This question most directly relates to how I teach my Sports Writing elective, a class that every year presents extreme classroom management challenges due to its appeal to, and high concentration of, "reluctant readers and writers" (a bit of a euphemism on my part), as well as the perceived appeal it presents to guidance counselors looking for places to put "reluctant readers and writers."
Somewhere along the line, I got this theory of "miles on the page" in my head, referring to the idea that, simply put, the more students read and the more students write, the better they will get at reading and writing.
And in order to make as much room as possible for students to read and write, assuming the tough ones, at least, will do little to no reading and writing outside of class or school, I as the teacher needed to clear as much space as possible for them to do this. This has resulted in a routine structure that includes little to no lectures or direct instruction, and in which, on one day, students do SSR reading from recent Sports Illustrated articles on topics they choose, for 20 minutes, followed by a generic set of reading response activities, and on another day, students write their own sports article, on a topic of their choosing, and are graded purely on their word count at the end of class. Rinse and repeat.
Easy to plan for me, and gets the students doing reading and writing as much as possible. Under this system, Sports Writing students (some of whom are "extremely reluctant") have on average (I have data to support these numbers) spent 500 minutes reading high interest nonfiction and have written 5,000 words of expository writing. That sounds really good to me.
I figure, there's no way a person could spend 500 minutes reading and not be a better reader, right?And there's no way a person could write 5,000 words and not be a better writer, right?
Then I listened to a bunch of interviews with athletes, Tom Brady most recently, but also a host of professional basketball players, who insist that if they are practicing something wrong, that if they have "bad form", that the more they keep doing it, they are actually getting worse, not better. Which also makes total sense to me.
So does this analogy apply to reading and writing? If a student writes 5,000 words poorly or without a lot of guidance and correction, is that better than writing significantly less (say, 1,000 words, but with a lot of teacher talk and rules and corrections and feedback and down time and chatter included that reduces their total "miles on the page"?
How much credence (I put a lot) do you put into that theory of "miles on the page"? Your thoughts?
I guess my question for you, Chris, is whether you've seen improvement in their writing?
ReplyDeleteAnd I guess my limited answer to your question is that "miles on the page" are necessary, but not sufficient.
I do buy the Tom Brady analogy. I see it in my son's piano practice... he practices 20 minutes per day, but if he keeps practicing the wrong notes over and over, the music definitely doesn't get better! Unless I step in to make him fix it (or he stops and fixes it himself, which he is doing more and more as he gets better at self-correcting). Sometimes he doesn't know he's doing it wrong, so I have to point it out to him. And then he has to practice it RIGHT more times than he's practiced it WRONG in order to overcome the bad practice. Sometimes he doesn't know how to fix it, so I have to demonstrate for him or teach him how to count out a tricky rhythm or manage a trill or adjust his fingering.
I assume that as your students are writing, you're stepping in to guide them in the same way. And perhaps if you see a pattern in multiple students, you provide a mini-lesson on a skill or strategy that will help multiple students. If you're doing this, then you're already providing MORE than just "miles on the page."
That's a brilliantly simple question. The truth is, I'm not so sure I have.
DeleteIn terms of improvement in reading comprehension through increased reading "miles on the page," and since I don't measure this in the class, I always assumed that the magical growth in ability would show up in future standardized test scores. Students would do better at MCAS, say, because of the amount of structured time spent reading in my class. Yet I don't have any data or evidence to support this.
In terms of writing, I have plenty of places to look for evidence: the 20 or so articles (less this year) that students are assigned to produce. I would say, again without careful analysis, that the quality of those writing pieces remained on a plateau, though the data would probably reveal a general trend that the timed writing pieces did get longer as the year wore on (showing increased ability to focus, or to have taken notes beforehand, or to write under pressure of a timed deadline). Yet the tangible improvement (in form, in understanding of the genre, in mechanics, in topic and idea development) is not necessarily there.
Which answers the question that "miles on the page" is not sufficient. Of course, I know that that is really the answer. That's why I don't teach all my other classes in the same fashion.
Yet it always seemed to me the most "bang for the buck" with this group due to its classroom management challenges and the logistical limits in prepping the course along so many other preps.
The more I think deeply about this, the more I intend to tweak and revise. Mike Fineran had great suggestions about providing templates, and matching the genre of the reading on reading days more directly to the type of writing students are best suited to produce (that is, game recap stories) by using short game recap stories from Boston.com in addition to or in place of longer feature stories from SI.
And finally, I know that I am doing a little more than just "miles on the page" in intangible ways and unscripted teaching moments. But not enough, yet.