Important Takeaways from 3 Books About Incorporating Social Justice Practices into Teaching Writing
If you are a teacher who wants to integrate more social justice practices in your English classroom, the three books discussed in this blog post are must-reads. But, maybe you are thinking you don’t have the time to read these books. I get it and I’ve got you covered with Equity and Social Justice Book Talks for English Teachers.
Teachers who participate receive 20-minute video overviews+notes about the 8 books shown in the image to the left. In addition, teachers also get access to tools and professional development videos to put what you learn into practice in their classroom. Scroll to the bottom of this post to learn more.
In this blog post I’ll share takeaways from three of the books specifically about teaching writing and incorporating social justice practices into your teaching.
Before we begin though…what does social justice in schools mean anyway? There are many opinions and thoughts about what exactly social justice means. Here’s what social justice in education means to me:
What is Social Justice in Education?
Social justice typically means working toward equal access to resources (jobs, healthcare, housing and a quality education). In schools, I believe it means that educators first need to admit all people have the tendency to judge and form unconscious biases that impact their decisions and actions. This could mean we might judge a student’s lack of motivation and inability to turn assignments in on time as lazy or a student’s negative attitude toward us as an attack when this attitude could mean a multitude of things, completely unrelated to us.
Social justice in schools means it is our job as educators to build awareness about our personal judgements and biases. It is also our job to help our students do the same by allowing time to write about and discuss feeling judged or treated unfairly because of actions or physical appearances. We must make it a priority to listen to our students and open to up to the wide array of experiences they have, experiences that we may never completely understand. Social justice in schools also means seeking opportunities to learn and being open to many perspectives. And what is one of the best ways to learn English teachers? Reading.
Now that we are on the same page about what social justice in schools means, let’s get to those books…
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop
This book by college professor, Felicia Rose Chavez, taught me three important lessons about integrating social justice practices into teaching writing.
Takeaway #1 Students ARE TEACHERS TOO
We must take time all year long to have students write about and discuss their unique life experiences and validate those experiences by listening intently and being aware of our own implicit biases and assumptions.
“We start by acknowledging that our workshop participants are experts in their own right. Early on in class, survey them as a means to better scaffold them later on:
What is your name? You have a right to claim space.
Where do you come from? You are endowed a storytelling legacy.
Who are your artist mentors? Your knowledge is legitimate.
What do you fear? You are in a safe space.
What do you want? You are free to risk failure.
Why are you good at writing? You are, and always have been, a writer.”
Felicia Rose Chavez
Takeaway #2 WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE internal critic WE ALL HAVE
Chavez explains that it is vital to help students become aware of the internal critic all humans have. We should share openly about what our own internal critic tells us. According to Chavez, "The anti-racist writing workshop trains participants [students] in how to release fear’s stranglehold over their work and exercise authentic voice." We must also provide many opportunities for students to write about the internal critic. Here are some prompts Chavez provides:
Write a list of your fears, hold nothing back…
When has competition kicked in while writing? How does comparing myself to others impact my writing?
What does your internal critic say about you today? What does it say about your writing?
What do you need today to meet your writing goals? What do you need on an emotional level?
Takeaway #3 WRITERS NEED SUPPORT WITH CONFIDENCE
Chavez discusses how she runs workshop from the beginning of the semester to the end. She begins by having students do a lot of low-stakes free writing and reading aloud to build confidence, trust and community. Then she transitions into craft exercises focused on voice, imagery, characterization and arrangement. This involves defining these terms together while reading literature from diverse perspectives. Next, students experiment with voice, imagery, characterization and arrangement in their own writing. Chavez says to prepare students for “formal workshop” students draft in and outside of class and have time to share drafts in pairs or groups to get feedback and inspiration. During “formal workshop” students read aloud their final writing piece to the whole class. Each student is given a 30 minute period to do this and engage in Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. This process gives students full ownership over what they want to discuss and what they want support with in terms of their writing piece.
Grading for Equity
This book clearly outlines information and studies that show how detrimental certain grading practices are, such as the 0-100 point scale. It also describes in detail what grading practices we need to implement in order to make sure our practices are equitable and promote social justice. Here are the three most important things I learned from this book:
Takeaway #1: The 0-100 Scale Must Go
It’s so obvious when you think about it…when you give a student 0, what are you communicating to that student? Are you taking into account the huge hole they will have to dig themselves out of to bring their average back up? Are you taking into account how demotivating this is for that student and how it will impact their motivation on future tasks in your class? Feldman includes a large number of reasons why using the 0-100 scale is not even a mathematically sound practice!
TAKEAWAY #2: Grades NEED TO reflect KNOWLEDGE
Every time we give extra credit, grade homework and assignments on completion we get further and further away from the grade reflecting students’ understanding of content knowledge. Feldman argues that grading anything else but assessments (that are not high stakes and that the teacher makes each student retake, even students with Bs and As) gives students and their families an inaccurate information about how the students is actually doing understanding the content knowledge. You might be thinking…but if we leave out extra credit, homework, don’t grade anything on completion and only grade assessments our grade book would be so sparse and would give students and their families so little information! Actually, Feldman says we should in fact include grades for all assignments and homework (that are direct practice for assessments) but weight them and 0% of the grade. This way it is clear why a student may have done poorly on an assessment.
TakeAWAY #3: Averaging IS AN UNFAIR PRACTICE
Averaging causes outliers to dramatically impact a grade whereas finding the median or mode resists outliers. An example Feldman provides is a student who has this set of scores: 91, 92, 40, 94, 94. The average is 82.2%. However the mode is 94% and the median is 92%. 40 is an outlier, the student might have been going through any number of things to cause this outlier. That 40 might even be a reflection of the type of assessment you gave…did many students do poorly? Might it have something to do with the way you created the assessment?
Feldman also goes on to include very realistic anecdotes showing how when a student learns something impacts their grade as well! Some students come to your class with very little experience writing persuasive essays, some come with lots of experience. The student who has little experience is at a disadvantage. So shouldn’t we weight assessments taken by students after multiple opportunities, lessons and feedback we provide?
There is so much more to this book and I can’t wait to share more with you on Saturday, July 31st 2021 at 12:00 PM PT/3:00 ET I will be going into much more detail about this book. Join The English Teacher Summer Reading Series event to learn more details.
The Knowledge Gap
So, what is the hidden cause of our broken education system, according to Natalie Wexler?
Students need knowledge and schools, districts and educational leaders are too caught up in fads to provide students with the knowledge about history, social studies, science and current events they so desperately need in order to be successful readers and writers!
Here are the three most important takeaways I gleaned from reading this book:
Takeaway #1 Students don’t learn to write by reading
It is a commonly held belief that the more time we give students to read the more their reading and writing will improve. This commonly held belief is a myth.
In The Knowledge Gap, Wexler discusses her friend Judith Hochman’s experience with teaching writing…"Despite her undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, she had never been trained in how to teach writing, just when to assign it." I think we can all relate to this experience. I was only given a set of six trait posters to teach writing.
The worst part is this…Wexler argues (and I agree) that writing is a lot harder to learn how to do well than reading and speaking are. There are many great readers and oral communicators out there who struggle with writing. However, it’s pretty hard to come by a student who is an amazing writer and struggles with reading.
So, what does Wexler propose we do with little training in how to teach such a tough subject to master? She looks to Judith Hochman, her co-author of the popular book The Writing Revolution. In this book Hochman and Wexler lay out exactly how we should teach writing. These methods are vital for struggling and strong writers alike.
I also wrote a blog post called 5 Mini Lessons to Teach Writing Explicitly and Support Struggling Writers that was inspired by all I learned from reading The Writing Revolution.
Takeaway #2 Students Need to Write About What They Are Learning
The Knowledge Gap is all about how students aren’t given enough time to learn information. Teachers often just assume students already have the information they need to understand what’s going on. In reality, students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds lack the knowledge that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds have acquired over time through travel, books, paid summer camps and more access to adult family members with vacation time. Wexler asserts that teachers of all subjects and grades need to dedicate much more time to learning and processing information from history, science and current events. She also proposes the very best way to process all this new knowledge is through writing. There’s an added benefit to having students write about the information they most recently learned too…through writing, the teacher can easily assess students’ understanding, depth of knowledge, misconceptions, trends and areas that need to be retaught!
Takeaway #3 Students Need a Plan to Follow So Working Memory isn’t Bogged Down
Writing requires students to have a plethora of information in their working memory all at once…spelling rules, typing/handwriting skills, organizational strategies, the ability to write complete sentences, proper punctuation and capitalization skills, idea inspiration, voice and the list goes on and on! Writing is quite a feat when you think about it. Wexler argues that outlines, sentence stems and explicit lessons about specific writing skills, such as how to paraphrase and how to elaborate a sentence with appositives, are vital. Wexler also disagrees with Lucy Calkin’s flash drafting methods where students are told to write without stopping for as long as they can and then urged to go back and revise. Instead, Hochman and Wexler believe teachers need to start writing instruction at the sentence level. These authors are all about teaching writing skills explicitly, having students practice, and then providing feedback. There is much more that they take issue with when it comes to Lucy Calkin’s workshop model, which I am a huge fan of! However, I also believe Wexler and Hochman have many valid points about how we should be going about teaching writing in order to serve our students and promote social justice.
Wrap Up
These three books are all worth reading if you are looking for ways to promote social justice as an English teacher. If you lack the time or money to read all the professional development books on your list this summer then you’ll want to check out this awesome opportunity to gain ideas and inspiration from the 8 books pictured here!
Here’s what you’ll receive:
Video Overviews- you’ll revieve a brief video overview of the book and recommendations about how you might use it to improve your teaching practices. These overviews can help you decide whether to read the book yourself or not!
Key Insights- each video overview will also include the most important takeaways and insights gleaned from the book from the perspective of a former English teacher with 13 years of experience in the classroom.
Online Discussions- you’ll have the opportunity to discuss each book in a private FG Group with other teachers who sign up for the event. The best part is there is no reading required to participate in the discussions!
About the Author
Amanda Werner has been teaching for 14 years and still feels like a novice. Every year is a unique and exciting challenge to inspire a new group of students to become avid readers and writers. Amanda reads educational literature voraciously and writes about the teaching of reading and writing on her website amandawritenow.com. Amanda received her B.A. in English Literature with an emphasis in Humanities at Western Washington University. In her free time, Amanda loves being outdoors with her husband and daughter.
