiauthored chapter focuses on one site only a.el on the issues of doing teacher research rather than on teaching and learning in multicultural settings, the multiauthored chapters in the book outlined in the paper will span the four sites and will focus on the issues that are focal to the teachers' research. (RS)
The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write.... more The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write. Success in the,. conference cad !cm ' connected both to its structure (who can talk when and how much,'aild what types of ,talk are sequenced in what ways) and to the content,withinthat structure (what topics'ere discussed, the amount of collaboration between student and teacher in sustaining topics, and so on). In one study of such conferences, tape recorded conversations between one teacher and four'students were analyzed for content and structure. The analysis of the first introductory conference revealed that the conferences were teacher controlled and centered around a discussion of the student's past experiences with writing and a review of the student's first writing sample. The substantive topic that the teacher 4nitieted most frequently differed for the stronger students and wetket students mnd:differed according to ethnic group. For the strong.-students, most of the teacher-initiated talk centered-rouad idea development. FOr the weaker students, talk centered around mechanics, revision, and issues of strategy. Another intereStins diffeance in the topics of conversation was affective. The teacher spent a great deal of time praising the stronger students and very little time, if any, praising the weaker sZudepts. Stronger students knew how to initiate but the weaker itpdents behaved and spoke in a manner that might have alienated the teacher. (HOD) cb
To move composition research forward into the 21st century, research conducted at the National Ce... more To move composition research forward into the 21st century, research conducted at the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy will benefit by continuing to be inclusive-of a diverse population of learners, taught by a diverse population of teachers, using approaches that allow for a diversity of ways of learning. The initial theory underlying the Center's research program was a socio-cognitive theory of writing based on the work of L. S. Vygotsky. Using a Vygotskian theoretical frame, the Center in 1985 conducted a 'tudy that compared learning to write in inner city schools in the United States and Great Britain. In the end, Vygotsky's concept of social interaction proved much too general to account for the teaching and learning of w;:iting. By 1990, the Center had expanded its notions of social proceses and social interaction to give greater consideration to the cultural meaning of students' experiences. A current project explores the dynamics of learning to write and writing to learn in urban multicultural classrooms. The project involves a national collaboration with teachers who work with Center personnel to conduct research in their own classrooms. The Center's sociocultural frame is proving particularly important in helping researchers understand the needs of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse populations of learners. (Contains 13 references.) (RS)
A ',naturalistic,' study of eight college students enrolled in a freshman writing class was condu... more A ',naturalistic,' study of eight college students enrolled in a freshman writing class was conducted to determine what 4ariables are critical to the learning process. After observing and tape recording four individual conferences with each of the students, the recorded transcripts were analyzed to determine the one or two is DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH EDUCATION I. 'NELF ARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION 00
The evolution of Rwanda's language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critica... more The evolution of Rwanda's language policies since 1996 has played and continues to play a critical role in social reconstruction following war and genocide. Rwanda's new English language policy aims to drop French and install English as the only language of instruction. The policy-makers frame the change as a major factor in the success of social and education reforms aimed at promoting reconciliation and peace and increasing Rwanda's participation in global economic development. However, in Rwanda, the language one speaks is construed as an indicator of group affiliations and identity. Furthermore, Rwanda has the potential to develop a multilingual educational policy that employs its national language, Kinyarwanda (Ikinyarwanda, Rwanda), to promote mass literacy and a literate, multilingual populace. Rwanda's situation can serve as a case study for the ongoing roles that language policy plays in the politics of power. Keywords Language-in-education policy Á Rwanda Á French Á Kinyarwanda Á Africa Near the end of 2008, some international news coverage focused on Rwanda's announcement that it was discarding French as one of its three official languages.
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