Standards, Curriculum, and a Writing Philosophy: What Can You Do Without Me?

What is the difference between standards and curriculum? Standards are one part of my curriculum. I’ve written about standards-based learning. This year in my 7th grade composition class, the writing standards –features of a narrative, argument, and informational essay — guided my instruction for the first three quarters, and then I stopped teaching.

Standards are the expectations of what teachers are to teach. The standards are decided by the state. The curriculum, however, is how those standards are taught. Curriculum includes the many resources, activities, and lessons teachers select to teach the standards, and this is mostly decided by the school or district, but, essentially, the teacher is the one creating the curriculum (depending on the school). The curriculum is the means by which I bring students to know and be able to demonstrate the standards. The curriculum I develop guides students to creating the evidence by which we assess (the students and I) whether the writer has met the standards and to what extent.

However, the curriculum is so much more than tools to teach the standards. The curriculum takes a stance on the subject; in other words, the curriculum constructs a philosophy of the subject: why does writing matter, what can writing do, what is the responsibility of the writer to the audience and topic — essentially, why does writing matter. My stance is to ask these questions every day and for the students to come to the answers not explicitly but implicitly in their choices and treatment of their craft.

Write Without Me: Assessing Learning, Assessing the Curriculum

For three quarters, from August to March, we (my 7th grade writers and I) wrote every day, and I supported students through the writing process of three forms of writing outlined in the Common Core State Standards for 7th grade writing. We wrote narratives that helped us bear witness to the lives of our classmates in biographical sketches. We wrote arguments about current events in the world and gave activist speeches.  We wrote informational pieces that shared our expertise and taught others. And we wrote every day to contemplate anything and everything that stirred in our hearts and minds stretching and questioning form and content. On Fridays, we shared our writing out loud and celebrate writerly moves. However, I guided most of these experiences, and in order to know if my curriculum helped students learn the standards and discover why writing matters, I had to see if students could write without me.

Thus, for the fourth quarter, our final nine weeks together, I wanted to know if students could work through the writing process on their own. Could each writer develop her writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, trying a new approach, and seeking guidance and support from peers? Could each writer produce clear and coherent writing in which the organization and style is appropriate to the form? Could each writer choose among different sentences to signal differing relationships among ideas (L.7.1B)?  Could each writer use accurately grade-appropriate academic language and domain-specific words when considering a word or phrase important to expression (L.7.6)? Most importantly, could each writer find purpose in writing?

To answer these questions and to create evidence to prove such answers, I asked students to spend our last learning quarter creating a portfolio of what they learned this year, not only in our composition class but in all their classes. I asked students to write new pieces inspired by what they learned and what mattered to them — without me. (To be clear, I was there but more as a writer than a teacher.)

The Portfolio Assignment

Create a portfolio on Google docs that tells the story of what you learned in 7th grade. In the first part, you will select artifacts from each of your class to demonstrate your learning and use jargon specific to that lesson to explain what you learned in a short descriptive paragraph. In the second part, you will write a poem, informational essay, narrative, and argument essay inspired by something you learned in one of your classes. You will work through the writing process for each piece (brainstorming, planning, drafting, conferring, revising, adding grammar, editing, and publishing) to provide evidence of your ability to write in the four basic forms of writing we’ve learned this school year. Your audience includes parents, teachers, and the principal, so you will also write a letter introducing and describing your portfolio before submitting it in Google classroom.

The Portfolio

A. Table of Contents

B. Letter to Teachers and Parents

C. Part I: Artifacts with a Description Using Academic Language

D. Part II: New Pieces of Writing Inspired by Your Learning

Students chose topics from their learning to extend into new writing pieces. They worked through the writing process on their own, which is to say they consulted resources such as their notes, classroom posters, classmates, drafts from earlier in the school year, and sources from their other classes.  In the brainstorming and planning stage of writing, students worked together (and with me) to decide on topics that resonated with them, that sparked new ideas, that called to them for further contemplation. In the drafting phase, some students co-wrote their pieces while others drafted on their own calling me or other writers over to conference.  A few weeks before the end of the quarter, students submitted a draft of their portfolio to me on Google classroom, and I offered feedback for revisions. The last week of the project, students proofread and edited for grammar and spelling (notice the color coded sentences indicating sentence variety). The requirement was to write one piece in each of the forms we’d practice in the first three quarters of the school year: poem, informational, argument, and narrative. Here are a few examples:

• Inspired by PE, this student wrote Being a Tryhard (argument) Book Bankruptcy (argument).
• Inspired by orchestra, this student wrote an essay about instruments built from trash in Paraguay: Deep amber is waxed to shine the dimensions (informational).
• Inspired by the genetics unit in science class, this student wrote Designer Babies (narrative) House Arrest (poem).
• Inspired by health class, this student wrote about her personal experience with depression and anxiety: How to cope with life (informational) How to Play the Violin (informational).
• Inspired by math equations and her love of zombie stories, this student wrote How to survive the zombie apocalypse (informational, ELL).
• Inspired by his music class and learning the guitar, this student wrote I Strum Away My Agony (poem and informational).
• Inspired by Marie Curie and a news article on Chernobyl, these students co-wrote Radiation incident in Chernobyl (narrative, ELL).
• Inspired by a novel, Small as an Elephant, this student wrote Should parents with mental health problems raise their children (argument Small as an Elephant).
• Inspired by The Outsiders, this student wrote an additional chapter: Thanksgiving with the Outsiders (narrative).
• Inspired by a history lesson, this student wrote The North and the South (narrative, ELL).
• Inspired by his health class and science, this student looked into The Science of Happiness (informational).
• Inspired by a unit of study in history class, this student wrote Trail of Tears (narrative).

Publication: Blogs and Open Mic

Two weeks before school ended, students published their portfolios to our Kidblog. We spent two days reading new pieces of writing and responding from three perspectives: readers, writers, and human beings.  During this time, I conducted individual conferences. The publication part of the project is important because writers need readers. For a writer, positive comments can keep us coming back to the page to create. Here are a few comments:

As a writer I noticed the technique of how you portray the emotions of the characters, is powerful because you wrote, “I tried so hard not to cry but tears escaped my eyes,Erika was just so quiet but crying was crying a river. … I started to think if Erika even loved me or if she cared if i left this world.” So beautiful.

As a writer, I noticed the word choice is powerful because you wrote,”I laughed as I devoured the doctor’s soul as he pleaded for mercy that no one gives.” I really enjoyed your narrative!!!!!!!!! <3 ( the character’s names are the best)

As a human being, what i can connect because in your informational i feel the same way about the mile. also how when you said that “your feet will feel like your stepping in lava” i totally agree with that bcause its hot outside.

As a human being i relate to what you wrote because you wrote,” I was walking by myself looking around to see what’s could draw,because my project is due tomorrow and I haven’t drawn anything yet.” this relates becuase when i have something due and i don’t know what to do i just walk around by myself.

I really liked your argument. As a reader I learned that you really don’t like the mile, but I don’t like it either. We (as in the students) don’t really like the mile because it is too long. The teachers always say that it is not that hard, But they cant even run it. I liked though at the end when you said “but all we have to do is try our best”. I thought that made a lot of sense, because sometimes we don’t always try our best and that’s why we don’t succeed.

I loved your narrative! As a reader I learned what Huntington’s disease is. When you said “a genetic disorder in which nerve cells in the brain breakdown over time.” This told me what the disease was, and helped me understand the story better.

For open mic, I assessed students’ speaking skills (VEEPP- volume, eye contact, expression, pace, and professionalism), while the students continued with celebrations of the writing by noting writerly moves and then complimenting the writers afterward during the last ten minutes of class when we practice giving and receiving complements:Celebrations and Speech Evaluation. Again, this is about audience and knowing and noting how writing impacts readers.

Standards-Based Instruction to Evidence-Based Assessment of Learning

In the last few months of school, I learned what the students learned in all their classes. From genetics to the Trail of Tears, students were reviewing artifacts from their other classes, drafting new pieces, and doing additional research to inform their character development in the narratives and write rebuttals in their argument essays. Writers did not come to me for approval, but rather went to each other for ideas and guidance. The list above shows that their interests and inspiration was vast (and those are just twelve of the nearly 400 new pieces of writing my 90 students created in the final weeks of school). Writers found reasons to write, and when they shared their writing on their blogs and during out open mic, they knew their writing was moving the hearts and minds of their peers.

Once students submitted their portfolios to Google classroom and linked them to the blogs, I knew (and the students knew) who had learned the standards, but we had final grade conferences to process and celebrate the evidence of learning. These are a few questions that guided our conferences:

• What did you learn about yourself as a writer? Point to evidence of this.
• Talk me through the process of your favorite piece. Show me evidence of this.
• How did the publication of your work on your blog and in open mics impact your writing? Discuss some examples.

Overall, students spoke with passion and expertise about what they wrote and why. It felt like I was just chatting with fellow writers rather than students.

But what about the evaluation of the curriculum and evidence that my curriculum was any “good,” that it worked?  The conferences were one piece of evidence, and here are two pieces of evidence that my curriculum (my plans, resources, lessons) helped students learn the standards and find meaning in writing: BryanPortfolio and StelaPortfolio. (Pretty amazing, right?)

However, there is evidence that my curriculum did not work for every writer. Because so much of this project required students to seek out resources and review the writing forms, many students struggled to meet soft deadlines along the way. Many could not find a reason to write and some just did not know how to begin. My curriculum required remediation, which meant that I had to reteach some writers how to organize the argument. For some students, I had to co-write the narrative, offer a template for the poem, or help them find a reason to write. Remediation is part of the assessment process, and I was smart enough to plan in a week for that part this quarter. Essentially, many students could write without me, but some did not have the skills or confidence or resourcefulness-yet.

Philosophy and Curriculum

Indeed, the standards drove my instruction, but my philosophy of writing drove my curriculum: why does writing matter, what is worth writing, how will what I write impact others. I think that the philosophy of our discipline can  get lost when the curriculum comes from a script or textbook or some mandated program. In this time of standards and accountability, I hope that teachers hold tight to “their” curriculum, the curriculum that supports students in becoming writings, and do not abandon the good in the name of standards. You can use standards to drive instruction, but the standards are not your curriculum.