These activities are very different from activities in which children color in or circle pictures on photocopied sheets. When alphabet-related tasks are active and occur in small groups, children make choices and decisions. And because there is more action and more talk, teachers are better able to assess what individual children know.
As writing grows more sophisticated, teachers should highlight conventions of writing and teach techniques or skills to children who are ready to utilize these (e.g., spacing between words, use of exclamation points). But, again, instruction (in reading and writing strategies) should be tied to actual purposes. When children are writing letters or cards to someone, the direction to space words makes more sense. Once children begin to build up a bank of words that they know they need to write frequently (this, the, is), teachers can work with them to generate a highfrequency word list. Teachers can ask the class, “What words do you write again and again?” These lists can be photocopied and laminated. What remains central is that instruction be viewed, by teachers and students, as providing tools for writing about experience. Instruction should support writing, not take the place of meaningful activity; writing should develop out of children’s genuine wish to communicate something that matters to them.
In first and second grades, when reading and writing receives more instructional attention, most children will benefit from explicit instruction in auditory and visual discrimination, decoding strategies, rhymes, blends, word families, and syllabification. However, returning to Courtney Cazden’s criteria, what remains crucial is whether a particular piece of instruction matches what a child can actually make use of. Children’s purposes in writing should remain of central concern to teachers. This is a natural outcome when teachers remember that children genuinely value the power they gain from the ability to write down their thoughts. (Vivid pictures of first- and second-grade literacy learning driven by children’s purposes are in Karen Gallas’s Imagination and Literacy: A Teacher’s Search for the Heart of Learning, and Anne Dyson’s Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Public School.)6
Programmed Instruction
The faith that is called for by progressive educators is the faith that education need not be something that is done to children.
In classroom after classroom, children as young as four years old sit at tables, working at paper-and-pencil—or crayon—tasks. In many kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade rooms, the “literacy block” is two hours long. Classrooms dominated by literacy activities have little time for the experiences that give children things to write about. Academically oriented (and essentially barren and boring) assignments are supplanting richer multidisciplinary curriculum. By mandating these programs, schools also ignore what is known about how children learn. The National Association for the Education of Young Children called “hands-on activity and experimentation . . . more appropriate for [six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds] than fatiguing mechanical seatwork.”7
The program in use at P.S. 87, where I taught (and in many other city schools), was Accelerated Literacy Learning (ALL).8 ALL divides instruction into preplanned units that are the same for all children, beginning with “Unit One: Living Life Like a Writer.” (This title, of course, is grammatically incorrect. And what does such a highly abstract phrase mean to young children?) Although teachers using the program are permitted to vary the pacing, lessons are sequenced and essentially scripted, guided by the logic of instruction, not the inner logic of growth. Because each unit has a predetermined outcome, there is less scope for individuality and variety of style than would be the case with an open-ended program, one committed to the broadest possible definition of writing. A critical viewpoint on the approach is provided by Lillian Weber in her discussion of children’s language styles. One child, she says, has a “visual focus” and continually sees things as looking like other things. Another child “is a storyteller.” Another child “with great deliberation savors the sounds, the syllables . . . another child speculates.” 9 Teaching based on programmed literacy materials cannot take into account this range of styles. In addition, by narrowing the possible outcomes, teachers are less able to assess individual needs.
The prescriptive nature of the materials is revealed in the teacher’s guide, which is written in a strange, stilted, artificial language. The teacher is asked to describe her own “noticings,” to talk about her “life as a writer” or “life as a reader.” Teachers are to say, “The more reading we do, the easier it is for us to make connections between the books we read. For example, you can compare different books by different authors with a theme like ‘friendship,’ and notice how the characters are alike or different.” 10 When teachers talk in this stiff and programmed way, students tune out.
The approach often substitutes abstractions for reality. In one kindergarten classroom, a chart reads, “In Writing Workshop, we’re doing Purposeful Writing.” The chart is a perfect example of purposeless writing; it bears no relationship to anything children see themselves doing. (Of course, in the kindergarten classroom where it hangs, children can’t read it anyway.) Purposeful writing occurs when children have real purposes. Indeed, a phrase like “purposeful writing” exposes the poverty of this approach, its failure of empathy with children’s minds, its disrespect for children’s real abilities and distinctive ways of thinking. A similar model, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, prompts teachers to address children with fake enthusiasm: “Wow, you guys! You look so ready to talk about your books! How great!” 11 The self-conscious terminology results from the belief, stated in the materials, that teachers should highlight metacognitive processes, so that children learn to be explicitly aware of the strategies they use in order to become “good writers” and “good readers.”
It is certainly the case that making knowledge explicit—“enabling children to know what they know,” in Karen Gallas’s words—helps children draw on their knowledge. But the terms in which explicit knowledge is formulated should remain close to children’s experience. For Gallas, this happens when children use an “expressive” medium—“drawing, painting, music, movement, dramatic enactment, poetry, and storytelling” to “synthesize and apply their ideas to new and different contexts.” 12 In contrast, literacy materials dictate the terms in which ideas are to be formulated: “Today I want us to practice this strategy and pay particular attention to why we have chosen to use certain tools when we are not understanding what we are reading.”13 Whether or not children learn any strategies this way, it undoubtedly kills the joy of reading particular books and makes it harder for children to respond to literature in heartfelt and thoughtful ways.
Overall, the approach restricts the meanings that children may encounter. This is even more likely to be the case when the approach is used by new, inexperienced teachers who become adept in rigid, by-the-book teaching but don’t learn to listen and watch children, and to adapt instructional methods to the needs of a particular group.
Reading Workshop, a feature of the literacy approach, occurs daily and is predicated on children’s choice of “just-right” books. Teachers “level” classroom libraries, organizing book baskets according to reading difficulty. Once a week, children “shop” for books from the baskets; these provide reading material for the week. Although teachers are expected to include additional baskets—books by specific authors, books on specific topics—in actual practice, because of the pressure to keep children “on track,” children may have few opportunities to peruse a variety of books, including books that are too hard or too easy. Given the daily pressure of literacy-related activities (Reading Workshop, Writing Workshop, Shared Reading, Guided Reading, Read-Aloud, and Independent Reading), there may be no time during the school week when children may simply browse—look at books for pleasure—and forge personal ties to reading. While practice in reading is very important in order for children to become fluent readers, that goal should not be met at the expense of pleasure in reading.
R
ather than prescriptive guides with timetables and scripts, teachers need resources that suggest “instructional detours” and tools: children can work with partners, write “how to” books, label shelves and bins. Teachers can introduce genres, literary forms, and writing conventions as these become relevant to a classroom’s ongoing work; teachers should be asked to find the right time to teach them. Children’s work should be the source of lessons, not the other way around.
“Let’s Write That Down”
As the children dictated the Friday Letter to Families, someone said, Our caterpillars got bigger. Michael immediately said, Not all of them. Then Mark said, Well . . . . And so on—that back and forth . . .
This discussion, with its additions and qualifications, occurred toward the end of the year. It resulted from months of judging, on my part, when to intervene in discussions, when to comment on someone’s comment or pose a question, months of deciding when to end a discussion, or call on a child who hasn’t said anything. Now, they added to each other’s remarks, disagreed, jumped in to qualify a statement.
Children’s writing should have the same energy, verve, and vivacity as children’s speech. This is the result when we teach writing in ways that let children explore the widest range of meanings. How broadly is writing defined, how various are the uses it serves? How authentic is it, how much is it their own? Where do we see it? “Its guuowey!” writes Catherine after mixing water and cornstarch. How much personality there is in that spelling! When writing is generated by lived experience, it is exploratory, broadly constituted, rich in variety—even overwhelmingly plentiful. Thoughtful teachers make it happen through the search for connections between children’s purposes and writing. Writing resulted when Francie asked her question about leaves and trees, and I said, “Let’s write that down, and we can ask the other children what they think, later.” Writing was the result when I added a mix of writing materials to the pretend area: notebooks, pads, Post-its, pencils and pens, little calendars, tape, envelopes; the pretend area was soon papered with notes. Writing happens when teachers find the places in the room and in the day to make it happen, and trust children to write.
The teacher’s job, then, is to consider what children are striving to say—and to aid them in their efforts. Guiding children is what teachers do best, through their knowledge of what these particular children might be seeking to communicate, and their respect for the richness of children’s thinking. This is the source of teachers’ authority: their reserves of intuition about children’s thinking and concerns, about the topics and forms that matter to them.
Just as teachers must trust children to write inventively and meaningfully, teachers have to trust themselves. Teachers need faith in their own ability to judge, develop standards, ask the right questions—a faith that develops inevitably and ironically as a result of doubts, mistakes, and corrections. I keep in mind times I’d lacked faith—the time I’d looked askance at Harry’s drawing, which seemed a mess of lines, only to have him inform me it was a food fight; the times I’d doubted children’s insatiable appetite for meaning.
We want children to produce writing that is honest and compelling, direct and thoughtful. Does the language—written and oral—of teachers and educators meet the criteria that we have for children?
There are several educator languages: that of official school documents and policy directives, of teaching guides, and of professors of education and academic texts. Reading any of these, I’m struck, again and again, by how the writers cloak straightforward statements in murky prose, which almost pushes the readers’ eyeballs away. Over the years, I’ve found it harder and harder to read official documents: I scan them and can them, often to my peril. Every field, of course, produces a specialized language whose obscurity separates practitioners from laymen, but educational writing seems to set a standard for lack of clarity.
Much educational writing is abstract, clichéd, full of generalities, weighted with mystifying words and phrases; clear and precise prose is the exception. Phrases like “at risk” generalize the problems specific children face and absolve the society, and the schools themselves, from responsibility for children’s failures. Vito Perrone, former director of the North Dakota Study Group, wrote of the “distancing, uninspiring, heavily technological language . . . beginning to capture so much of the public discourse of education.” 14 Here is a sentence from Accelerated Literacy Learning: “Teaching students to intentionally activate their background knowledge before, during and after reading may help them: 1) selectively look for information most relevant to their purposes for reading, 2) retain and recall what they’ve learned and 3) modify their schema about fiction and nonfiction text structures, formats, author style, craft and content area topics.” 15 In other words, students should connect reading material with their own prior experiences, in regard to both content and form. By using jargon and obfuscating language, the authors claim a more objective, “research-based” point of view. They also transmit a lack of respect for the daily experience of teachers.
A contrast is provided by teacher-writers. Reading Karen Gallas’s Languages of Learning, for example, I find sentences that are accessible, grounded in her experience of classroom life.16 In style and substance, her writing confirms teachers’ sense of their own importance in relation to children’s development. Teachers, then, must be critical readers, recognizing when material obscures their knowledge of children, or when it honors children’s efforts and their own efforts, when it adds to their ability to see and hear children, and challenges them to think more deeply.
The language that teachers use in classrooms also transmits attitudes. Their speech can be fake or genuine, manipulative or direct, encouraging or punitive. Teachers sometimes refer to themselves in the third person, perhaps to hide the authority of their role. There are teachers who habitually use fake, cutesy phrases. Before a lesson, they say to children, “Put on your listening ears.” These kinds of phrases are condescending to children and don’t take seriously their intelligence and their struggle to communicate and to know.
Only if we speak to and listen to children with respect and integrity can we define literacy activities in broad ways and tie them to children’s desire to communicate. The classroom can then tap the raucous intelligence and the comparing, arguing, and questioning that are normally heard outside school walls.
7
Midwinter Doldrums and Quarrels
Starting Over
A hard week: I was out on Monday, and Thursday and Friday of last week, with a viral infection—and weak all the rest of this week. Children very quarrelsome when I’d returned—Well, she did it first! Emily and Francie the worst. Emily—there’s a thing she does with her elbow, pushing someone else’s arm or hand out of the way of something she wants.
In December, the class had seemed cohesive, stable, and familiar: we’re way beyond the fall; the introductory stuff is over. I knew the children well, had already spent so much time with them that I seemed to hear them at night: I’ll hear a hum of a voice, the tone, rhythm, recognizable—but won’t know right away who it is. Sometimes I’ll figure it out. It’s often just there, a kind of auditory wallpaper. Their strengths, weaknesses, choices of activities and companions: I feel as if I know them—am not likely to be very surprised. Vanessa’s friendships—the way she floats from friend to friend.
December marked off the first part of the year: it is winter next week, the shortest, darkest day—it has gotten significantly colder. It seems a point of balance. But between what and what? We are at the end of K-104, Part I. What strikes me is how happy they are—at least, a good enough amount of time. The kids who were more watchful and wary for a long time—now, they say, “Can I . . .” and when I nod, they skip off. In the weeks before the Christmas vacation, the children had worked with a fury, and I had too, putting together the gifts they’d made to take home. They’d made photo books of their lives in school, chosen three photos of themselves at work from the photos that
David had taken, and dictated text for each page, which I printed up. They’d decorated the pages with watercolors or Cray-Pas. For the cover, we used self-portraits they’d made earlier in the year. David had bound the pages, and the children made wrapping paper by printing on tissue paper. But after the Christmas break, everything changed. David, a sturdy, caring presence, was gone, his internship over. The study of squirrels that had absorbed us for months—finished: I have taken down the squirrel charts—told the kids, OK, our study of squirrels is over. We learned a lot, but . . . enough squirrels. It was January, the weather was cold, I got sick, the children got sick. Worse, Arshea, the assistant teacher, had to stop working because of her pregnancy. We had a new assistant and new student teacher. Everyone would eventually adjust, but at the moment, it felt as if nothing was the same.
Yet if time and change played roles in the drama of classroom life, at times they seemed invisible. Perhaps I was too close: I’m at the center of this whirlwind—“Julie! Julie!”—I can’t see because everything is moving so fast around me. All I noticed were the consequences: Things feel too loose. What’s nagging at me? Is it the time of year? Midwinter doldrums? The blank walls? I have the feeling the central theme of our class isn’t there, that we’re pursuing activity in a mindless, unfocused way . . . it’s not clear what’s central. I experienced this time as a frayedness, the feeling that the routines that had organized our days and weeks were coming undone: I’ve been forgetting this and that, forgetting to have kids read the story on Wednesdays. The end of the day is when everything catches up with me. We start running late, and I have no energy to stop and set things right. It’s a judgment on the rest of the day. I see things being done wrong, routines I think I’ve taught, and I feel at a loss—mad at the kid who made me feel at a loss, mad at myself for getting mad at the kid.
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning Page 14