A Tough Audience:

1. A ToughAudience: Writing Groups That Work With Special Populations

2. Writing Group Names • Peer Groups • Writing Groups • Response Groups • Feedback Groups • Peer Editing Groups (Do not use so students know groups are about revision not editing!) • Reading/Writing Groups • Helping Circle or Writing Circle

3. How I Spent My (Teaching) Life In Jail • Oakton HS • Boys Probation House • Indiana Boys’ Prison • Northwest Mental Health • Reading/Writing Resource for the Interagency Alternative Schools • 45 Interagency Alternative Schools: Court, Mental Health, Alcohol and Drug Rehab, Family Services

4. Setting Up Writing Groups • Get the students writing and feeling flow! • See the following slides on how to do borrow a line poetry. • Utilize the rules of focused freewriting: • Write for three minutes (set timer) • Do not stop writing • Do not worry about grammar and mechanics (at this point) • Have students produce a lot of first draft writing before choosing what to bring to their first writing group

5. Borrow a Line Poetry • Respond to the reading in whatever way comes to mind. What does the piece make you think of? • Write down a line and write from there. NOTE: This is original writing. Do not critique the piece. Use the following poems to create something new!

6. Greyhound Across Oregon, 101 by Oscar Penaranda The sun’s dusk rays spill over the gray sea – clouds like paste thick silver dripping against the powdered sky’s purple secret I’m a long ways from home

7. The City Is So Big by Richard Garcia The city is so big Its bridges quake with fear I know, I have seen at night The lights sliding from house to house And trains pass with windows shining Like a smile full of teeth I have seen machines eating houses And stairways walk all by themselves And elevator doors opening and closing And people disappear

8. BatsBy Mary Effie Lee Newsome I’d really hate to go to bed Just swinging from some wall. But bats, they say, do just that way. I’d not wish to at all. I’d hate to swing down from my toes All upside-down – and try to doze.

9. Keeping Hair By Ramona Wilson My grandmother had braids at the thickest, pencil wide held with bright wool cut from her bed shawl. No teeth left but white hair combed and wet carefully early each morning. The small wild plants found among stones on the windy and brown plateaus revealed their secrets to her hand and yielded to her cooking pots. She made a sweet amber water from willows, boiling the life out to pour onto her old head. “It will keep your hair.” She bathed my head once rain water not sweeter. The thought that once when I was so very young her work-bent hands very gently and smoothly washed my hair in the willows may also keep my heart.

10. Fishbowl Modeling • Model what a poorly run writing group looks like for the class: • Prepare a few students to take on unhelpful roles (ex: off-task, rude, relating too much) • The teacher shares some writing with these students while the rest of the class watches the “fishbowl” noting what is going well and not well • The class discusses the unhelpful behaviors and then discusses what writing group should do and look like to be successful • Repeat the fishbowl using positive roles

11. Teacher Modeling • Use a piece of your own writing that is in rough form. • Post it so that all students can see the writing. • Have students give you feedback on your piece, highlighting how you would change the piece based on their comments. • Be sure to model the behaviors you expect in group and the types of feedback that help writers revise their work.

12. Give Students Specific Questions • Be sure students understand that in order to get good feedback they need to ask good questions about their writing. • Have students practice with the “General Writing Workshop Questions” on the next slide. • After students have success with these questions, teach them how to create their own specific questions during mini-lessons.

13. General Writing Workshop Questions • What possibilities do you see for this writing? • What question(s) do you have? What else would you like to know? • What is your favorite line/part and why? *With a partner, use these questions to receive feedback on your borrow-a-linewriting!

14. What the Experts Say:The Permeable and Dialogic Curriculum “Here’s my belief: You don’t learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.” --Ralph Fletcher, from What at Writer Needs

15. What the Experts Say:The Permeable and Dialogic Curriculum “You know, I never ‘got it’ before. I never understood why teachers made us get in these groups and ask each other for help. Now I get it… my friends know what I am talkin’ about, my friends know. They are the best ones to help with my writing. I just have to know what type of question to ask.” --17 year old male in the mental health facility

16. What the Experts Say:Modeling and Mentoring “I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.” -- Haim Ginott, from Ralph Fletcher’s What a Writer Needs

17. What the Experts Say:Modeling and Mentoring “Dear Kim: You are always carrying that damn book around. I mean, it is at lunch, in community meeting. It’s everywhere. I started wondering what was in that book that was so great that you would want to lug it around. Then you showed us. Now I have a big book to haul around, too. Damn it. I’m a writer. Something I never thought I’d be.” --15 year old boy in the mental health facility in “Letter Quality” assignment

18. What the Experts Say:Writing Groups “Peer response groups cause me the most unease. It’s the clearest indication that I’ve relinquished some control, that I’m trusting teenagers more to give and take what they need. A good part of my unease stems form my excessively high expectations for how peer groups should work. I have too much of that old ideal of teaching left in me: I ran the show, cracked the whip, acted upon the students, ever fearful that they might not be working if I didn’t ride the herd. Even I couldn’t function in the ideal peer response group I have in my head…Most students will risk saying more among their peers than with me. And, of course, the students can learn from each other in this close contact. So I live with my discomfort and let teenagers meet in groups.” -- Tom Romano, from Clearing the Way

19. What the Experts Say:Writing Groups “It’s the best part of class. I love meeting with my group. Even when I don’t agree with what they say, I like to hear what people hear when I read my writing aloud. I like that I am doing what Steven King and all the other great writers do. I was so nervous at first, but now I can’t write without my writing group. I just can’t.” --15 year old girl in a court school

20. Please Contact Me! Kimberly.Sloan@fcps.edu (703) 359-0078 (H) (703) 568-2582 (cell)

21. Disclaimer Reference within this presentation to any specific commercial or non-commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer or otherwise does not constitute or imply an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the Virginia Department of Education.