Episode 6: Increase opportunities to practice text-dependent writing

Jonathan: Welcome to Literacy Geek Show. We are your host, Jonathan LeMaster.

Lee: And Lee Ramsey,

Jonathan: The goal of Literacy Geek Show is to inspire educators and spark great conversations that help students meet and exceed reading and writing standards.

Lee: join us as we geek out about our journey to revolutionize literacy instruction. we want to get the reps up on our writing practice, right Jonathan?

Jonathan: Yeah, that's exactly right. How do we get kids to write more often and in particular about texts.

Lee: Our focus has been on text-dependent writing and how to make it more accessible

Jonathan: Yeah. I mean, we've got to get them writing more often because there's just more assessments now than ever that require this kind of work and this type of skill. AP exams, state tests, college entrance exams. They're everywhere. And so we need to get our kids more comfortable with writing about sources so that they're successful in various different academic settings, right? And we've talked about in other previous shows, we've talked about close reading. We've talked about how do we purposely select texts. Then on the kid's shoulders, they got to do a lot of close reading. They got to do a lot of analysis. They have to support their ideas with what others say. They have to learn how to introduce what other people say. This is all about writing with sources and, and there's so much to it that we need to increase that practice if we're doing it once or twice a year. It's not enough. And we don't know if kids are being asked to write about sources or with sources and their other content areas. I think so often we put that on the English teacher. Although it's a good place to do that work, we don't know if it's happening in the history or social science classrooms or in the science classrooms, but at the end of the day, kids need to be writing more and they need to be writing about, sources.

Lee: One of the aha moments I think I've had is that you really broke down and looked at, um, some of these assessments and what, what's being asked of the student, it's huge what they have to do.

What I've heard you do is really break down the small pieces of it and make sure you're teaching a little part of that each day or each week or a few times a week.

And I can see how that adds those reps in a small bite sized package that makes it a little easier to teach. I can see how trying to take on one of these once a week or twice a week would be daunting.

Jonathan: We've talked about that a lot. It's a heavy lift. We're looking at 15 to 20 hours for a secondary teacher. So you have to factor in if I'm assigning three essays a month, you just have to use a simple multiplier. So three essays times, times the 140, 150 kids that you have times 15 hours.

20, I mean, it gets really crazy how much time it takes to do this work. And so I used to break down the skills and have kids do even at the sentence level practice and how to introduce sources, how to talk about their sources in their writing, because kids don't also, you know, want to write. Every day, obviously an essay, which we don't want either. Probably multiple times a month is a good pace to learn how to do this work. Well, and to preserve my time, I decided to break down these skills and say, all right, we're not writing a full essay, but we're going to write a little component here.

We're going to do a little bit of work in our notes using sources in our writing and I think that practice helped them tremendously. We've developed some tools that we're going to be talking about in the show today and technology that's really changed that for a classroom teacher.

And now even though the small little practices are great, I think now we have a real viable way of having students practice more authentic process essays and the students get those reps that they desperately need and the teacher can just focus on the teaching and not focus on all the grading because it's just, when you think about it, like the last thing I want to do, is dedicate my night and weekends to grading papers.

Lee: I think it was interesting because when I was explaining my daunting, I was thinking about it from the students standpoint.

Jonathan: Oh, how funny.

Lee: You immediately started talking about the daunting task of grading it, which I thought just kind of super funny how that works. But that is interesting on both sides.

It can be a tough skill to practice. And then it's a tough skill to grade and get that feedback. There's major friction on both sides.

Jonathan: What made your brain go to daunting for the student? Like, what, what's that about? Share a little bit more about that.

Lee: When you get into the nitty gritty of introducing the source and then talking about it in a smart way, I feel like that's difficult work. It's daunting to my brain to have to go down that path, and it seems like doing that quite a bit throughout the week or throughout the month would be a challenging when you have all these other things you're having to do too in the classroom, right?

I guess that's my first thought on it.

Jonathan: I wonder how much to the lack of feedback that students sometimes get just because we're human beings and it's hard for us to turn a paper around quickly, with depth in our comments. I wonder if you know, we've played around with this idea too. Are kids not excited about writing because it's writing?

Are they not, excited sometimes about writing because they know that it's going to go into this hole for a while and it's not going to come back? It is a very interesting question to think about when we're talking about writing practice. I think some of it because kids get like to get feedback.

I think when you can increase the time or at least maybe shorten is a better way of explaining it. Shorten the amount of time between turning in and receiving feedback. That might be more motivating for our kids. I think you're right. I mean, writing is the hardest thing to do in school because it requires so much thinking. And it is really a great way to assess what students know. It's a great way to assess their ability to think through a problem. It's the best way, really, but it's also very challenging, right, to get kids to, um, to express themselves in writing when they don't do it very often. I mean, it's kind of like this, what leads to what, you know,

Lee: it's true. Yeah. What is it? There's something because I love doing math problems. I would do them over and over again but after the math problem was done, I was able to check and see if I got it right. I was able to practice over and over again, but it was that immediate feedback that I was getting.

That helped me make sure I was on the right path. And it was started, I could kind of run that over and over again. And that, didn't exist much with writing. It's daunting for the teacher to get that feedback back to that student.

Jonathan: There's a type of writing that we have in the English classroom called literary analysis. And what that means is they're looking at a story, short story, a novel or a poem, and the students are analyzing the language or analyzing the techniques.

Oftentimes the same and they are writing about that. So they're pulling source material from a story and they are talking about it. They're saying the author does this. The author tries this and the impact is this. The effect is this. And I would say that although the students are using sources here, it's not the same as writing an informational text or argument using primary and secondary sources. So I want everyone who's listening to the show to be clear that there are different expectations. The task is very different. The skills are very different when you ask students to use a source and then to support something you're saying, and you're not analyzing the language of that source. So in poetry, I might analyze a metaphor and talk about the impact or significance of that versus using a source to either establish my credibility as a writer. Seeing if it's even credible because, you know, we give the kids the fiction. We never asked them, is this credible? Should you use this? It's like, no, you're going to read this and you're going to use this.

Is this a credible source for my argument that I'm making? Why am I using this source? We've talked about this before. Why am I using this source? What's my purpose of it? How am I going to use it rhetorically? What rhetorical choices do I have with this particular source? I mean, it's just such a different way of thinking about it. And when I teach, I teach literary analysis and I teach text dependent writing, and I actually teach them different. I mean, they don't even exist on the same plane for me because they're just extremely different in what the kids are expected to do, how they're expected to think and how they're expected to use sources. So you might have an English teacher, which is great. You know, I'm, we're going to do three lit analysis essays, and we're going to do one text dependent paper using informational text. To me, I would say they only got one practice in that informational text piece, that text dependent. Those other three, uh, analysis pieces are great, but they really kind of exist in this, unique space in the English classroom. And college kids don't write those kinds of papers at all unless they're in an English class or they're an English major or they want to be an English major. Otherwise, they're not doing lit analysis anywhere else. And I think it's really important for a school and individual teachers to really recognize that, the lit analysis paper, although has value and it's in our standards,it's not the kind of text dependent writing that the universities are looking for. It's not the kind of text dependent writing that the state is going to ask your kids to do when doing their state exams. It's really a small portion of the kind of work, the reading and writing work that they're gonna have to do in college. So it's kind of interesting. I don't know if you remember. It's a while for both of us, but what your experience was going into college when you had to write papers. I know that you were more on the, science, math, and computer sciences. So you probably didn't write as many papers. But we both went to San Diego State University. It's a liberal arts college, which means you got to take a lot of classes, that are kind of on the elective side before you get into your major.

So what was your experience like with that?

Lee: I think you're correct. It was more about writing about a text, kind of like you're talking about, and it wasn't literary analysis. The last time I did literary analysis was In high school, and after that, it didn't do anything there. Writing was challenging for me, as I've said.

And so, I really tried to take as few classes as possible where they were assessing on writing, cause I didn't do as well. Literary analysis just was part of my high school English classroom.

And so when we started 14 years ago, as we've been doing this and common core came around, they started talking, some of this just seemed foreign to me, it didn't make sense. Cause it was my view or understanding is only literary analysis.

You say you teach it completely differently. It makes sense that you kind of need to. You're, attacking it completely differently. It's super interesting and it is \closer to what you're going to find in college and in work.

It was part of my day to day much more than literary analysis is

Jonathan: We, think about the standards and we use them as our guiding light. There's also this change that happens in middle school and high school and that change is they're asking us to spend more time and more attention on nonfiction reading and writing because they know that transition for college and career readiness is nonfiction work. You think about college. You and I are a great example. I took lots of English classes because I'm an English major. But you took

Lee: Yeah

Jonathan: few. And I took, guess how many computer science classes I took?

Zero

Lee: Yeah

Jonathan: Because that's not my degree. So when we talk about college and career readiness, it's really about, can we teach kids how to break down arguments, informational texts, and then use them for some purpose is, is really where we're at with college readiness.

Lee: So in the CCRs, does it call out what percent of fiction and nonfiction you should be teaching per grade or middle school, high school, elementary. Does it give guidelines?

Jonathan: Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's overlooked at times. In middle school, they suggest 60% nonfiction to 40% fiction. So they want that transition. Now there's a big question mark. Remember the CCRs include history and science. Do they mean collectively, is it the science and history classes and the English class that is supposed to equal 60%? I don't know. I definitely know that among all the standards, the large majority of them, when we include science, when we include social studies or social science history, and even English, the large majority of them are about nonfiction texts. There are nine in all of the CCRs that are about fiction. Nine. So it's hard to know, are, when you say 60, 40, or do you mean all the content areas combined, or is it just English? And then when you get into high school, it's 70, 30. So there's even, even more emphasis being placed on the nonfiction reading and writing, and less placed on the fiction. And it's not, you know, it's, we have to be really clear, you know, it's not to attack fiction.

It's not to say that fiction isn't a value. It has tremendous value. But if we're talking about CCRs, we're talking about college and career readiness skills, not what you love, but the skills and the skills in order to be successful in a history class, a geology class, a anthropology class, a sociology class, or a philosophy class. These are all content areas that you're not going to be reading fiction in. And so what are we doing? How do we best prepare kids for that kind of reading? And I'm going to plug this in here too, because I think it's really important. I think teachers in schools see English teachers as kind of like we're the ones who kind of tell everyone how to read and write and what you should be reading and writing. But the highest lexile in all of the content areas is science. That means if science is not spending a lot of time reading, then kids aren't experiencing that level of sophistication and complexity in their texts, right? And I've always said, I've trained for a long time and I've always said this. I don't know if it rubs you the wrong way, but I think it's really germane to this conversation is if we depend on the English teachers to take care of all the reading and the writing, we're going to mess up your kids because we don't give them the highest lexile and we don't necessarily teach kids how to write. In the same ways that a history teacher needs to teach the kids how to write. So, practice shouldn't just be in the English classroom. Practice needs to be in the science classroom. Practice needs to be in the history, social science, and social studies classroom. That kind of practice needs to happen, too. And we're prepared for that. Literacy Geeks is ready for that, right? I think we have the ability to support the core content areas with this type of writing, with histories DBQs and then science with their science articles. We can support this work

Lee: That's exciting. So the ability and some of the features we've recently come up with really allow us to then enable that practice and the instant feedback and it's not so scary for that teacher to do that grading. I can see why you would stay away from that. If we can get rid of that and make it super easy to grade and give personalized feedback.

I think it changes the game and it changes what you practice in the classroom.

Jonathan: Do you remember in LiteracyTA, we built a table that says What students read in, and then we have all these different content areas, and what students write in, and we have all these different content areas, I think we should share that with people who are listening to the show in our Geek Gazette, because, it's one of our most liked pages on LiteracyTA, number one, and number two, it illuminates what we're saying, and it gives people a good idea that there is different types of reading and writing happening in the different content areas, and it looks like the things that we're talking about, and our kids need to be producing, so we talk about rhetorical ways of thinking and knowing, what do scientists read and what do scientists write? What do historians read and what do historians write? And if we keep thinking about reading and writing as like an Englishy thing, it's problematic.

It's problematic because that's not what kids are going to experience when they go to college, the college right in a standard state, you need to be able to read an argument, a nonfictional piece, be able to break that down and be able to use sources in order to support some idea that you have. And I just think it's fascinating. If we've got a history teacher assigning a paper and we've got an English teacher assigning paper and a science teacher assigning a paper, we kind of want to take that, those 60 hours combined work it would take for them to grade all that and say, Hey, let's get all that done in a couple of minutes. And then you guys can continue working on skills with your kids. I mean, how awesome is that?

Lee: Think it's interesting, my mind and my brain starts asking much different questions when you start with who the author is. And I think of anything, I don't know if we can inspire history teachers and science teachers and people outside of English to really, even English teachers to really kind of just take a moment and talk about that because it really does fire up the brain in a much different way.

What are they trying to accomplish? Who are they, this scientist wrote this journal and what were they trying to accomplish? I think that's interesting. And then let's read about what their thoughts are. Never thought about the author. I don't know why.

And I don't know if it's just not part of that process that we were trained in. But it was so important in your college, in the rhetoric department, and it was the center of where you started. I don't know if that little shift can really kind of take you down the path of where the CCRs were trying to point us, right?

And maybe that's just some teachers and people like me are just starting to catch on and we can head down that right path and you know and help these students think about things in a little different manner.

Jonathan: right?

Think about a little different way.

Lee: Let's do a tech advance. All right, here we go.

Jonathan: All right. All

Lee: Out of our 14 years here, working on this ed tech platform. We received the biggest gift from the tech gods and it was called LLMs, Language Learning Models. And this is a whole level up from AI, we'd been talking about AI for a long time. And about a year ago, Oh my gosh, this chat GPT thing could do things we had never even heard of.

And the coolest thing that it did was it was very good at language and it was very good at writing. And it all has to do with how it was trained. And so the training set that was used is, is all the writing on the internet. And then they transcribed all the videos on the internet and then learned on that too.

And so AI became very good at writing, and that is a gift to us in our industry. It now allows us to do things that were never possible. AI had been around, people were figuring out how to do things, but the biggest thing with AI that they cracked was AI needs a huge training set.

So the bigger, the training sets, the smarter it is. And it's kind of like us, right? I mean, we take one class one day, we know something, but if we we take, four years of college, we get a degree. We know quite a bit more and thenyou go into two more years and study. So it's the more hours you put in, the more you learn the more of an expert you are.

Right. And so they're kind of doing the same kind of concept. There’s all of a sudden we now have this amazing tool and for us here at Literacy Geeks and I think all of the reading and writing platforms out there, and you're starting to see different people pop up and try and use it in different ways, and it's fabulous.

We have a huge problem. Really our show today is how do we help improve practice? And I come at it from a student standpoint and say Oh my gosh, That's daunting. And you, one of our biggest problems as a teacher is saying, that's daunting for me to grade.

Right. And so if you can auto grade that and provide feedback immediately, to the student, you, can practice all you want. It just changes the game. And so that's really the essence of this amazing technology that we can use as a tool to help increase writing practice.

I mean, that's the essence of it. And we are so pumped about it. We believe you're just going to start to see it get better and better. And now these different platforms, all these different people out there that are going to be moving it forward. And we're just excited. We're excited to be one of the few companies out there doing it.

We've put a lot of time and energy into honing it and getting it just right. And here at Literacy Geeks, we care about technology and we care about how technology is used. We don't want to use it just because it's cool. And we also want to make sure it's used in the right manner.

Students brains are on and they're thinking and we're moving him in the right direction. They're just not playing games. So there's, definitely our approach to it. And this new tool fits right in. It's exactly kind of what we did on the reading side, and now we can kind of do this on the writing side.

So I know Jonathan was going to show his screen and share a little bit more of the visuals and more of the details about how we use this tool.

Jonathan: I'm so excited about what we were just saying. I think we should do an AI segment. I think AI is one of the hottest topics in education. So we can sit down and brainstorm how we might approach just the AI. I think there's some halfway thoughts about it.

There's some super excited people going into it and might not know what to look out for. And you and I have taken a deep dive for like the last 12 months in this and looked at some of the greatest minds around it. And I think it'd be a great show to have. So let's Let's think about that.

Lee: That's a great idea.

Jonathan: All right, what you're looking at is our assignment library. Now this assignment library is on one of our learning engines. This is Quindew. If you were using Literacy Chops in high school or Comprehension Engine for Elementary School, you would be on those platforms looking at those libraries that are specific for those grade levels. So this is a library of writing tasks and you can see that you'll have the text dependent little marker here. That lets you know that this assignment is for kids that are learning this skill using sources in their writing. And we have, obviously assignments that don't have text dependent tasks. And they're just more open ended, free topics that you can write about. So we're really excited about this growing library because students are going to get more practice when we provide very simple ways for teachers to come into a place to open up a practice, assign it to a class, and go. Let me show you one of my favorite topics is gaming a sport, and I just think this is such an interesting conversation to have with students and to have them be able to write about it. We're talking about video games being part of the Olympics, and I know for many of you who are high school teachers. We already have gaming programs, gaming teams at schools. Lee, I don't know if you knew this or not, but high schools, at least in San Diego and probably across the nation now have gaming teams or clubs. And schools have renovated classrooms for this. And they just play video games and they compete against each other in other schools. It's becoming more and more like a sport.

And, yeah, so this is one of ours in our library. And you can see the source here. So, Is gaming a sport and you have, sometimes arguments on one side or the other, depending on sometimes there's two arguments, but you have the source here for your students and then you have the rubric that will assess their writing. So you have all the pieces you need. You have the prompt, you have the source. And then you have the rubric all right here for you in the library ready to go, which is really great. Now, that's one way to go is you can click on one of these and you can assign it to a class. The other way to go is to click new writing assessment and you can build your own. So if you click on this, a few fields to fill out on the left hand side, and then you can put in your prompt here. You would, uh, if you had a text dependent, you would add a source. If you don't, that's fine. You leave this blank and then you have your rubric and we have a drop down here that you can choose from a dozens and dozens of rubrics that are all aligned to standards. And then you would press save. And now you. Have a writing assignment so you don't have to worry about thinking about the prompt. You don't have to worry about thinking about, when do I have time to create this? It's, it's all created for you right here on our platform. So it's really easy to get more practice.

And we have ways to assign shorter assignments too and what we call those is target skill assignments. So they would be like write a paragraph learning how to introduce sources and you could get those from our library as well. So that's really exciting to be able to have that as an option.

Lee: Yeah. I think we're excited about it. I think we're going to grow our library over the next few months and getting ready for next school year. I think that library is just going to grow more and more and we're just really want to make it easy. Just like we've made it easy for reading practice. We want teachers to be able to come in, grab a practice, assign it.

go. And if they want to, come up with their own, then we love it. Then that's great. Uh, we want to keep that option easy for them as well. So, um, but most important is getting the reps up. Uh, and then that auto grade with personalized feedback is, is the game changer

Jonathan: Game changer.

Lee: changes how you can look at your classroom, right?

You're, you're not. By doing that, you're not overwhelmed. You're not a teacher who's scared to go do that anymore. And you're putting that hard work back on the student and which is exactly where we want to be.

Jonathan: It's going to be less daunting for the kids as we provide that immediate feedback. And it's now there. It's like you've met your math problems. They now know the reward. The reward of doing this hard work right now is that I'm going to get immediate feedback on how to get better at this, which is awesome.

Lee: and I think every time we have taken the bar up, so we remove multiple choice, we make it harder. We don't get pushback. I think students want to be there. They have to be supported. So I guess maybe we need to push when we don't support them. We push them hard without support. It does seem like failure.

But we can push them, right? And you've constantly talked about that. Challenge them. And, and so let's, I think you can challenge them more. We can get them writing more, get them doing harder tasks. Their brain actually likes it. At first it doesn't want to do it. And then it acquiesce and it's like, okay, and then, and then it enjoys it, right?

It's not the craziest thing in the world.

Jonathan: It really is. Yeah, I find that the students are more engaged when you challenge them more, when you treat them as intelligent human beings, when you have high expectations for their behavior and their performance, they rise to the occasion. They want to do that heavy lifting. Most importantly, like you said, the support, which we have built in as well with our assignments, you're going to have a auto proofreader.

That's going to walk them through how to help them get their paper even better than it is when they first turn it in. And then we have graphic organizers that help them. We have an amazing grammar tool that flags issues but doesn't tell them how to fix it. It's not just an immediate fix. Putting it back on the students so they have to figure it out.

What is this issue? You know, what do I need to change? Getting them to think about it and process it. All of that's the support that they need to become better, stronger writers. And that's all included in one. You just go into our library and pick, pick one, pick one of the assignments and you get all of that.

You get the graphic organizer, you get the perforator and it chops and it's just kind of one of those things. It's all those things. The person at the fair telling you it does. It really does, which is amazing. All right. So later this week, we're going to post some of the practical ways we can get you moving on, supporting text-dependent writing. That's going to end up in our Geek Gazette, and you're going to want to check out our previous shows, because these shows have been all about, the different components of text dependent writing. I think this one's going to kind of wrap it up for us in this conversation. We're going to head over to Common Writing Assessments next show. We're going to talk about the power of Common Writing Assessments, why Common Writing Assessments would be a good thing for a school or a district, and how to get that very, very difficult work done in an easy and manageable way. So we're really excited about that. All right, so this is the Literacy Geek show. Visit our website or YouTube channel for more inspiration.

Lee: Thanks for geeking out with us today.

Jonathan: Lee, you were very geeky during the tech segment, I just have to say.

Lee: I was, but you really geeked out quite a bit. I love the geeking out over our writing practice.

Jonathan: Yeah, well, I mean, it's something worthy of geeking out, so.

Lee: It was, you take the award today. I'm proud of you.