For the past two years, I’ve been working on a very innovative project, and it has taken me a while to find a way to get others to share my vision. I’ve been on a very steep learning curve, but learn I have! What stops many people from truly listening to innovators is what they already know is true. They tend to confront a new idea with all kinds of arguments about why it won’t work. They cannot see beyond their own experiences and beliefs to entertain possibilities that challenge the imagination. I think I’ve finally figured out how to present my idea so others get it. This is an experiment; I’m going to share my outside-the-box thinking with you.
Here are the questions I’m asking:
• What would happen to the learning environment of your school if your teachers and award-winning children’s nonfiction authors collaborated in a large-scale project where everyone was involved in sharing knowledge and skills?
• Is the love of learning—the passion that drives us children’s nonfiction authors--contagious? Can you catch it from us? Because lifelong learning is who we are and what we do.
• What happens to student literacy when the core reading material is children’s nonfiction literature? Our books are normally considered “enrichment” and relegated to a secondary role in student learning, if not completely ignored in most classrooms, although they more than meet national educational standards. Suppose that they become the intellectual meal rather than a sometime dessert? Can you imagine it?
• How could personal contact with the award-winning authors of the books enhance the professional development of your teachers in both literacy skills (writing) and knowledge of content?
• How can these questions be addressed in a way that is affordable for a school and yet compensates authors (who have no salary or benefits) for their time and expertise?
Ink Think Tank has a group, Authors on Call of nine award-winning nonfiction authors and two consultants, one in literacy and one in children’s nonfiction literature. We are pioneering a way to work with schools via interactive videoconferencing (ivc). Let me describe how a partnership with an elementary K-5 school with about 500 students would work. Please note that this is just an example that can be modified to fit your school:
• Your school would select one title from each author that fits into your scope and sequence in science, social studies and math. The authors can help with the selection. They can also show how the selected books fit into the scope and sequence of your language arts program.
Alexandra Siy (natural science, animals, technology)
Andrea Warren (history—major world events from the point of view of the children who lived through them)
• Your school would order 100 books of each title one for each author, about 3 classroom sets.
• Your school would assign the books to the appropriate teachers who would read the book (s).
• Just prior to teaching a book, the teachers would meet for an hour via interactive videoconferencing (ivc) with its author for a brain-storming session on classroom strategies for teaching that particular book including tips on researching and writing.
• INK would establish a wiki for the project with your school. Each author would have a page on a wiki to answer teacher questions on an on-going basis for the duration of the use of the book. Teachers could also use the wiki to blog about their experiences.
• After the students finish studying the book, they would meet face-to-face with the author via ivc for questions and answers. In order to keep the groups small, this would be three 20 minute periods or four 15 minute periods.
• In addition, the teachers would attend an ivc with Dr Myra Zarnowski, a professor of children’s literature at Queens College, CUNY author of Making Sense of History and one with literacy advocate Angela Maiers, author of The Passion-Driven Classroom.
To sum up, the package would include about three classroom sets for each title (9); 11 hours of just-in-time professional development, and nine hours of interaction with children. The wiki created by the authors and teachers would be a permanent record of the insights developed during the course of the program. The total investment is $45-50 per child, no more than $25,000 for a school of 500 students, with the books and the knowledge available for years to come.
I believe that this program will generate unprecedented excitement and a culture of learning in your school. Teachers and students will love the writing projects that come out of interacting with real authors. I also believe that reading terrific nonfiction will have a significant effect on test scores. Don’t forget, it is our booksthat are excerpted on the assessment tests. There is grant money available in technology (interactive videoconferences), in professional development, and in literacy.
Think about it. And contact me if you’re interested in knowing more. My email address is: Vicki@inkthinktank.com. I’d love to hear from you.
The other day, a friend of mine, a professor who teaches teachers, pointed out that the title of my last post “Added Value” was becoming an emotionally charged phrase among teachers. Why? If you reverse the words to “value-added” and tie it to test scores as a way of determining bonuses for better teachers (as if a bonus would make a good teacher better) it adds additional pressure to do test prep, despite its stifling effect on what good teaching should be. I’m not going to discuss the effect of “value-added” on the teaching profession or the problems with the metrics, as those are different topics. What I want to discuss here is the effect of national educational standards on what actually happens in a classroom and where the added value of a gifted teacher fits in.
First, let me confess, I never wanted to have anything to do with the standards. I KNOW science. I believe that I more than embody the standards in my work. This was only confirmed when I was directed to the standards two years ago by an editor who said that a book of mine didn’t meet them. As I read the science standards, steam came out of my ears. Here’s why: There are eight standards for science: One of them is “Science as Inquiry.” My book was about the growth and behavior of microorganisms in a child’s life. It asked questions and gave activities for the reader to discover answers and insights to the major concepts in the book. The entire book manifested (not told) “science as inquiry.” What was missing in my book? Nowhere in my text for children did I call what we were doing “science as inquiry.” Those words simply did not appear and the editor, who was used to traditional expository writing, missed the point. As it happened, the book also met three other science standards: “life science,” “science in personal and social perspectives, “and “science and technology.” In addition, it met a number of standards in language arts.
If you read the standards, you’ll see that they are meant to be guidelines. “Science as Inquiry” is a very broad criterion that can be interpreted in myriad ways. This is as it should be. There is no pedagogy attached to the standards in any discipline and, in fact, the standards writers specifically say that it is not their job to tell teachers what curriculum to use or how to implement the standards. The standards writers certainly never expected them to be the literal outline for texts for students (which they are, sadly, all too often.) This narrow view of meeting national standards as written has come to mean second-guessing what will appear on the assessment tests making whatever you teach in class a lottery. There is no guarantee that what is “covered” in class will appear in exactly that form on the test and that the kids will remember it. And if “value-added” metrics determine 40 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness, it is no surprise that many teachers, given a choice, opt out of teaching fourth grade, the year of the big bad tests.
Since I have spent most of my life as a writer, a very introspective craft, I have had the time to analyze my own “added value” — what I bring to the subjects I write about. I suggest that teachers do their own analyses of what added value they bring to their students regardless of the evaluations of supervisors and their students’ scores on assessment tests. And if your current teaching situation has got you down, here are a few questions to ask yourself to start the process of self-evaluation:
•What would it take for you to be the teacher you always dreamed of being?
• Under what circumstances do you have “fun” (meaning “engagement”) being a teacher?
•What percentage of your time teaching is fun for you? How can you increase it?
•Outside of the tests you give, how do you know when your students are learning?
•Do you enjoy learning yourself? If not, why not?
•Do you have a problem not knowing answers to a student’s question? If so, what would it take for you to get over this and learn alongside your student?
•How much autonomy do you have in determining how you teach a particular curriculum subject? Are you willing to make a case for yourself to get more?
•Do the answers to these questions shed light on your effectiveness as a teacher?
What would happen in your school if every teacher wrote up an honest self-evaluation of their added value and you shared them with each other? How could that encourage collaboration and a collegial atmosphere between teachers? How could this process add value to the learning culture of your school? Does anyone do this? If so, I’d be interested in what it produces. The insights from such questions just might be the intangible added value that terrific teachers bring to the classroom.
According to educator Alan November, one of the three essential skills needed for workers to thrive in the 21st century is that they should be able to “process enormous amounts of information, sift through it and synthesize it into new work that has added value.” This skill is exactly what children’s nonfiction authors do and it got me thinking. When I write about science — something that is the subject of a gazillion books and articles — what do I bring to the party? In other words, why should anyone read my books when there are so many others on the same subjects? What is my “added value?” I think that this is a question that all authors of children’s nonfiction should think about. Here’s what I think I offer:
Accessibility to difficult concepts
My first writing assignment, a high school chemistry text book, had to “sound simple.” My task was to make concepts in chemistry accessible. The editor/publisher made me do three drafts of the first chapter before giving me a contract. So taking abstract concepts and making them relevant to the uninitiated reader was the first piece of added value to my work. I cannot write so that it sounds simple unless I have a deep grasp of a concept myself. My very solid educational background in the sciences is my foundation here.
Respect for the reader
Many authors of so-called “informational material” just write the facts and expect readers to do the work to figure it out for themselves. I truly honor my readers. I make the assumption that most of my readers are reading my books because they have a school assignment. They have no curiosity or real interest in the subject matter. So it is my job to grab their attention and keep them interested. As a result I pay a lot of attention to my lead sentences. Does it make them want to keep reading? I use playful language to engage them and have fought battles with editors over that because they are so steeped in the traditional (boring) way writers have discussed science in the past. Examples:
“Want to smell something rotten? Take a deep breath by a garbage can. If it’s rotten your nose knows.” (This is an out-of-print book on microbiology for thre third grade.)
“There are some natives of Australia who are famous for sleeping stark naked on frozen ground.” (This book, also out of print, is about going into very hostile environments.)
The formats of children’s books, which include art, put constraints on the length of the text. For an author, this means every word counts. I curate the information I include, often making ruthless decisions about what to omit. There is such a thing as “too much information” and there’s nothing quite like it to turn off a reader. I write for the uninitiated. If my book is the first one a child reads on science, then I have failed if it is also the last.
A different vantage point
Science has traditionally been presented to children by attempting to induce them to enter the world of science. They are told that science is fun. My books bring science into the world of children. I show them how to look at some aspect of their world as a scientist might so that they learn something new about something very familiar. A drop of water skating around on waxed paper gives insight into how water can make them wet. Standing with one’s back to the wall makes it impossible to pick up a ten dollar bill on the floor at their feet and there’s science to explain why. Changing the paradigm and bringing science into the world of children makes me think about what that world is. It keeps me in touch with the child I once was and as a result I speak “child.”
Playful language and an irreverent tone
I write the kind of book I would have loved when I was a kid. I have a sense of humor, a command of language, and they define my writer’s voice. I know how to wink at my reader verbally so that we see humor in the same kind of thing. An example: “How many different ways can you make sounds with your body without using your voice? Experiment and find out.” [in the illustration, a female character with the initials VC—obviously my alter ego—says in a speech bubble] “Remember, not all sounds are polite!” This is another example of speaking the language of the people I wish to lead.
Extensive research and new findings
Then there’s the research part. Every writer gets a rush when s/he discovers something pertinent to the work that is not widely known. When writing about colds, I found out that our noses are computers — that our nostrils take turns doing most of the breathing and you can tell which nostril is dominant by breathing on a mirror. The dominant nostril produces a larger circle of condensation. I knew kids would love knowing that! When researching our sense of taste, I discovered that spicy hot food actually stimulates pain receptors in the tongue (not taste receptors) and that you can “taste” hot peppers on your wrist.
I’ve been writing science activities for kids for so long that I’ve been dubbed the “Julia Child of kids’ hands-on science” because I seldom come across an activity I don’t already know. Even so, I do every experiment before I write it up to make sure that it works as well as possible. This leads to improvements in procedures and generates ideas for my own discoveries, like heating apples in Fantastik® as a test for sugars instead of using Benedict’s solution, a lab reagent.
Connecting the dots
Hands-on work is important to science but for almost all of my formal education there was little connection between what we did in the labs and what was presented in the lectures. I make it a point to integrate a hands-on activity whenever I can into the context of the subject I’m writing about. When I tell kindergartners, in I Face the Wind, that air is real “stuff” even if it is invisible, I give them an activity that proves it. They can’t see air but they can catch it by twirling around with an open plastic grocery bag and twisting it closed. Without the context of what they’re discovering the activity has little value or meaning. But in the context of proving something that is invisible is also very real, they are truly excited to engage in it. Thus, the simplest activity has import if presented in context as it illustrates a concept. On the other hand, there are many terrific science activities in books that don’t explain their significance. Extracting real DNA from onions is a relatively complicated process. When I give the procedure I connect it to the history and significance of this amazing molecule. A baking soda and vinegar “volcano” has relatively little added value by itself.
When I write a biography or talk about big ideas in science, I create a narrative using many of the techniques of fiction writers. Stories have an arc — a beginning, a middle and an end; they have well developed characters; they have dialog; suspense is generated by foreshadowing. For example, in my biography of Harry Houdini, I recreate in language (and with great photographs) how the relatively uneducated son of an immigrant Jewish rabbi became the first great international superstar; as well as an autodidact Renaissance man with high ethical standards despite knowing all the tricks of charlatans.
Writing is one profession that improves with age. Life experience, mastery of craft, self-knowledge, a sense of self, constant interaction with the world of ideas all feed the singular intellect of every writer. Even if we all wrote on the same subject, the works would be different and would have the added value that each singular intellect brings. If students read several works from different authors on the same subject, they would have a basis for critical evaluation (the sifting process) that will lead to the development of a singular intellect of their own — the goal of education.
