Karen Harris
Episode 29 to the classroom podcast
My guest today is Dr. Karen Harris, who joins us to talk about the role of strategy instruction for qualities of good writing, such as focus organization and detail, as well as strategies for self-regulation. We'll also discuss a recently published meta-analysis she co-authored focused on effective professional development for teachers. I'm joined by my colleagues Lea Liebowitz and Lainie Powell in the second half of the episode where we'll discuss practical strategies for writing you can use right away in the classroom, as well as our takeaways as leaders of professional development.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Welcome Dr. Harris.
Karen Harris:
Thank you very much. Jennifer, please call me Karen.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Okay, Karen. Well, I'm excited to talk to you today about your work around writing strategy instruction, and I want to start off by talking a little bit about making a case for writing in the classroom. So we know that often what gets tested is what gets taught in schools and in a lot of states the annual literacy test is really a reading test and sometimes you might see a small writing task, like a short answer, constructed response, something like that. But on the whole, it's really a reading test. And so I think it's no coincidence then that the literacy block in many schools is often dominated by reading instruction. And in many core programs I've looked at, even when writing is involved, it's more common to see it assigned than really explicitly taught. So what's your pitch to educators in school leaders listening about why writing deserves time in the daily schedule and why writing needs to be explicitly taught, not just assigned?
Karen Harris:
Okay, well first of all, I think that as a culture, as a community, most our states, many of our parents and many teachers and lay people think that if you can read, you'll be able to write. And I think we have decades of data now that inform us that that is just not true. And actually if you get into studying writing, the cognitive metacognitive affective skills and knowledge components that it requires are just extremely demanding. I like to give a quick example. I was in a classroom and I love the book. I Wanna Iguana. I mean, it's a great book.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I know that one.
Karen Harris:
Yeah, it's very persuasive. This is why I should have an iguana and I'll learn to be responsible. It's a really fun book and kids love it. And so the teacher did a great job of reading it, leading guided discussion. The kids were really enthusiastic about the book and then she said, now write about what you would like to have as a pet. And the majority of 'em spent most of their time trying to figure out what pet did they like and how do they write about it. And they couldn't get started. And there are a few who were doing pretty well, at least they had a bit of an idea, but the majority of students were, they would ask, how do I start? I don't know what to do. And there was a lot of getting up to sharpen pencils. So this is the issue.
Jennifer Serravallo:
You research and write about self-regulated strategy development or SRSD. How does this approach fit with other common approaches?
Karen Harris:
Since 1982 I have written that SRSD should be integrated with the process approach. It's a false dichotomy to say you can only do one or do the other. One of the things is that it purposefully does already integrate many aspects of the process writing approach, the formation of a community of writers, the formation of what am I good at, what are other people good at? How can we work together, how can we help each other? Lots of peer collaboration, but in addition, it's an extremely active dialectic talking back and forth, but explicitly covering what students need to know. I think writing process, what's very important about emphasizing the process approach is it as SRSD does, it goes from thinking, learning, brainstorming, to planning, then to drafting, then to editing and revising, and then to publishing and sharing. Also a big part of what we use, discussion, looking at models and using those models as something you can write from. So instance, if I'm doing persuasion, I need to know the difference between a fact and an opinion. I need to know that to persuade people. I need a really clear opening that's fun and hopefully catches my reader a little bit. I need to know that generally speaking, it's good to have at least three or more strong reasons why I should have this pet that I want. Then you should say more about each reason, be powerful and think about your reader. This is where we find voice.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think you've been really helpfully given everybody an idea of the kind of what we're trying to get kids to do, to have voice to write within a particular structure, like having a persuasive argument and reasons or examples, the importance of elaboration structure. And what I want to ask you now is how would you define a strategy? It's part of the “SRSD” of course is the idea of strategy. We're used to hearing the term strategy when it comes to reading, but when it comes to writing, it's more than just saying to kids, you need to have voice or you should have three reasons, right? What is a strategy in your definition?
Karen Harris:
Well, a strategy is a game plan. You have to know what you're going to do and what you're going to do next. What we have learned about effective teaching and effective learning, successful learning across multiple theories is basically the same or extremely similar, and they found evidence that it works. So when you talk about having a strategy, learning a strategy are supported by more than one theory and large bodies of learning and teaching research,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Can you help us to envision how a lesson would go incorporating writing strategy instruction?
Karen Harris:
So we have goal setting. They set a goal. They want to have each of the elements, the teacher's in control of the goals because the teacher knows their students. Teachers have to make multiple decisions. So the teacher will decide, I'll start with these goals, but maybe this small group I'm going to pull out because they're going to need a lot more support even with these goals and so forth and so on. So the teacher will start with classroom literature like iwan iguana, but then when we start talking about writing and we've talked about IWAN iguana and why it's good and how it reached you, then we read writing level appropriate models, good models, okay, let's pick a pet for example, to write about that you think is good for children. And they'll discuss what pets settle on a pet and then the teacher will say, alright, who are we writing to?
Who's our reader? And they'll decide. And then they get into a discussion of self-talk and self-talk is so important and the research base on self-talk is huge. So these kids begin formulating self-talk that would help you we're focusing on self-talk and goals. The goals were to have a good opening sentence, grab the reader, have at least three reasons, have a nice wrap up, maybe use emotion, maybe use logic. And so now the teacher says, you know what? I have a strategy to share with you. I think it will really help you and help me and we will have a plan for how to do this. And they go through the strategy and now they learn. Then the teacher will introduce tree and it's a great mnemonic with a tree and branches and leaves and T is topic sentence, say what you believe and grab the reader.
And that points to the tree trunk. Everything has to build off that opening and you can use a little story, you can add to the opening so that it grabs the reader in some way. And we have a whole list that they look at and talk about of ways to grab the reader and they get more extensive as you get older. Then the R stands for reasons three or more, and the reasons are the branches on the tree and you only want good reasons. And then the first D is explanations. Now say more. Convince me more about why this is important. And then the last D is ending. And again, we teach ways to wrap it up. We try to teach students more fun ways to say, these are my reasons and these are why I have these reasons. While at the same time at least mentioning each of their reasons. And then if I was the teacher, I would move into using revising strategies, which we have validated multiple revising and multiple editing strategies for kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So you've got the reading of a mentor text like I want to iana. Then another reading of a text that's a little bit more level appropriate. It's closer to what the students are going to be writing. Then you engage students in what I would call shared writing where you're having a shared topic, the teacher is holding the pen and doing the scribing and thinking aloud and engaging kids to give the teacher ideas of what to write down and all the while modeling and explaining and voicing over the steps of these different strategies like tree, which are the mnemonics for the strategies or the game plans, the steps that you have. Then after the shared writing, you have students go back and try to write themselves, I assume.
Karen Harris:
Here's where teachers knowledge comes in. So they know their students and we work with them on differentiating on who needs what. No, there are some students in the classroom who will get this pretty quickly and they need additional goals. They need to keep growing. They need more goals to operate with.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely. I appreciate the different examples of shared and guided practice you offered. You mentioned a couple already, but I was hoping you could talk a bit more about self-regulation and what that means in the context of writing.
Karen Harris:
So so far we've got goal setting and self-talk. You model out loud, not just cognition, not just what you're thinking, not just the steps of the strategy. You model your feelings, you model your coping strategies. We ask teachers to model things to say to myself to get started, things to say to myself while I'm writing and things to say to myself about what I've gotten done and need to do. The fourth and final self-regulation component of SRSD is self reinforcement. What we're talking about is that satisfaction in the work I've done. When we get to self reinforcement, they've done that pretest or their baseline or whatever you want to call it, and they score themselves. Now the teacher is really positive and encouraging. Of course your score's not going to be very high. I have a teacher on video's like, I hadn't even taught you this yet. Let's just compare where you are now. So there's no grading, there's no evaluation, and they score their pretest and they talk about where they are now and the kids are, wow, look at me how I've grown. Anne Brown said years ago, students need to know why they're learning something and we're very definite about that. Yes, they do.
Jennifer Serravallo:
The self-regulation and the strategy use, it's so empowering because it puts students in the driver's seat. They're active participants in their own learning and the teacher is supporting them in being active. And I think about, I dunno if you've spent time studying the Duke and Cartwright active view of reading model at all, but I just feel like what you're describing could make a really powerful active view of writing model in their model. The strategies and self-regulation are this opening circle that lead into the word recognition and language comprehension, which then yield reading comprehension or skilled reader. And I feel like it's kind of the same thing. We've got self-regulation, got strategy use, and then we think about how that feeds into genre knowledge, craft skill, ability to organize, elaborate, edit, use proper spelling, and all of these things are things that teachers can and should explicitly teach. So I think it's just really exciting the contribution you've made.
Karen Harris:
Absolutely. So let me just say real quickly that reading comprehension improves the more writing students do and there's a new meta-analysis out and the data, it is amazingly powerful. Students should be reading for writing and they should be reading for enjoyment and learning and that improves when they write about what they're reading, they get better reading comprehension.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was hoping we could spend a little time talking about professional development, which was the focus of the paper that you just released this month actually, right? August, 2023 you wrote about professional development as being critical to improving writing, and I was hoping we could talk about some of the elements of effective professional development for teachers relating to writing strategy instruction. What did you find?
Karen Harris:
So the recent study, and we've done several studies now, is of practice-based professional development. First developed by Deborah Ball, which is immersing teachers in a community of learners together, staying with them and doing all of the instruction with them. We lead it at first and they are their students and they experience it from the student side and they have to write too. They have to write to persuade or inform or whatever, and then they start doing the modeling and the whole instruction with each other. We've run a number of these and we just did a review. There are 21 studies of practice-based professional development for SRSD across grade levels, elementary to high school. They have all been extremely successful. So what happened, we worked with first and second grade teachers and we really pushed the envelope. We taught these young children how to read next generation science standards aligned text at their writing level with a lot of the facts that the NGSS wants kids to get and then write about it to inform, to help someone else learn.
And our first graders and second graders learned close reading. They learned a markup text for different parts. They learned to choose and reject things they wanted to use. Their essays are quite different in many ways, and they blew it out of the water. We had effect sizes, again ranging from 0.80 to 2.0. So they do the practice-based professional development. It's demanding. It's at least two seven to eight hour days. We often need to do some coaching or follow-up supports afterwards. As teachers implement in these diverse classrooms they have, we do work on that diversity during pd. It is actually, it contains all of the aspects that researchers have come to agree our core to good pv.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Can you name some of them?
Karen Harris:
Sure, sure. So an example is using exactly the materials you will use in your classroom and using them, modeling and participating with others as you would use them with your students so that other teachers or other PD people are being the second grade students or the sixth grade or the eighth grade students. And then talking about what's working for them, talking about what will happen in their classroom. We also add looking at where your students are now, right at the beginning of pd we use videos so teachers can see good modeling happening during the PD as well as us modeling it. The other is the professional learning community. Who will you call? Who is going to be your discussion partner? We are always available to you, but who in this group of eight or nine or 12 who are with us today? How will you support each other? So that peer support is a very important component and then that follow-up support.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Did it seem from your study that there was an amount of professional development that was needed to sort of tip the needle into positive student outcomes? So you said we don't just want to put the strategies up there and lecture at the teachers and send them on their way. Obviously we want to engage the teachers in practicing the work of writing that they're going to be asking their students to do. You mentioned coaching in classrooms. I guess what I'm wondering, is there a certain number of hours of professional learning each year that really seems to show that there's major changes to classroom practice and most importantly to student outcomes?
Karen Harris:
Yes. That's such a good question, Jennifer. It is variable and it takes more time when you have teachers who are highly resistant. Minimum time for us has been 14 hours together with teachers, it can be two days spread apart because in between they do a little homework, they have a little reading, they do a little planning. It can be three days. It can be how the school wants to set it up, but we need, if you don't have the continuity of about five hours, you're doing it in too many little pieces. We prefer two days each seven hours. So the big time issue PD is not cheap yet. If you're doing, and we don't do practice-based professional development to groups of 60, you can't do that. The whole nature of practice-based professional development is at least if you have enough PD people that they are actually doing everything and someone's monitoring and they're really getting an experience that makes them confident and makes them feel like they can talk about whatever they want in this setting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I'm thinking about the sustainability issue and if you come into a school you've got that's maybe 14 sustained hours, however it's broken up over time. You get teachers going. And then in any of your studies, have you tried coming back year over year or following up with classroom visits or administrative support to make sure that there's time and space carved out for the writing practices that you taught teachers how to use or help teachers troubleshoot? Because inevitably there's always going to be challenges, right? Yeah.
Karen Harris:
Help them troubleshoot
Jennifer Serravallo:
Once they get into it.
Karen Harris:
Yes, and I'll tell you, when principals see the results and teachers see the results, they're so excited and happy for their kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. Last question I have for you is about how do we evaluate our effectiveness as a professional development provider? So you as a researcher, of course you're talking effect sizes and for those not familiar with effect sizes, you said 1.0, 1.25, 2.0, those are giant, right? We're happy with 0.4, 0.5. So those are giant effect sizes. That's right. How do you measure effectiveness? Are you looking at student work samples and measuring the effectiveness of the professional development by the impact it has on students are pulling the teachers and asking them to self-report how much more confident they feel? Or do you have some sort of an observation checklist that you're using and you're looking for certain classroom practices? Is it all of those things, right? What would be your advice for those who are providing professional development for teachers, how to evaluate the effectiveness of that professional development?
Karen Harris:
That is another excellent question, Jennifer. And what has worked for SRSD researchers doing this practice-based professional development is pretty much what the research literature tells us is effective. We are using a combination of the things you just mentioned, but the major product that we look at first is student writing. So they are scored using very stringent. Stanford has a beautiful article out on this scoring through rubrics, and we use very stringent standards. We score for the elements, but not just that they're there, but the quality of them. Then we score for the vocabulary use sentence structures. We had spelling, we had handwriting, we had all these measures in that study. The writing components, again, got very large effect sizes, and when I'm talking about a 1.0 effect size, this is where the classroom mean is, and this is where the classroom mean and curve moves up to.
And when you're moving, that's a whole standard deviation up. A 1.0 is you're move that class a standard deviation ahead. That's far more than normal development in the school year in writing. So we do all of that. We also have checklists. We are always in the classroom, every two or three lessons or more if teachers want us there more and we have a checklist and they have them too. They love them for planning and it lists all the essential things that need to be done, but we evaluate those checklists and that's called fidelity. In the study of 21 studies, fidelity ranged from 90% to a hundred percent across those studies. I think one study had an 82, maybe 80 somewhere, but that's still considered high. Why? That's practice-based professional development plus observation plus feedback. We didn't just go in and watch 'em. Every time they're observed, they get feedback, oh, this was great. I saw you do all this. They know exactly what they're supposed to be doing and they've bought into it. They're doing it not because it's on the checklist, but because it works and the kids are excited. And then we do teacher interviews and kid interviews and we learned a great deal about what it's like to learn SRSD, how we can make it a bit better, and again, how teachers take some time to be confident to make their own changes in it. So we really do quite a bit of all of that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you so much for your time today. I feel like I've learned so much from this conversation.
Karen Harris:
Thank you, Jennifer.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Laney and Leah for a conversation about practical takeaways. I'm so excited to talk about this interview because I know that we all work with teachers to help them with writing strategy instruction, and so we're thinking about this as both teachers of writing strategies as well as people who provide professional development. I think there are a lot of things that we could learn from that conversation and talk about. Maybe we should start off with a conversation about the idea of strategies being a game plan. So which to me says A how right that we're going to give kids explicit, clear for some of the skills that we want them to accomplish. And she gave us that one example, which kind of helps kids to think about the structure of a paragraph. But I thought we could share some additional examples with teachers that just to kind of get their minds working of how would this look in narrative writing, how would this look in poetry? How would this look? Helping kids with adding detail, what are some examples of ways to help kids to edit for their writing and check their spelling or anything like that, just to get some more ideas and examples out there. Laney, do you want to start us off?
Lainie Powell:
Yeah. What I have found in my work with teachers and writers is that sort of like Karen mentioned, different writers need different things at different times. So I might find myself sometimes leaning on 5.8 like that story mountain work with some kids. Maybe some children aren't ready for that, so we might use a timeline or maybe some are more visual, so they might storyboard. But I love the idea and I find that in writing often, I don't know, maybe the default in a lot of classrooms is a graphic organizer. Everybody gets one graphic organizer, and that doesn't always work for all kids, but when we give them different strategies in different ways to organize their writing, suddenly we get it yields more writing for kids, it's more effective.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Those examples you gave Lanny, just for those of you who don't, don't have the book, the 5.8 you're referring to is called Uhoh Uhoh Few. And the idea here is that sometimes when we're writing a story, there's a clear problem, and so we want to think what's that clear problem? And then think about how does the problem get worse and then how does the problem get solved? And so the little story mountain starts with the problem. And you're right, sometimes the story I'm writing doesn't have a problem. What if I'm talking about a personal narrative about the time I went to get ice cream with my grandfather, and it's just a sweet story about this moment I shared with my grandfather. There's no problem. So that story mountain isn't really going to work for me. I need a different way of organizing my narrative. So the storyboard that you mentioned, which is just a sequence of events where the writer is prompted to sketch what happened first, next, then, and then finally and have a visual representation to anchor them and plan through and think through their writing first. Then they go back and they write with detail as much as they can, what happened during each of those smaller moments within the larger event? So that's a perfect example of how different writers can use different strategies depending on what's the story they're trying to tell, how do they want to organize that story? And we just need to be flexible and nimble with different options.
Lea Leibowitz:
I also think similar to that idea is the idea of targeting students and being very specific for where they are developmentally when offering strategies is important. So for example, in chapter six, there's a strategy 6.3 speech bubbles, let your characters talk. So for a younger writer I might say, one of the things that we can do is think who was in this story in this moment? What were they saying? And now let me add a speech bubble. However, if I'm working with older writers where they're not using pictures, I might want to think of a strategy that refers to characters talking dialogue that is a little bit more advanced for them. So it might be strategy 6.15, let your readers know who's talking, right? So the idea that we have to be nimble in letting children use strategies that fit the kind of writing that they're doing, just as much as we have to be targeted to give them strategies that match where their zone of proximal development is to make sure that we're not stretching them too far or to make sure that we're not holding
Jennifer Serravallo:
Them back. And that takes that kind of continuous observation of students' work, continuous teacher choice. I really appreciated that Dr. Harris talked about how important the teacher is in making decisions and making those choices for how will I pull small groups, which students will get which strategies in addition to that shared practice. What else should we think about? Should we think a little bit about maybe some of the conventions of writing? We talk a lot about writing craft, but of course it's so important that we're supporting kids with explicit strategies when it comes to, for example, editing their writing for punctuation or thinking about, have I spelled all the words as accurately as I can? I think what happens sometimes is we might give kids checklists, some of which even have mnemonics, right? Like, oh my gosh, I'm trying to think of one that I've seen in classrooms. It's an editing checklist. Oh, cops, that's what it was. Yes. The kids would just check. Yep, capitalization check. Yep. Organization. Yep. Punctuation. Yep. But if they're just checking a checklist, it's probably a sign that they haven't been taught the strategy for how to. So the strategy being a game plan has to be more than just what to be editing for. I've got to offer kids how to do it.
Lea Leibowitz:
I love the strategy 9 1 7, read your draft aloud and listen. So that idea of giving kids the whisper phones and letting them hear themselves hear what it is that they wrote so that when you stumble upon something, it's like, oh, that sounded weird. Maybe I did. I can find a place where I forgot a word or I put word in twice and I can go now and get rid of that or put the word that belonged there. That
Lainie Powell:
Love there. I love that I often tell kids or writers or teachers that your ear will find mistakes your eyes don't see.
Lea Leibowitz:
And so
Lainie Powell:
Reading it aloud and too, it's like multisensory, right? Tapping into another set of senses. Jen, your conversation about the checklist reminded me of 9.4, which is in the writing strategies book, it's repeated readings to check a checklist. And I'm thinking of a specific classroom I was in last spring where we did, we built a checklist, the teacher and I with the class based on a piece of shared writing we had done with the class. And you know how sometimes inevitably in a class that last week before publishing, you have a handful of writers who are done, they have finished their piece, they've edited like ready to go to print. And so what we noticed, what we decided to do in this classroom was let some of those writers who were done and truly had made lots of significant changes and didn't have any work left to do, run small groups themselves with the checklist the class had created. So again, differentiation, peer feedback, all things that Dr. Harris highlighted.
Lea Leibowitz:
To piggyback on that, not everybody's checklist needs to be the same. Some kids may have checklists that are a little bit more advanced than others because what once we're using a confusing is now something that they've mastered and they're not making that mistake anymore. So they no longer need that on their checklist. So I think it's important to make sure that we're not being one size fits all. And again, we're super targeted about what it is that we're asking kids to do so that we are meeting them where
Jennifer Serravallo:
They're absolutely, I'm not opposed to checklists at all. In fact, I remember a conversation with Dr. Cartwright where she talked about how checklists can really support executive functioning skills, but I think we have to keep in mind that a checklist serves as a reminder of strategies you've already learned. It's not just so you're going to simply present it to kids. Check your punctuation if you've never taught them how to check their punctuation, like using a whisper phone, reading through it. Slowly listening to yourself as you read, noticing if the pauses in your voice match the pauses you've put in punctuation on the page. That's a really concrete how-to to help them to do that. And then the strategy that you mentioned, the repeated readings to check a checklist is really a strategy about how to use a checklist that you look at the first item, you read through the piece, you ask yourself questions related to that first item, then you decide to check it or not, then you go to the second item. So it's really a game plan or a how to for that checklist.
Lea Leibowitz:
Yeah. I love how in your teaching tip right here on page 3 27, you specifically mentioned that the best checklist are simply reminders of things that have already been taught and learned. That means that not only has the teacher mentioned it in a lesson and demonstrated how to edit for that particular convention, but students have shown that they're able to at least approximate editing for it too. That's
Jennifer Serravallo:
A really important clarification. Let's talk now about self-regulation because that's another area where Dr. Harris talked about needing strategies. We really need strategies to support that. So there are four in her paper. They are goal setting positive and self reinforcement. I believe she talked about goal setting, self-talk and self reinforcement. And then self-monitoring would be being aware of, am I doing the thing that I'm trying to do or how is this particular goal going for me? We've got some concrete strategies in chapter two. What are some of your favorites?
Lea Leibowitz:
I think strategy two point 11 make a plan for writing time. So the idea of not just writing and checking myself along the way, but really being intentional before I get writing as to what is this time going to look like? What's my plan? What are my expectations of myself so that as I'm writing, I have something to lean on for deciding how am I doing?
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'll tell you, I taught my daughter this summer. I put her in a week long writing camp. She's actually kind of a reluctant writer. And I said, you get comfortable with writing. You're going into high school. Let's just do some fun writing for a week. So it was a creative writing weekly camp, and she was texting me the first day, I don't know what to write about. That's right. There you go. I don't know what to write about. I'm really nervous. We're going to have to read our writing really soon to everybody. And I just, right,
Lea Leibowitz:
You're Jennifer
Jennifer Serravallo:
Sarah's daughter. And I was like, I'm got strategies for you. You called the right person. I took some photos and the one I said to her first was the one that's called silence, the it's no good voice. So that to
Lea Leibowitz:
Me
Jennifer Serravallo:
Made me think about the self-talk. And I think so many writers, and I'll speak for myself, I have this voice sometimes no one wants to read this little imposter syndrome. This isn't important. Is this really going to land with the people you're trying to write to? And I think that's what was a stumbling block for her in that moment was, I have to read this to my peers and I don't feel like what I have to say is good enough. I was like, you've just got to get something down first. Just get your pen moving and get going and get writing.
Lea Leibowitz:
Yeah, I think that especially in the beginning of the school year, for a lot of students, that is going to be the case because they're around maybe some peers that they haven't met before and they're in front of a teacher.
Something like that can be whole class, not even just that one day lesson, but let's just get started today during writing time, applying that strategy, let's all, whether we have that voice in our head or not, let's just all remind ourselves that we have to say is important. And all of us around here are not going to judge anybody for what it is that they're writing, but we're all writing and what we're saying and what we have to offer is going to be accepted by everyone around us. Just setting that tone, I think is going to be something that might negate a lot of the engagement, small group or individual work that you need to do during the first few weeks of school.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved that idea from Dr. Harris of just embedding or kind of layering in some of these self-regulation strategies, like the positive self-talk into any demonstration, just an added layer. So there's opportunities, like you said, to do discussions with kids or lessons with kids about them by themselves, but then also just as a layer, as another part of every lesson I think is a good thing to take away.
Lea Leibowitz:
I saw a teacher once give a lesson, and while she was demonstrating it was during shared writing, she had said, I remember last year I had a student who, and instead of modeling herself as a struggling writer, she just reminded the students that in writing there are students who feel a certain way. So she kept herself as that positive view as being a writer who doesn't stumble upon those things at this point in her writing life, but use students from her past to let kids know, you're not alone in this. There's other kids who do this, and now let me explain to you and demonstrate for you how those kids got past that stumble.
Lainie Powell:
It's a creating that classroom culture where
It's safe to take risks. We really value process in this classroom and feedback as part of that process and that we have a classroom that values process, a growth mindset that we're all, it doesn't matter where we start, it matters where we're going. I was in my son's kindergarten open house last night, and they took pictures of this activity where they all wrote can't, and there were backward seas and some things were upside down because they're five, but they all wrote Can't on red paper, and tore it up into little tiny pieces and had a confetti party with it. Love
Lea Leibowitz:
Said, it's
Lainie Powell:
Not something we don't say in kindergarten. We say, not yet. I just love borrowing the spirit of that for all grades, or even as a
Jennifer Serravallo:
Grownup. We're all because exactly in my
Lainie Powell:
House at the dinner table. So yeah, I just love that emphasis on process and growth.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And honestly, sometimes when we write stuff, it's not very good. That's part of the process too, and I think that's something
Lainie Powell:
Down. You've
Jennifer Serravallo:
Got to have something down. And I think that's one of the things that's hard about maybe for some people where actually my daughter, she's a really good math student. She loves that there's a right answer. She loves math. And so I think part of what's challenging for that kind of personality type maybe is that with writing, there's a lot of gray. There's a lot of uncertainty of what's good and what's not good. There's a lot of fumbling sometimes till you get to a product that you're happy with and absolutely, that's all about approaching it with process mindset and growth mindset.
Lea Leibowitz:
Yeah. Strategy 2.27 is be realistic. So I think that fits with this whole idea, right? That if we have too high expectations of ourselves or too low, we're not going to get to that place where we feel confident. So the idea of making sure that we help kids to be realistic with their goals is important. And it reminded me during the conversation Dr. Harris made mention of also needing to be realistic with the models that we show our students that we share with them writing samples that truly are what they are capable of.
Lainie Powell:
Leah, you know what that's reminding me of is the work we do with teachers sometimes on creating demonstration texts before we enter a classroom for some in-class practice, and I did a little action research two years ago in a district where we used a mentor text, we used a student text and across within one grade level, but across classrooms and then some teacher written texts that we had developed based on, it was narrative based on the teacher's experiences, but also looking at the class data, what the class was ready for. And so we were super intentional around that demonstration piece. And I mean, leaps and bounds engagement and volume were so much higher with the teacher piece. And I use that little anecdote so much in my work with teachers because I think you get so much mileage out of a demonstration piece, you can be really intentional. You can tailor it. You're building rapport with your kiddos and building that culture and community of writers.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think to create it, you're having to practice the stuff that the kids are then going to be doing.
Lainie Powell:
Yeah, you're
Jennifer Serravallo:
Building empathy, being the writer. So let's move now to talk about effective professional development. And
Lea Leibowitz:
Dr. Harris
Jennifer Serravallo:
Talked about that. We've got to practice, we've got to put ourselves in the shoes of the writer and practice the writing and see what we experience. I think there's so many strategies that teachers will develop based on the challenges that they themselves had when they were in that practice. What other things resonated with you, either from the conversation or from the paper, which I think had a little bit more detail about some elements for effective professional development?
Lea Leibowitz:
I think that one of the things to really consider is time. And she discussed the importance of this front loading time, which is in the absence of writers and in the community of teachers as learners instead. And that's where all of that practice happens, where the teacher sits in the seat as the student and really experiences this entire process of being a writer and what it's like to actually think about and apply the strategies yourself to get the work down on paper and to be comfortable as a writer before we're the teacher of writing is going to be really important. But more than that, what I have found in experience being in schools, working with teachers, it needs to be followed up with in-classroom support, where now the teachers in the driver's seat as the teacher, just because they did it really well as a writer themselves, doesn't mean they're going to be perfect right away as the teacher of writing. So having that follow-up coaching support in the classroom, in the company of students, I think is where the practices and what the paper really alluded to is that's where the shift in practice happens, and then naturally the impact on the student achievement comes, follows up.
Lainie Powell:
You know what, this is making me think, Leah, as I listen to you so many times, especially in summer PD or when I'm there on a day that's protected for PD in a school, I'll do some adult writing, some teachers as writers, and at the beginning I'll say, you don't have to share this, but we're going to do some adult writing, and I want you to just be a writer, but also zoom out and let's think about what are some of the conditions that allowed you to write for an extended period of time. And they love it. I mean, they're just so excited by the end of it, and they've got these beautiful pieces, and sometimes it's a little emotional because they are remembering things that they had stored away, but it builds empathy. And you would be surprised at some of the things that adult college educated people say about what helped them having choice, seeing you do it first, knowing how much time I had.
If I say we're going to write for 12 minutes, when you said that, I was like, oh my gosh, I can do this. Okay, so let's borrow from that and do it in the classroom. This is also what elementary writers could benefit from. Absolutely. Yeah. We can't just talk two teachers about writing. They have to actually write and they have to actually practice the writing and that they have opportunities for feedback and reflection. I thought that was really astounding how the experimental design of the study was that they were in their classrooms regularly providing feedback on how they were doing every two or three lessons, every two or three lessons. So that regular feedback, and if you don't have someone supporting you from the outside, is there a coach in the school that can do it? Can you
Jennifer Serravallo:
Teachers up to
Lainie Powell:
Watch
Jennifer Serravallo:
Each other? Colleagues? Yeah. Have colleagues in professional learning communities so that you have that feedback and somebody to bounce ideas off of and troubleshoot and just, again, it's what we know works for kids. They've got to have feedback, they've got to have practice
Lea Leibowitz:
For the administrators listening. Something that we've done in schools a lot and has really gained a lot of traction across the board in a school is the idea of principals or coaches setting up these opportunities for teachers to be freed up, even if it's just for 10 minutes to go into somebody else's classroom to observe. Because when we watch other people do things, we get better at that thing. Teacher retention is always an issue, but if we create this community of learners and we create opportunities for teachers not to feel so alone and siloed in their classrooms, but to give them the support in between maybe professional development visits, we are going to create a place where teachers don't want to leave that they're not looking for, what am I doing next year? And so when we're thinking about all of this, when I read that in the paper, this idea of teacher retention and making teachers want to stay is going to have an impact on student outcomes, so why not focus on that too? And the best way to do that is support your teachers. Give them the resources that they need to teach well, and that just doesn't include the textbooks or the curriculum. It is the resources that are around you teaching next door to you. That's the best resource in a school is the teacher, Emma, herself.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. I think that really speaks to the importance of professional learning, being needs-based in communication with the teachers themselves, setting the goals, not just that there's something I want to fix or change or force on a teaching staff that's not the same kind of support that we're all talking about. This collaboration and this really, again, mirroring what we ask kids to do, set goals, figure selves, make an action plan. How do I work on this goal? That's the same kind of stuff we want to do with adult learners. They should be in the driver's seat of how they're changing what they want to work on, and that we're always, again, focusing on student outcomes all along the way.
Lainie Powell:
Yeah. One more thing that came to mind as you were describing the structure of RA school visits amongst colleagues, that when we do that, inevitably we're going to be working on both content and pedagogy. I feel like so much of planning time in grade levels is devoted to content. What are we teaching such a good
Jennifer Serravallo:
Point
Lainie Powell:
And how is often left out, but I find that it's really that outcomes improve when we think about nuance and the art of teaching. And when we're watching other teachers, we inevitably have to think about pedagogy like, oh my goodness, I never thought about it, but when I watched him do it, suddenly I was struck by, or I never considered grouping kids this way, or I love the way you led into this that we are able to notice and support pedagogy when we're visiting other classrooms.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's so important to mention. And going back to her conversation, I was thinking about how she gave a nice example of examining mentor texts. She gave a nice example of doing some shared writing with students. But what we didn't get into in the conversation are some of the really important methods that you use to differentiate. Once you notice different kids need different strategies, like small group strategy lessons or
Lainie Powell:
Peer Writing.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, doing peer writing group. What does it look like when you're coaching into a partnership? So really looking at how are we teaching, not just what are the strategies that we're teaching, but how are we teaching these strategies and supporting independence so that we're not always doing the heavy lifting, holding the pen as the teacher, but we're handing it over to the kids, equipping them to do their own writing, and giving them really clear strategies, feedback, guidance, and support for those strategies absolutely requires some close study. And that's hard to do if you're only doing a presentation where you're participating in all adults in a room, no students there. It's better to get into classrooms and work with students and practice it that way,
Lainie Powell:
But it's so worthwhile, right? You get so much mileage out of that. I'm thinking of Dr. Gabriel's research around the importance of the teacher and how that makes so much more of an impact on student outcomes more so than curricula. And that I really was thinking of her research, which I was listening Dr. Harris about the importance of the teacher and teacher knowledge and the teacher making all these decisions in the moment.
Jennifer Serravallo:
All right. Well, that sounds like a great place to stop for today. Laney and Leah, thank you so much for your time and all your thoughts and insights.
Lea Leibowitz:
Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And thank you for listening. Please support to the classroom by sharing, subscribing, or leaving a review on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Find out more about me and my work at my website, jennifer cavalo.com.