Elyse Eidman-Aadahl's List: NWP Summer Reading 2011

Moderator Elyse Eidman-Aadahl discusses with NWP site directors Lil Brannon, Faye Peitzman, and Troy Hicks their ideas about appropriate and relevant readings for the invitational summer institute and how they can best be used.

Typically, summer institutes provide teachers with three kinds of readings: common readings that establish a shared vocabulary for the whole group, readings that gather together teachers with similar interests (such as grade–level groups, or teachers of special populations), and readings that support individual teachers' interests.

As Jim Gray writes in Teachers at the Center, NWP "summer institute programs have always been devoted to the exploration of theory and research. As professionals, teachers need to immerse themselves in the why as well as the what of their work." As the range and substance of professional literature about teaching writing and reading, as well as school reform issues, has grown over the years, the opportunity for rich discussions of reading and research continue to be crucial to the summer institute experience. So before addressing the question of what we read, we'd like to consider two other questions: "Why do we read in the summer institute?" and "How do we read in the summer institute?"

In this article, CWP-Fairfield describes a process of rethinking their readings to promote greater diversity at the site. Director Faye Gage writes: "One advantage of the retooled reading list was that it provided the institute with a common vocabulary for examining issues of language, power, culture, and equity. These issues, because they resonate so deeply with urban teachers, became part of the fabric of the institute, informing the demonstrations, the writing groups, and the discussions."

Think you've got a book inside of you? Anne Lamott isn't afraid to help you let it out. She'll help you find your passion and your voice, beginning from the first really crummy draft to the peculiar letdown of publication. Readers will be reminded of the energizing books of writer Natalie Goldberg and will be seduced by Lamott's witty take on the reality of a writer's life, which has little to do with literary parties and a lot to do with jealousy, writer's block and going for broke with each paragraph

In this online PDF selection, taken from Lamott's popular book about writing, Bird by Bird (1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those "shitty first drafts" that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts.

This innovative book teaches students how to write informative and engaging nonfiction that emphasizes voice and creativity and incorporates observation, research, memory, and point of view. Writing True serves as a valuable core textbook or a supplement for any creative writing or composition course with an emphasis on creative nonfiction.

Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction.

LaRoque, a former journalist and editor, teaches the elements of good writing through the use of essential guidelines, literary techniques, and proper writing mechanics.In conversational style, she covers elements of the craft of writing that might serve teachers well in their own writing

In this online PDF, the author argues: "As a composition instructor who incorporates literacy narratives into her pedagogy each semester, I find that student-produced literacy narratives can encourage self-reflective learning and help students develop a sense of critical agency about their literacy practices. I assign literacy narratives so students can reflect on their continuous literacy experiences throughout the writing course as they encounter a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. By writing sequences of literacy narratives in conjunction with their genre-writing projects, students may become aware that their literacy does not just emerge after they complete one writing assignment in which they “study literacy” or produce a single writing assignment. Instead, students come to understand literacy learning as continuous and changing, rather than as a static experience that happened in a past isolated event (or has yet to happen to them as writers) and recognize themselves as writers and understand the rhetorical choices that they make. "

Link to an ERIC report: Finds that students understand reading and writing as demonstrations of what they know, with the purpose of giving teachers what they want, and the hope of getting an "A." Shows that they begin to believe themselves so incompetent that they no longer enjoy reading and writing; indeed, they read and write as little as possible.

The NWP Digital Is website is a collection of ideas, reflections, and stories about what it means to teach writing in our digital, interconnected world. Digital Is provides a platform for educators to publish depth reflections and to curate collections that form the basis of discussions and online courses.

NWP's newest book, Because Digital Writing Matters, examines what teachers, administrators, and parents can do to help schools meet the challenges of digital writing and to equip students with the technology-related communication skills they need to thrive in our information-rich, high-speed, high-tech culture. The book offers practical solutions and models for educators and policymakers involved in planning, implementing, and assessing digital writing initiatives and writing programs.

Where others have talked about new technologies and how they change writing, Hicks shows you how to use new technologies to enhance the teaching of writing you already do. Chapters are organized around the familiar principles of the writing workshop: student choice, active revision, studying author s craft, publication beyond the classroom, and assessment of both product and process. In each chapter you ll learn how to expand and improve your teaching by smartly incorporating new technologies like wikis, blogs, and other forms of multimedia. Throughout, you ll find reference to resources readily available to you and your class online. He also includes a practical set of lessons for how to use wikis to explore a key concept in digital writing: copyright.

Students are reading and writing all the time, but in places we aren't necessarily paying attention to. Build on their authentic interest and motivation using the technologies they are already committed to, and you've won half the battle. You won't believe how engaged they are; they won't believe they're learning for school. In iWrite,Dana Wilbur shows how to guide students through the new literacies, including how to discern between media, how to account for audience and voice, how to choose appropriate genre, and how to harness what they already know to be more successful in school.

Whether you are a writer of fiction or essays, or want to explore poetry or memoir, Tiberghien's twelve fundamental lessons will help you discover and develop your own distinct voice. Tiberghien's inventive exercises focus on the processes unique to each genre, while also offering skills applicable to any kind of writing, from authentic dialogue to masterful short-shorts.

Peter Smagorinsky, Larry Johannessen, Elizabeth Kahn, and Thomas McCann draw on the teaching and research of George Hillocks to break down the writing process into more manageable steps. Across the commonly taught genres of personal and fictional narratives, essays of argumentation, comparison and contrast, extended definition, and research reports, the authors share teacher-designed, developmentally appropriate, task-based activities for:

developing procedures for rendering ideas into text
fostering goal-directed thinking
generating appropriate, repeatable writing processes
cultivating imagination alongside strategic thinking.

The popular, brief rhetoric that treats writing as thinking, WRITING ANALYTICALLY offers a sequence of specific prompts that teach students across the curriculum how the process of analysis and synthesis is a vehicle for original and well-developed ideas.

"If teachers show children how an illustrator's decisions about pictures are a lot like a writer's decisions about words, they form a bridge of understanding that nurtures children as writers."
---Katie Wood Ray

Katie Wood Ray has made a very readable, very usable book to help teachers teach elementary students to 'read like writers'.