I MOVED

 As of March 17, 2023, my future blog posts will be posted on Get Flourishing, a collaboration with my husband, Michael. 

To see my posts, click here. See you there!

5 Things I Learned from Writing 500 Blog Posts

Moving on--new location, new work, new blog, but still learning and writing

 

Over 10 years ago I began this blog simply to process my summer professional reading—which had started with the book Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students. My husband suggested the title “Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn,” alluding to a prediction by futurist Alvin Toffler that those would be the essential skills for navigating the 21st century. It certainly rang true with me for navigating all the new ways of teaching I was discovering as I returned to the classroom after a few years away for raising young children, so the title stuck. 

Three schools, 6 grandchildren, 1 pandemic, and 499 posts later, this blog has been both the catalyst for and the witness to a lot of learning, unlearning, and relearning. With this 500th post, I wrap up my 3rd and final year at my current school and move my writing to a joint venture with my husband: Get Flourishing—click here for my posts. (I’ll still be learning, unlearning, and relearning—just keeping the end goal in mind! And because it’s on a different platform, you can actually subscribe to it, if you want.)    

Here are 5 things I’ve learned writing 500 blog posts:

(1) Being a writer who publishes regularly helps me teach writing. I regularly consider audience and purpose, what kind of writing that I find helpful, and how to use hooks, examples, vivid word choice, sentence variety, transitions, conclusions, and a toolbox full of literary moves. So when I coach students in writing, it’s more immediate than a textbook list of do’s and don’ts.      

(2) Being a reader who delights in the benefits of reading is the best way to inspire readers. As I read for my own purposes—to relax, to learn about the world, to understand my neighbors, to understand myself, to deepen my faith, to grow my pedagogy—I model a vibrant adult reading life. I also read to recommend books to my students because I love those little humans, and I love to find books that will help them relax, learn about the world, understand their neighbors, understand themselves, deepen their faith, and develop their interests.    

(3) I am the chief learner in my classroom. The world is a jaw-dropping place—I am so curious about its beauties and its brokenness. I want to understand it more deeply and know how I can help. As I model my interest, questioning, reading, and experimenting (how to teach EFL, how ignite middle schoolers’ reading lives, how to embed grammar instruction in reading and writing, how to be resilient, how to organize class book clubs), learning becomes a normal, human (not just kid) thing to do, and the classroom becomes a community of learners.     

(4) The discipline of writing helps me reflect on, consolidate, implement my learning, and share it with others. Every week I’m thinking, “What is going on in my teaching, in my classroom, that is significant enough to reflect on in writing?” If the answer is nothing, then I’d better do something! Once I’ve done it and wrestled it into words on the page, I have purposefulness to share with students about what and how they’re learning and why it matters, and with colleagues about the excitement of the hunt for what opens students’ hearts and minds.      

(5) Learning is always better with others. It’s better when my students are learning how to ask really good questions, build on classmates’ comments in discussion, share their favorite books, and give and receive feedback on their writing. It’s better when I’m in a book discussion with colleagues, sharing what we’ve tried in class this week and how it’s gone. It’s better when I can articulate it in a blog post and sent it out to find a reader who might need to hear just that thing.

Learning. Teaching. The beautiful, groaning creation we find ourselves in. The gifted, hurting neighbors, students, colleagues God plants us among. Even our own flawed, deeply loved selves. Education is tough yet rewarding work. 

An 8th grade English as a foreign language (EFL) student, reflecting on the experience of preparing for and teaching a 4th/5th grade EFL class this week, sensed it even in that brief exposure: “Teaching is hard because you can’t teach people just with your understanding, and you have to teach it so they can understand. So it was hard. I felt that teachers were incredible. One more thing is that teaching is fun. I had fun when they understand it.”

Writing 500 blog posts has been part of helping me lean into the hard and the fun of teaching—teaching so students understand, and seeing that understanding happen.

How about you? What have you learned over the last 10 years? How do you consolidate and share that learning?

2 Reasons to Write in an AI World

If students understood experientially, deep in their bones, that writing accomplishes these 2 purposes, all worry about inappropriate assistance from artificial intelligence would be laid to rest:   

1. Writing makes my thinking better. I can clarify, connect, develop, evaluate, and apply my thinking.
2. Writing communicates my better thinking so others can benefit. 

I thought about ChatGPT when it first exploded across the public, what it might mean to me as an English teacher, and what it might mean to me as a writer. I decided my first classroom response would be to experiment with explicitly teaching 6th and 7th graders those 2 purposes for writing. 

If students could experience the deep satisfaction of wrestling their thoughts into words and onto paper, of looking at it and saying, “Yes! THAT is what I think!” and if they could then share those words with someone else and see their impact—that would be a good foundation for beginning a conversation about how AI can facilitate or undermine those purposes of writing.   

The writing came after a lot of reading, processing, and discussion had already taken place. This is essential—that students have stuff they want to say. We started with book clubs on novels with resilient protagonists. We learned about resilience, took an assessment for ourselves and for a character in our novels, and set a personal goal for increasing resilience. We did a novel-based hexagonal thinking project in pairs (see below) and a one-pager as individuals (see bottom of page). Then it was time to see how students would pull together all the thinking they’d been doing. 

The prompt was this: "Why is resilience important and how can you increase your resilience? Use resources on resilience, illustrate with examples from your book club book, and apply it to your life." Students wrote a thesis, filled in a graphic organizer, hand wrote a rough draft, got peer feedback (using a rubric-based protocol), incorporated that feedback into a typed revision which I edited (first 10 comments), and finally produced a final draft. Once the final draft was submitted, they self-assessed (using the same rubric we’ve been using all along) and reflected on their learning (using 3 specific questions).

I’m really pleased to see how students were able to make the connections between the concept of resilience, specific examples in the novel they read, and applications to their own lives. This is the kind of reading and thinking and writing that is real and powerful right now and will continue to be throughout their lives. If students understand experientially the power of writing to make their own thinking better and communicate that better thinking to others so they can benefit, the appropriate role of AI falls into place.  

How does it fall into place for me? I used ChatGPT to originate a list of 10 suggestions for improving each of the 6 skills of resilient people, according to the Mayo Clinic website. Then I revised the lists to be sure they fit my students’ contexts and had one or two explicitly faith-based suggestions in each list.

How about you? What do you think students need to understand about writing in order to see AI in an appropriate role? What do you do to help students own that understanding?