Dr. John Collins was our afternoon speaker on day four. He’s
the guru of the Collins Writing Program, and spoke to us about writing across
the curriculum. His program advocates four types of writing in all classrooms.
I won’t detail those here, but you can get more information on his web site.
I was so interested to learn about the Yerkes-Dodson Law. Wikipedia
explains it pretty well. This gist is that performance gets better with
increased mental arousal, but there is a point where the arousal is too high
and performance decreases. A good healthy level of stress and difficulty
increases performance, but too much stress and difficulty, and learning will
crash and burn. My business math class at A&M comes to mind…
Here’s a model from the Wiki article:
I’m very interested in
identifying when students are at the top of the curve, and I know it will be at
very different times for different kids. This speaks to appropriate rigor AND
relevance at the same time. I like it.
Collins also stated “We over test
and under quiz.” This left me questioning the role of formative assessment in
our classrooms. Do we “quiz,” formally or informally, enough? I always say that test scores should never
surprise a teacher – the teacher should know who got it and who still has a way
to go before he or she ever grades a test. But is that reflected in our
practice? It’s worth looking at.
He also spoke of the “curse
of knowledge.” In other words, he believes that the longer you’ve taught
something the harder it is to teach it because you lose the ability to
understand why it’s hard. This reminded me of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? I’m actually doing a 45 minute session on
some of the concepts in this book at our district’s You Matter conference this fall, so Dr. Collins’s work may show up
in the presentation as well!
Collins’s writing program
comes with special paper that requires kids to skip lines. The main purpose for
this is so that they can edit without having to recopy the whole thing. I
thought of our students with dysgraphia or other difficulties with handwriting,
and decided this is a great idea! His process also includes specific directions
at the top of each page – called Focus Correction Areas (or FCAs) - that he says work as a contract with the
student, ensuring they know the requirements. I love that he didn’t just say
that kids should write in every subject, but gave the how, both how kids should
write and how teachers should grade.
My favorite tip was a writing
assignment as closure that’s something like, “What would be a great quiz question
over what we covered today?” The teacher picks the best one and uses it. Then (my
favorite part) you put all of the good questions in a jar at the front of the
room and pull them out periodically to spiral back through content. Genius! Another
tip was to take a student’s paper that meets the requirements well and copy it
onto the back of all of the papers when you return them (with the name off, of
course). This allows all students to have a positive “mentor”writing assignment
to review and prepare for next time. Overall, his program seems very user
friendly.
Sidebar: He’ll be in Houston
at a couple of schools in the fall. I’m thinking of calling those schools to
see if we can send a teacher or two who doesn’t teach writing but will
integrate writing into the courses they do teach.
Finally, and not really
related to school, I learned about a column in the New York Times called “The
Ethicist.” Each installment gives a situation with an ethical dilemma. It
seemed like productive fun to look these up and discuss around the dinner
table. And I’d be lying if I didn’t see a great timed writing prompt for high
school kids in there somewhere, too!
No comments:
Post a Comment