LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Action Research Grants Available

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Eastern New Mexico University is accepting Action Research Grant Applications for the 2007-2008 academic school year.  Grants are available for up to $3000 in all disciplines and at all grade levels. 

Guidelines and applications can be found on-line at www.enmu.edu/cte.  The deadline to submit is February 9, 2007. 

NCLB Petitions

Two groups have recently posted petitions critical of No Child Left Behind.  One, from Fairtest, suggests changes to the law while the other, from the Educator Roundtable, asks that NCLB be entirely scrapped. If you're interested in adding your name, you can do so here (Fairtest) or here (Educator Roundtable).

Profile in Courage Essay Contest

The annual John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Essay Contest invites high school students from across the nation to write an original essay about an elected official who has demonstrated political courage.  The contest is a companion program of the Profile in Courage Award, named for President Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, which recounts the stories of eight senators, the obstacles they faced, and the special valor they demonstrated despite the risks.

Winning essayists will receive awards totaling up to $6,500. The first-place winner will be invited to accept the award at the Profile in Courage Award Ceremony hosted each May by Caroline Kennedy and Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.  To encourage student leadership and civic engagement, the nominating teacher of the first-place winner will receive a John F. Kennedy Public Service Grant for $500.

Deadline for submission is January 6, 2007.  More information is available here.

National Books Awards

The National Books Awards were given out last week.  Richard Powers won the fiction prize for his novel "The Echo Maker," Timothy Egan's Dust Bowl history, "The Worst Hard Time" won for nonfiction; Nathaniel Mackey's musical and mystical "Splay Anthem" took the poetry prize; and M.T. Anderson's "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. I," a multiformatted epic in 18th century prose, was cited for young people's literature.  (And if you haven't discovered M.T. Anderson yet--his previous works include "Thirsty," "Burger Wuss," and "Feed"--it's time.)   Here's more about the National Book Awards from The Boston Globe.

NCTE Resolutions Passed

We're back from the NCTE convention in Nashville.  Over the next few days we'll be sharing some of what we learned there.  To start, here's a link to the resolutions members of the Council passed.  They include statements on Literature in the Curriculum, Increasing High School Graduation Rates, and the Role of Teachers in Selecting Reading Programs.  NCTE also released a set of recommendations about how the No Child Left Behind act could be improved.  You can find them here.

Teaching to the Test (Not)

Here's an interesting opinion piece by English teacher Jamie Pearson.  It's from the Billings Gazette of November 11, 2006: 

Guest Opinion: Teaching to tests leaves students behind
By JAMIE PEARSON

As a member of the National Council of Teachers of English and a middle school English teacher in Billings, I am writing about No Child Left Behind and the realities of the legislation in my classroom. Since the law was signed in 2002, NCLB has focused attention and dollars on the kids who can't or won't keep up. The thinking and even the direct words of lawmakers indicate that excuses about poor parenting, poverty or racism will no longer be heard. The law, in no uncertain terms, expects schools to educate all kids and leave that other "stuff" to the people ultimately responsible for it.

Even its critics acknowledge that NCLB has yielded some positive results. Test scores don't lie, right? They prove this concentrated effort to raise test scores has worked. NCLB has successfully forced schools and districts to focus on groups of students who might otherwise be overlooked: students in poverty, students with disabilities and those from racial minorities. Margaret Spellings, President Bush's secretary of education, boasted to a group of reporters a few weeks ago: "I like to talk about No Child Left Behind as Ivory soap. It's 99.9 percent pure. There's not much needed in the way of changes ..."

Critical thinking missing
My perspective on the "front line," working with kids is a bit different. Test scores are going up, but they don't tell the entire story. . .

Read the rest here.

Teens Pick Top Ten Books

Teen readers across the country voted "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling as their favorite book to take the #1 spot on the annual Teens' Top Ten (TTT), sponsored by The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the fastest growing division of the American Library Association (ALA). The vote took place during Teen Read Week, October 15-21, 2006, and gave teens an opportunity to voice their choice of the best new young adult books. 

TTT is a part of YALSA's Young Adult (YA) Galley Project, which facilitates access to advance copies of young adult books to national teen book discussion groups. These groups evaluated books that were published from January 2005 through April 2006, and created a list off 22 nominations for the best new books for young adults. Teen voters across the country then cast ballots for their three favorites, creating the 2006 Teens' Top Ten booklist of the best new books for young adults.

Teens were encouraged to vote for their favorite young adult books during Teen Read Week from the official nomination list posted online at the Teens' Top Ten site.  Over 5000 online ballots were cast and the results, combined with the results of a separate vote of the TTT groups, determined the final ranking of the 10 top books of the year, as selected by teen readers.

With J.K. Rowling's sixth Harry Potter book topping the list, the 2006 Teens' Top Ten includes:

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic Press, 2005).
2. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2005).
3. Eldest by Christopher Paolini (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2005).
4. Rebel Angels by Libba Bray (Delacorte Press, 2005).
5. Peeps by Scott Westerfeld (Razorbill, 2005).
6. 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson (HarperCollins Children's Books, 2005).
7. Poison by Chris Wooding (Orchard Books, 2005).
8. Captain Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth by J.V. Hart (Laura Geringer Books, 2005).
9. If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where's My Prince? by Melissa Kantor (Hyperion Books for Children, 2005).
10. Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2005).

Final nominations for the 2007 Teens' Top Ten vote will be posted in April at www.ala.org/teenstopten. 

 

Research on Writing

A new summary of the research on writing instruction has been published.  Commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York, authored by Steve Graham (Peabody College of Education, Vanderbilt University) and Dolores Perin (Teachers College, Columbia University), Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High School identifies eleven classroom practices that research suggests will help improve the writing abilities of students in grades 4-12. 

The eleven instructional practices that Writing Next recognizes as holding the most promise to improve students’ writing skills are:

Writing Strategies: Teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions

Summarization: Explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts

Collaborative Writing: Instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions

Specific Product Goals: Specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete

Word Processing: Using computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments

Sentence Combining: Teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences

Prewriting: Engaging students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition

Inquire Activities: Engaging students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task

Process Writing Approach: Interweaving a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities, writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing.

Study of Models: Providing students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing

Writing for Content Learning: Using writing as a tool for learning content material.

You can download the entire report by clicking here or on the link in the research section (left margin) of this page.

Lessons on American Indians

Debbie Reese maintains a very useful blog about "American Indians in Children's Literature."  In an entry posted today, she critiques the common but problematic teaching idea of having students read American Indian tales and then write their own versions:

The activity is very popular, most adults did this activity when they were kids. It seems harmless and fun, but is it?

Is it harmless to take a people's way of thinking about the world and use it as a playful model for a writing activity?

Would you do this with Genesis? There is a double standard at work, subtly undermining the integrity of indigenous peoples whose stories are trivialized in this way. Engaging in these seemingly harmless activities has ramifications for the way children learn to think about American Indians and others whose stories are used like this.

Let's stop doing it.

You can read the rest here.   

Mix It Up At Lunch

November 14 is "Mix It Up at Lunch Day," a project designed to foster  respect and understanding in schools and communities:

The program’s concept is simple but powerful: For this one day, students are encouraged to sit with someone new at lunch. Nowhere on school campuses are the boundaries of group membership more clearly drawn than in and around the cafeteria.

“Many of our prejudices and biases tend to fall away when we mix with and meet new people,” said Mix It Up Director Tafeni English. “Mix It Up at Lunch Day gives students an opportunity to bring down the walls in their schools and get to know people they might not otherwise interact with. It helps teach young people the value of integrated living.”

The annual event is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program, which provides educators with free multimedia teaching kits and other materials designed to promote respect for differences and an appreciation of diversity.

This year, an estimated 4 million youths at 9,000 schools are expected to take part in Mix It Up Day. At many schools, organizers are planning a variety of innovative activities at lunch and throughout the day and week.\

For more information about "Mix It Up at Lunch Day," click here.