66:16 minutes (15.17 MB)
On this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers, we have some of our current and former students on the podcast to talk about the high school-college transition. We are also joined by a couple of National Writing Project teachers who have been involved with the “Framework for Success in Post-secondary Writing” that came out a few months ago. These frameworks include this amazing list that we invite you to explore:

Habits of Mind

The Framework identifies eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing—ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and will support students’ success in a variety of fields and disciplines:

• Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world.
• Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
• Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
• Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
• Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
• Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
• Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
• Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

Our guests on this podcast include:

• Lennie Irvin (who recently completed his PhD), is the Co-Director of the San Antonio Writing Project. In addition to working with the above frameworks, for the past four summers, Lennie has facilitated an open institute, Crossing2College where they’ve been asking:

Every year, we have far too many students like Ian. They aren’t the AP kids (though they might be), and they aren’t the students who fail our classes. They do OK, even sometimes receiving excellent grades in our high school classrooms. But when they get to college, they place into Developmental English classes, or worse (like Ian) they crash and burn and drop out of college. They fall off the bridge between high school and college. This site is devoted to local efforts to help more students graduating from high school place directly into college level writing classes, and importantly—do well in freshman composition. It is meant both as a resource and a professional community of practice dedicated to doing more to prepare our students for college and for helping these students do well once they are in college, for “college readiness” and “student success” in college are really two sides of the same coin.

• Kirsten Jamsen whose affiliations include being the co-director of the Minnesota Writing Project. Kirsten presented on the “Frameworks for Success in Postsecondary Writing” at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting in November, where she discussed the statement’s purpose, and recounted the process of composing it. We’ll ask her do some of that again. We’ll also use some of her questions from that session to guide our discussion on Wednesday evening: “What is your response to the statement? How might you use it to promote effective writing instruction at your school? How could this statement help you design thoughtful professional development?”
  
  
• David Pulling whose students at Louisiana State University, Eunice, have been posting on Voices on the Gulf this year. David is the Director of Continuing Education at LSU Eunice, and will share his insights into what it takes to be a successful college writer as well. David is also an active member of the The National Writing Project of Acadiana.
  

Enjoy!

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59:59 minutes (13.73 MB)

Teachers are learners at heart. We’ve got full time jobs, rooms full of hormonally-driven teens, stacks of papers to grade – yet we still find time to write and to learn ourselves. On this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, we hear from two inspirational teachers, Donovan Hohn and Alice Barr.

Donovan Hohn’s writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The Moby Duck Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2. A former New York City English teacher, he is now the features editor of GQ. He lives in New York with his wife and sons. You may have heard his interview with Terry Gross on NPR on March 29, 2011, where he talked about his experiences writing his first book, Moby Duck.

Alice Barr, our colleague at Seedlings, is the Instructional Technology Coordinator at Yarmouth High School, Yarmouth, Maine, a Google Certified Teacher and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Maine. She mentors faculty and students on 1:1 laptop integration and is network administrator and webmaster. People ask her all the time what’s available this summer and she wanted to share her own upcoming courses so she launched and twittered a Summer 2011 PD Opportunities page that has already become an amazing shared resource as we begin to think about upcoming opportunities to learn something new or share what we have learned. Add your plans at http://alicebarr.blogspot.com/p/summer-2011-professional-development.html

Enjoy this conversation!

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59:35 minutes (13.64 MB)

Before the Thanksgiving turkey there was…

• “Digital Is…” Conference
• National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting
• National Council Teachers of English Conference

After coming home from these conferences in Philadelphia, we invited a few friends from a recent show —

TTT #175 - Looking Forward to the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting with 3 Presenters - 11.04.09

— to join us again, this time to reflect on the workshops, presentations, meetings, and conversations in the hallway that might still have been fresh in their memories. We wanted to find out what they had learned at the NWP's Annual Meeting this year, and what they were planning to do with all of the connections and ideas they had brought home with them.

This podcast, co-sponsored by the New York City Writing Project and the NWP Technology Liaisons Network, featured:

• Robert Rivera-Amezola, Philadelphia Writing Project http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/nwp_amsession/1584
• Joe Conroy, NWP at Rutgers University Writing Project  http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/nwp_amsession/1607
• Chuck Jurich, High Desert Writing Project (New Mexico)  http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/nwp_amsession/1608
• Paul Oh, the coordinator of the technology liaison program for the National Writing Project http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/nwp_au/1102
• Seth Mitchell, Maine Writing Project, http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/nwp_amsession/1582

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56:55 minutes (18.11 MB)

On this podcast, our guest host, Kevin Hodgson helped to wrap up the third episode of a Teachers Teaching Teachers 3-part series that centerd on the book Kevin helped to edit (and contributed a chapter to) called Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom.

On June 10, TTT hosts Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim interviewed the editors about the project, which looks at changes in the writing classroom through the lens of technology and assessment. (listen to the podcast of that show over at TTT#155). In the second show in this series, on June 17, TTT156, Paul turned the host reins over to Kevin as he chatted with some of the chapter writers about the concept of collaboration in the technology-infused classroom.

In this podcast, as Kevin once again graciously agreed to host the show, we looked at the concept of audience and technology is opening up new doors for publication and expanding audiences and what that does to writing in the classroom.

Chapter authors Dawn Reed, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Red Cedar Writing Project; Troy Hicks, associate Professor and director of the Chippewa Writing Project; and Bryan Crandall, high school teacher and a teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project, shared examples of their classroom practices to prompt a discussion about audience in writing using digital technology. The topics they discussed included high school students using multimodal ways of writing in a speech class and an example of what happens when you take the senior project “digital.”  In addition, Marva Solomon joined us to talk about her work with a small group of struggling elementary school writers. The title of her chapter is “True adventures of Students “Writing Online: Mummies, Vampires and schnauzers, Oh My!”

Please enjoy the podcast, and add a comment with your story about how writing is changing in your classroom.

This podcast is the third of three Teachers Teaching Teachers shows in June that focused on this book. On TTT#155 (June 10) we had the editors of the book. Next for TTT#156 (June 17), we had authors from the different chapters of Teaching the New Writing on the show.

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50:05 minutes (15.79 MB)

Got a video project? Wish you did? Want to provide a platform for your students’ videos?

Listen to this podcast to learn about an exciting opportunity for your students to make videos that address the Obama Administration.

David Cole from the Pearson Foundation and Paul Oh from the National Writing Project joined us on this episode on Teachers Teaching Teachers. We invited them to talk about the latest iteration of the Letters to the Next President project that involves video.

A National Writing Project teacher, Chris Sloan, who had already registered for the project, joined as well to talk about his purposes and motivations for involving his students in the project. Ron Link, a video teacher from the Bronx added

On this podcast you'll learn more about -- then you'll probably want to sign up for:

Letters to the Next President: The Video Campaign Encourages Teen Filmmakers to Address Obama Administration - National Writing Project

Letters to the Next President: The Video Campaign, sponsored by the Pearson Foundation and the National Writing Project (NWP), encourages filmmakers ages 13–18, with the support of their teachers, to voice their points of view by creating and sharing digital videos about the issues they want President Obama and his new administration to address.

The video campaign extends the popular Letters to the Next President letter-writing campaign launched in 2008 by NWP and Google Docs, which engaged over 6,500 high school and middle school students across the United States, as well as the hundreds of teachers and mentors who guided them. Students identified topics that reflected their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and with the help of Google Docs published their work online for their peers, parents, and the public on the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website: www.letters2president.org.

The new initiative is open to all young people whose teachers register their class to participate. The deadline for registration is March 27, 2009. Full registration and publication guidelines can be found at www.digitalartsalliance.org. In early April, participating teachers will be able to upload their students’ videos and publish them for the global community. The complete collection of student work will be posted at www.digitalartsalliance.org and www.letters2president.org.

 

Enjoy the pocast, and sign up this week!

 

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