Kevin Glynn writes here about a fad that is unusually absurd:
“Each day, my son enters school with a smile. My hope is that he returns home in the same great spirits. I am afraid with endless quest for data, this simple hope is too much to ask.
“In addition to the countless other assessments my second grade son is asked to take, the latest really has me scratching my head. Each student (K and up) is being asked to “on demand” write for 45 minutes on a genre that has not been taught. Imagine 5 , 6 and 7 year olds being asked to start every writing unit demonstrating something they have never been taught? Then, these students will spend a month or more working in that genre. They will use the writing process to develop and publish amazing pieces of writing and each unit will culminate in a Writing Celebration. The celebration ends when they are asked the very next day to write another “on-demand” piece to demonstrate their growth in this genre. I find this practice to be redundant and unnecessary. The issue is further complicated on the following day when the cycle resets and they are asked to write another “on demand” piece without receiving a single day of instruction in the next genre…
“I do not see the value in adding beginning and end of unit “on-demand” pieces when our writing workshops are already structured to show student growth. A challenging part of teaching writing is getting students to love it and I fear that adding these many on-demand writing assignments will stymie that love for my son and his second grade friends.”
Now, it is true that someday your boss may call you in and ask you to write a memo on demand. But I doubt that anyone will ever have the same request from a college professor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How to kill love of learning, too!
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to give them 45 minutes a day to read a book they know nothing about and then share it in a discussion in class? And it would have to be a real book, no devices or iPads!
a book of their choosing
For at least the lower grades (K-2, anyway), wouldn’t it make more sense to give them 45 minutes a day (and even more in kindergarten) to play and learn by playing?
The way many of these schools are going amounts to child abuse.
Have none of the people who come up with these requirements ever studied child development? Or child psychology? Or education?
Give me a break!
Absolutely! Why not combine our proposals? Each day with 45 minutes of free reading and 45 minutes of play. When I was in 5th grade oh so long ago in a great California public school, my class had one period a day of free reading. We could select out of a huge assortment of books. And I’m pretty sure we had at least two 15 minute recess breaks plus extra time at lunch. I think that was the year I peaked.
With one caveat, GregB. I don’t think that, nor would I expect that, all kindergartners would be able to read. Therefore, I would have the teachers read to them. Asking them questions afterwards, and getting their responses, of course.
In my brief experience teaching primary grades, I learned that 45 minutes of anything structured is too long. Their curiosity shuts down and turns to frustration. My lessons back then were 5 minutes, 10 minutes… maybe 20 tops.
I’m not talking about “structured play,” LCT, I’m taking about free play.
Zorba,
I meant to agree with you. You are correct. Sorry, it didn’t come out right. 45 minutes of sustained writing is ridiculous, especially in primary grades. Children learn from freedom. Bright side: many of my 8th graders have come to my class this year somehow already knowing about the unstructured education delivery in Finland.
Wow, LCT! Good for your 8th graders! Lucky them, and I’m sure you will continue doing the right thing by them this year.
Damn the reformy torpedoes. Full steam ahead!
Greg B, >sigh<, your memory of 5th gr reminds me of my 5thgr in a rural NYS school. We too had 15mins outdoor play twice (am & pm) plus 30+mins after lunch. Our teacher read to us 30mins/day from continuing stories (I remember Toby Tyler, & Kipling’s jungle stories). There were at least 60ft of shelved books we could sign out & read– & not just at home. Since 5th & 6th were in the same classroom, there were regular silent times when she was working with the other grade. You could do h.w. or finish class assnts — or just read.
One thing that struck me about the autobiography of John Stuart Mill is how little writing he did before age 16. What he did do is listen to his erudite and didactic dad on long walks, and he read a lot. At times his dad would ask him to write synopses of what he’d read. And, after reading tons of histories, he spontaneously attempted to write his own history. That’s it. No early treatise, autobiography or essay writing –yet those are genres he would end up mastering.
American schools have been obsessed with writing for decades –with nothing to show for it. We misunderstand what writing ability is. It’s not a skill like throwing a football that gets perfect with mere practice and a few tips. It’s the culmination of a long career of broad-based, knowledge rich education. A great writing education might entail almost no writing for the first 12 years. At this stage kids need to hear and see (in texts) language well used. This gives them vocabulary, grammar and syntax –and mental templates of the various genres. They also need units of study that teach them about the things of the world. This gives them the ability to say intelligent things about topics beyond their immediate experience. Only once these foundations are established can good writing about a wide-variety of topics occur. At this point writing workshops like the one Glynn describes might be fruitful –as fine-tuning for this core writing capacity that’s been achieved indirectly through a long period of imbibing the language and world-knowledge. But doing it earlier is putting the cart before the horse.
“American schools have been obsessed with writing for decades –with nothing to show for it.”
On what basis do you make that statement? I am not aware of any research supporting that claim. As a matter of fact, my anecdotal information says exactly the opposite depending on your understanding of how writing should be “taught.”
We’re not talking about “good” writing, just writing–playing with ideas and words, writing fantastical stories, collecting fascinating facts. To think that you cannot write until adolescence and then miraculously become a good writer is silly. Kids like to write when there isn’t someone standing over their shoulder making sure that they spell everything correctly, etc. Kids like to write when they are allowed to express themselves in ways appropriate to their age. As becoming a skilled reader takes practice (and I favor lots of free reading) so good writers have done a lot of writing. I can think of no good reason why that practice should be delayed until adolescence.
One of my sons had a freshman English teacher who told them early on that he could see they had all mastered the five paragraph essay. Lest they think they had mastered all there was to know about conveying ideas in writing, he was going to take them well beyond that middle school ritual. Whether the 5 paragraph format was a useful stepping stone for him, I don’t know, but I can’t quite imagine how he could take them beyond it if they had never had the experience initially. It had served them well during middle school as had their experimentation with poetry and narrative writing.
School always seemed to be a spiral to me. From the most basic of imitative, imaginary play, each year added to our understanding at a more sophisticated level. I never minded (much) revisiting previous topics because I soon saw how much more there was to explore. My kids were lucky to have writing incorporated into that exploration from an early age in an age appropriate manner.
Well, at least the know-nothings who sold this program to the district are celebrating.
“Dollars on demand” is probably a much more accurate description for the program.
How about on demand writing about how stupid on demand writing is?
“Poetry on Demand”
Verses on demand
To twist the poet’s hand
And bury her in sand
This “on demand” is grand
Bill Gates demands data! You have to give a ‘pretest’ writing assignment to establish a baseline of data. Then, you give a ‘post test’ writing assignment, take the two data sets and use an algorithm to establish a writing ‘trajectory’. Nevermind the fact that human learning doesn’t happen on a linear trajectory. It doesn’t matter. Data! It’s how you teach a robot to write.
I think we should send Bill on a trajectory — out past Pluto.
Maybe he would even finance it.
Bill Gates has never studied child development or education.
And the interesting thing is that his kids go to an expensive and exclusive private school, which does not do this type of “data driven” so-called “education.”
Hey, Bill and Melinda, if it’s good for most kids, why isn’t it good enough for your kids?
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander and all that.
Unfortunately, many education and child development experts also cannot differentiate between human beings and microchips. Low hanging fruit for Bill.
“Nevermind the fact that human learning doesn’t happen on a linear trajectory.”
Exactly! And they want to come up with standardized trajectories for every frickin’ topic/task/skill. Little Johnny must learn this material in this way within this time frame. That used to be one of the nice things about being a special education teacher. For most of my career, no one expected my students to march lockstep through a curriculum according to some master plan .
The image in Glynn’s post is unreadable when enlarged (in blog comments he explains it’s from Lucy Calkins’ ‘Writing Pathways’)– but I found it easily by googling “On-Demand Performance Assessment Prompt”. The inappropriateness to K-2 is stunning. IMHO as a Mom not a writing teacher this looks inappropriate any time before 7th grade.
What happened to Lucy Calkins? In the early days, she never would have written this rubbish.
It’s inappropriate for every grade level, and now that I’ve thought about it, it’s been part of the commercialism movement called reform for a very long time. Seems to me Bill Gates has been paying the UCLA Writing Project to foist this “on demand” junk on LAUSD for years. Literature is dying, and it’s not just because of Amazon and Google; it’s because of bad teacher education programs taking Gates money.
No, LCT, literature is not dying! Wonderful new novels and poetry every yr! But maybe you meant it’s dying w/n the pubsch sys…. which of course could mean we are producing fewer readers of lit every yr… which does not bode well for the future of Amer Lit…
Yes, read that part of my comment in the future tense, please.
My husband is an elementary youth soccer coach. He asked his teams two weeks into the new year “How’s school?” Nearly every kid yelled out “Boring!!” and one even said to the others “it’s SUPPOSED to be boring!” Our school is nearly always “ranked” at or near the top of every public school list. Clearly we have a lot of work to do to truly engage our young learners. It is really, really sad that in this day and age with all the research and all that we know about how children best learn, it is being ignored. What we need to ignore are the endless mandates and high-stakes standardized tests that are destroying curiosity and severing connections. I had one young 4th grader sit down next to me last night in the midst of a backyard S’mores party and say “Wait, is tomorrow Sunday? Because I hate Sundays since Monday is the next day and that means schools.” What?!? This kid was in the middle of a party with 12 of his buddies, running around the yard and roasting marshmallows and he was worried about the next day because it is THE DAY BEFORE school starts again. What in the world are we doing to these kids?
This is what I see happening too. Teach juicy facts and stories about the world, and the skills will follow. Let’s drop this dry Common Core skills stuff.
These data-driven programs try to teach a student’s hand to do the writing. Schools should be developing the students’ minds and then the writing will pour forth.
Exactly.
Reading, writing and thinking all support each other in growth and development. A comprehensive education will provide the foundation for all three to grow.
This is the classic assessment thing to prove teachers are doing their jobs. My daughter did a comic strip on it and shared it with her school. She was told to stop because it was not respectful. We have the first three.
Oy! Encourage your daughter, she is spot on!
Your daughter is very talented.
I agree with Zorba.
Encourage her.
But how can you be a good teacher without data? So you give a pre-test to prove that what the kid does on the post-test was your doing. You would not believe how much time we waste giving these silly “measurements” of student learning. (Here Duane’s head pops off, if you are familiar with this blog).
I was asked to give a pre-test in Geometry some years ago. This was a directive from a central office from a central office suggested by a professor who was getting money for the use of his data driven idea. I posed a serious question: why should a student who had never experienced geometry be knowing enough about it for a test to have meaning? That was met by one of those I can’t really answer you but I wish you would keep so and so off my back type of answers.
Test, test test.
Harharhar! Pls encourage yr dghtr to continue in some venue where like-minded can contribute. This is a great safety-valve.
NB: reminds me a lot of when my husb & I were first dating. We worked in the same engrg/constr corp in Reagan ’80’s when MBO data-driven proj-mgt was on the rise. We both were graphically talented & exchanged a whole lotta cartoons about counting jellybeans 😉
When my son was in first grade five years ago, they were expected to write a paragraph on a given prompt every other day. Never mind that most of the boys lacked the fine motor skills to form letters quickly and accurately If the work was not done, they were told by the teacher, they could not go to recess. Such a horrible, and inaccurate, threat from the teacher. One day the prompt was “tell me how you do your hair in the morning” for six year old boys! I flipped. He gets up and does nothing because he has a buzz cut! Flash forward and my kid reads at high school level and would rather have his teeth drilled than write. She won the battle but lost the war.
Unfortunately, this assignment is not just a fad. It is well entrenched and embedded in the Common Core and teachers who use the program are likely to be evaluated by Charlotte Danielson’s rubrics.
The assignment for sustained writing is pushed into thousands of classrooms courtesy of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and the work of a British teacher, Lucy Calkins, who founded the Reading and Writing Project.
According to the website, this approach to teaching writing, and a companion approach for teaching reading, has been taken up as a moral imperative.
Yes. What?
“Since its inception, the Project has aimed to hold tight to the moral imperative to accelerate students’ development as readers and writers, and to help schools maintain a laser-like focus on improving teaching and learning.”
The Program has a longstanding history of being aligned with standard-based instruction. The website says:
“The Project has played a central role in the roll out of both the first iteration of standards (Calkins was part of the committee authoring the New Standards and keynoted the conference at which they were rolled out) and in the roll out of the Common Core State Standards (Pathways to the Common Core, written by Calkins, Ehrenworth, and Lehman in 2012 has been heralded as a seminal text on the implementation of the CCSS).”
Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement comes with a study guide for teachers who need coaching on “close reading” of the Common Core standards, and extensive coaching on how to comply with them.
Here is an example of the checklist for scoring student efforts in narrative writing from pre-kindergarten through Grade 2. Samples of the Narrative writing by students can be found on the website.
https://www.rubicon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/NarrativeWritingRubricCalkins.pdf.
I don’t know if there was another moral imperative driving the project, but In 2103, Teachers College Reading and Writing Project entered into a collaboration with Charlotte Danielson, author of the Danielson Framework for Teaching, evidently in the pursuit of “Best Literacy Practice.”
For readers who may bot know about it, the Danielson Framework for Teaching (FFT) is a rating scheme that is widely used to persuade teachers that they should pursue a “highly effective” rating. If you fall short of meeting Danielson’s view of highly effective teaching you may be merely “effective,” or “developing,” or simply “ineffective.”
This scheme for observing and judging teachers is structured around various “domains” of interest and rubrics that function as Danielson’s criteria for rating teachers. Here is a 2013 example, for one domain” Classroom Environment” with 36 criteria for effective teaching. http://connect.readingandwritingproject.org/file/download?google_drive_document_id=0B3yKjAsMtuECZFV3ZldMbDJtZXc
In October 2013, Charlotte Danielson received a grant for $3 million dollars from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust “to establish a rigorous research project to modify and align the Framework for Teaching with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
In the same year I asked Danielson if she had research to affirm the validity and reliability of the Framework for Teaching, and specifically for every grade-level and every subject where it was being used to rate teachers. Her extended answer, via email, amounted to a “no.” I have checked back more than once to see if there is supporting research. All I found was more publicity, based on the (flawed) use of the FFT is the deeply flawed $64 million Gates-funded “Measures of Effective Teaching” study, designed by economists.
The point of this post is to say that the teachers who are forcing this absurd scheme for teaching writing need to activate their own moral and professional imperative, not to kill a love of learning, especially reading and writing but following stupid and arbitrary rules and ridiculous standards.
Fascinating. Tragic. And, of course, maddening, Laura.
The bozos who just ran Equifax into the ground were rated as “distinguished” when it comes to their pay. (NY TImes today https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/business/equifax-executive-pay.html?mcubz=3)
Meanwhile, children and their teachers across the nation face ridiculous demands just to be rated “effective”.
But, you know, what struck me was the phrase, writing “on demand”. So, I just sat here and Googled the phrase “on demand” pushing the letters of the alphabet after it….a, b, c, etc….
ON DEMAND… delivery, hot water heaters, TV, jobs in Uber, publishing and something. called on demand assessment which sounds like it has to do with job applications.
When did “demanding” people to do things become such a part of our culture? Well, at least for citizens on the lower end of the pay scale. Another interesting article in today’s Times touches on that issue, I think: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/business/economy/bump-in-us-incomes-doesnt-erase-50-years-of-pain.html?mcubz=3
Really, It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon to lounge on the hammock and read the papers. Not at all demanding, I might say. Finally, I could think.
“Life on Demand!”
Life is a movie
On Demand!
Life isn’t groovy
On Demand!
Life is for writing
On Demand!
Isn’t for kiting
On Demand!
Life is for testing
On Demand!
Not for the zest thing
On Demand!
I also looked at the on demand…key word. Teachers are treating an absurd scheme as if it is a mandate. TC is marketing this as if “best practice.” it is not,
And overlooked my error in the last line of my post where “but” should be “by”
The empresses, Calkins and Danielson, have no clothes. They just pulled their ideas out of thin air and dubbed them “best practices”. It’s a scandal than no one is calling their bluff. I’m sad that so many of my fellow teachers are so easily bamboozled by fancy-pants language and fat binders of convoluted lessons. Schools want clear-cut programs and in that the empresses deliver. But the stuff is neatly packaged junk.
Good GAWD!
Don’t people GET that: LEARNING IS MESSY?
Laura,
It will be helpful to know the source of this nonsense. Thank you for feeding my brain. I have a spine, but that’s not enough.
The word rubric has been used to legitimize more than one silly idea.
OK I’m just an enrichment ‘special’ to various regional PreK’s (Span lang 1/2-hr wkly) so that means I don’t get to see what the kids are actually doing all day, but over 16 yrs I’ve certainly gotten the gist:
since 2008 or so, outdoor recess & indoor unstructured playtime curtailed, hands-on stuff like water & sand tables gone, mini-kitchens/ tool-workshops smaller & moved to back, toys-babydolls/ puzzles/ games slashed by half & stowed in ultra-organized shelves, sit-down rug area smaller– all to make room for lots of long tables with chairs, [or round-table “learning-centers” w/chairs] for lots of seat-time w/ pencil & paper… & I’m talking 2-1/2 to 5-y.o.’s!
Oh, and did I forget to mention? In about 1/3 of these places [sadly, the ones where directors cave to parent preferences] , a row of laptops against the wall for age 4 & up, w/canned video curriculum taking away from storytelling/ play/ recess etc.
The early-childhood writing rubrics you linked make me want to cry. A very far cry from the relevant sections of the excellent ’90’s NJ ‘Preschool Stds & Expectations’ which were written by a panel of early-childhood specialists & teachers– all gone now, overwritten/ expanded rubric-style in a trickled-down version of CCSS. No room at all for creative development. Devised, sadly, for a cohort of underpaid, under-educated, hrly-no-benefits-pd teacher/aides who used to fly by the seat of their pants/ instict, but did a darned good job when guided by a gifted director (a dying breed, replaced by bean-counters)– folks who are more comfortable w/a check-off list & a [false] sense of security that if they follow the written rules they will keep their jobs.
Sounds like a hideous “approach” that is sadly not at all new. Sounds like the balanced literacy “writer’s workshop” crappola which is age inappropriate as well. In some school settings, this may work. But the school settings where I have worked, this approach is incoherent for most of the students still grappling with learning the language and needing to learn language basics including grammar and spelling. A good teacher would naturally use this kind of approach at certain points but would make the determination as to how, if and when. Sadly, when a school district “buys into” (literally and figuratively) one approach as in the balanced literacy approach… it is often required to be followed in a cookie cutter boiler plate fashion as the writer of this article describes!
aggggggh!
appalling!
Right now Kevin Glynn, I am ready to vomit. This ruins how kids may even have one notion to write. This program must be one more of David Coleman’s “I don’t give a damn what you think, just write” methods classes. Seriously I think of all the ways I have encouraged kids to write, but never this way. How about coming together as a whole group for some shout outs as to what the group knows about a particular theme or subject? Have these people ever heard about pre-writing, brainstorming, graphic organizers, etc.? How about drawing before writing? It is so sad that many may have never taught by the great teachers of writing, Nanci Atwell, Ralph Fletcher, or Barry Lane, to name only a few.Writing is such a powerful tool and I worry we are losing it because of all the fast writing we are doing. LOL, IDK and more have kids and even adults forgetting that writing is such a powerful tool for communication. I have even let kids use recorders to record their voices and then write with words.I truly believe Common Core and all of its regurgitation has made children lose their identity with writing. We must bring writing back into our schools. Not just writing on the computer…that is not enough. But writing in meaningful ways. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, plays…you name it. Then most of all, share it with others! I miss it!
We will have to fight back against the cheap machine-scored assessments to make that happen– which means fighting for a bigger % of GDP for education.
What are writing-instruction rubrics, if not a way to not-teach writing in service of assessments of not-writing via computer-administered & scored testing of “writing” [ = demonstration of computer-testable writing “skills”]?
Back in the ’60’s when I was in pubsch, finals, SAT’s, & SAT special subject-tests for advanced placement all featured human-scored essays/ writing samples. I have to pinch myself to realize that edumetric data-collection has assumed such dominance in today’s version of education that it has nearly wiped skilled written communication– a skill nevertheless decried by the corp job market as crucial & increasingly less available among job-seekers– off the map.
Like.