Cutting Edge: A Report

Plenary Hall on Day 1

I attended the AATE/ALEA Cutting Edge conference in Hobart about two weeks ago and my head is still giddy with the pedagogical possibilities I experienced there. Each morning, I stepped out into the bracing stillness of the harbour's Southern Ocean air, looked up at the looming snow-specked rockface of Mt. Wellington, and smelt the collective woodfire of the street's chimneys.

The walk to Wrest Point Convention Centre was chilly but the scenery and ambience always made up for it.

View of Mt Wellington from Wrest Point

Where does one start with a conference attended by 1100 delegates, a conference that went for four days, a conference where 260 separate teachers and educational specialists shared their knowledge and ideas with one another? Many times I felt like a kid at a music festival with multiple stages, wrestling with the agonising need to make a decision about which bands to see. Gnashing my teeth whenever I noted that two or three or even four great workshops were up against each other.

Like many other attendees, I was spoilt for choice.

Day Zero: The extended pre-conference sessions gave me a chance to engage more closely with the pedagogy of international speakers Linda Hoyt and Steven Layne, who were both such enthusiastic presenters that one couldn't help but get swept away in the positive and constructive methodology they shared. Dr Layne spoke wonderfully about using feedback and community-styled classroom environments, and modeled how this works by getting those of us who attended the session to generate creative writing pieces and accompanying feedback.

Day One: My highlight for the second day (the first day of the conference-proper) was a session in which South Australian teacher and researcher Sarah McDonald discussed the problematic stereotyping that has contributed to the timbre of boy-focused literacy initiatives in Western education. Her ongoing research was both useful and thought-provoking. Another highlight for the day was the keynote from American high school reading specialist Cris Tovani, who turned the focus back onto the teachers in the room by asking them to consider what it is that makes learning compelling for them, and then showed the lecture theatre some useful strategies to get students interrogating the texts they read for greater depth of understanding - alluding to Super Six-styled skills of connecting, monitoring, questioning, etc.

Cutting Edge talk on the 100 Story Building

Day Two: Wayne Sawyer started the day with his inspiring delivery of the Garth Boomer address on 'Low SES contexts - What could they mean for 'English'". Among the many insightful points made, Professor Sawyer highlighted the concentrations of disadvantage in those of low socio-economic status, asserting that deficiencies in performance within the subject of English are always about class. I'm not going to do justice to his keynote address in the space of a paragraph, however, the inclusion of the Motivation engagement Education (MeE) framework - and it's 'Fair Go' principles - provided a lot of intellectual grist for the audience. Later in the day, I was also fortunate to attend a session on the Seven Steps to Writing Success presented by its creator, Jen McVeity, and in the space of just 35 minutes she managed to convey enough material for several lessons' worth of creative writing instruction. It was fantastic.

Day Three: The last day of the conference was another big one, with Israeli educator Dr. Adam Lefstein sharing his research on classroom practice. Dr Lefstein made the case for repositioning Professional Learning as something that should happen on the job rather than outside it, and spoke illuminatingly about the way discourse shapes our thinking as teachers, as well as the need for educators to focus on positive practice when observing each other (rather than the usual things in the classroom that can go wrong). Dr Lefstein lectured about a lot that really spoke to me, and I can see myself blogging more about him more extensively in the future. The final day of the conference was also the one in which my colleague Kira Bryant collaborated with me on presenting our own materials on teaching explicit creative writing skills in the classroom. I enjoyed it a lot. 

Presenting on Creative Writing strategies

I had to take this photo - I couldn't help myself!

I met so many great teachers at Cutting Edge and learnt a lot of great stuff. I'd like to once again thank the Copyright Agency for granting me a 2017 Scholarship to attend the Cutting Edge conference. I blogged a few times about it, and the links can be found here:

Engaging Writers in the Classroom by Steven L. Layne

Gender and Literacy by Sarah McDonald

Sizzling Starts by Jen McVeity

Write Right: Authentic Engagement with Creative Writing

That's Wrest Point on the right

Some links of interest related to some of the presenters can be found here as well:

Linda Hoyt - Excellence in Literacy Instruction
Steven L. Layne - Passionate about Reading
Cris Tovani - Reading Comprehension Specialist
Elizabeth Birr Moje - Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan
100 Story Building - Creativity and Literacy for Young People

Wayne Sawyer and Larissa McLean Davies - Investigating Literary Knowledge in English Teachers
Angela Meyer - Flash Fiction
Jen McVeity - Seven Steps to Writing Steps
Rosie Kerin - Write Me: Workshops on English and Literacy
Adam Lefstein - Some useful articles on his research around classroom management and professional learning

Write Right: Authentic Engagement with Creative Writing

This is my first time attending the AATE/ALEA National Conference and I couldn't be more chuffed! Kira Bryant and I are having a great time visiting Tasmania for the first time and want to say a big thank you to everyone involved in making the conference happen.

I would also like to personally express my gratitude to the Copyright Agency for granting me a scholarship to help make my attendance happen :)

Here are the resources that Kira and I presented.

Resource: Write Right PPT (our presentation)

Resource: Activity booklet (this accompanied our presentation)

*Please note that the activity booklet omits the short story 'Grandpa's Place' as this piece is scheduled to appear in an upcoming volume of the ETA's Creative Writing textbook series later this year.

Sizzling Starts

Jen McVeity, the passionate and engaging creator of the Seven Steps to Writing Success

The AATE/ALEA Cutting Edge conference has been a whirlwind adventure these last few days, with bravura performances from international keynote speakers like Dr. Steven L. Lang, Linda Hoyt, and Professor Elizabeth Birr Moje, and brilliant snapshots of the skills and understandings being taught across Australia by our own teachers and educational consultants.

One of the great 'snapshots' I got to experience today was Jen McVeity, the highly-esteemed creator and CEO of the Seven Steps to Writing Success - a model for chunking creative writing into discrete pieces to assist students with digesting skills for future use. The idea here is that:

Repetition makes writing skills into muscle memory.

As the session was a brisk 35 minutes long, McVeity used the time well to concentrate on just one of the 7 skills: Sizzling Starts. 

From the website, a sizzling start is described as "Start where the action is. Not at the beginning of the day where nothing is happening. Begin when the volcano starts oozing lava or as you walk in the door to the big disco competition". McVeity impressed this upon us in around three minutes before letting us try out some sizzling starts on our own. We were given five prompts with a minute each to write our attention-grabbing story beginnings. 

I decided (against my own better judgement) to undertake this activity by hand. 

I would describe my handwriting as resembling something a sloth would write if given a pen for the first time. Keep in mind that this sloth probably doesn't even know what words are. That's how my handwriting looks... I have a lot of trouble reading it even a few minutes after committing it to the page. 

But I digress. Here are the five prompts:

And here are my responses:

1. I burped and fire enveloped the dinner, my mum screaming as tendrils of flame rippled across her best tablecloth as if on a slick of oil.
2. Timmy cried as the shoe spun to a stop in front of him. His best friend Roger had just disappeared forever into the hollow of the tree. With a last gasp of hope, Timmy reached into the black yawning hole in the trunk.
3. My phone exploded once again. It was one of those days - the sort where the car won't start, your computer crashes, and the toilet decides to fill up to the brim rather than flush. I hate technology.
4. I never imagined I would be here, standing on this cliff. I'm afraid of heights but, you know what? A million dollars is a million dollars. Time to bungee-jump.
5. Everyone hated Matt the Brat, especially when they found bits of him in their chocolate bars. Ms. Treving never imagined the excursion would turn out like this. 

As you can see, there isn't much you can get done in 1 minute per response, however, the rapid-fire nature of the activity forced me to keep practising the same thing with little room for drifting off-topic. McVeity compared it to standing in front of the tennis ball launcher while practising your backhand - the ball is aimed right at you so that you only have to practise the hitting of the ball rather than moving around to meet it. The analogy she's making here is that this is the aforementioned scaffolding provided by the prompts and chunking.

Resource from the workshop

I think my last one about Matt the Brat is my best attempt at a sizzling start in the rapid-fire scenario. There's something about humourous cannibalism that works as a great attention-grabber in creative writing. Obviously, I can't start every story with a character ending up in food eaten by other kids but, you know, I think the spirit of a sizzling start is there! 

Gender and Literacy

How often do we hear the phrase, "This would be a great text for boys", when discussing novel choices for teaching? I've been guilty of it, and many of the teachers around me have too. Maybe you have as well... I don't really know you, though, so I wouldn't want to say for sure.

Sarah McDonald talked about this at the AATE/ALEA National Conference today as being reflective of the 'Boy Crisis' fed to us by the media. McDonald is an English teacher, Vice-President of the South Australia English Teachers' Association, and an active researcher at Flinders University of gender construction in relation to the discipline of English. She identifies the 'Boy Crisis' as focused mostly on 'literacy and reading as markers for underachievement in boys', and outlines some of the problematic discourse that surrounds the deficit in the reading habits of young males. McDonald has also established a helpful timeline that demonstrates how this terminology emerged:

1. Policies on providing equal learning opportunities for girls began to emerge in the 1980s in response to the 1973 Karmel Report.
2. By 1993, data starts demonstrating that girls are ahead of boys in most areas.
3. The media begins to ask "What about the boys?"

McDonald seeks to identify the ongoing issue in the conversations around this issue, and pinpoints this through the assertion that the way we approach literacy for boys is very much a perpetuation of 'constructions of hegemonic masculinity'. She substantiates this through analysis of websites designed to get boys reading, and the way they reinforce assumptions about masculinity and, in particular, assumptions about masculinity in relation to literacy.

The sites that McDonald cites are:

• Ideas for Getting Boys into Reading
• Guys Read
• Boys Read

It's interesting as these websites are representative of a metanarrative that surrounds comparatively poor literacy rates amongst boys in Australia.

Celebrated Australian author James Moloney, in the first of the aforementioned websites, demonstrates quite a lot of the problematic behaviour surrounding boys and the practice of reading. This includes the positioning of mothers and female teachers as those to primarily blame for the construction of gender in this area. According to McDonald, Moloney suggests that 'boyish' texts centre around the gross, the dirty, the gory, and the curse-wordy, and that female adults play a big role in censoring this stuff due to their own value judgements in regards to this content. Boy-interests are 'subversive' and this is why they don't get to read the things they 'like'.

The problem here, of course, is that it's a generalisation. The attachment of particular genres to particular biological sexes is part of the construction of masculinity as a gender stereotype. In the presentation, McDonald hilariously points out the ludicrousness of the idea that a book about sport will appeal to those who play sport. It's laughable because anyone could see that the two activities have little to do with one another - playing sport and reading about sport are as closely related as going to the gym and conducting chemistry experiments on vitamin compounds. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the liking of sport shouldn't have anything to do with gender or biological sex.

Sarah McDonald's presentation today, whilst informative and intellectually stimulating, could have gone a lot longer - I just wanted to hear more about her research! The above information feels like the tip of the iceberg and she evidently had a lot more to speak about.

I don't know what the solution to the above problem is, but I do know that I will be thinking a lot more carefully about which texts "would be a great text for boys".

Steven L. Layne on Engaging Writers in the Classroom

Professor Layne in action

Steven L. Layne is an American educator and a professor at the Judson University in Illinois. He specialises in curriculum and literacy, and has written nearly 30 books (both fiction and non-fiction). Today I find myself sitting in front of Professor Layne at the AATE/ALEA Cutting Edge Conference in Hobart, Tasmania, as he talks about certain essential truths that get to the heart of how writing exists in the classroom.

He's an engaging presence, which is fitting when you consider that this session is called Engaging Writers in the Primary and Secondary Years, and he starts off his session by getting the room to judge a series of statements/questions on a continuum. The overall consensus from this room of teachers seems to be:

• Writing is one of the most complex subjects to teach.
• Writing is not a subject that most teachers are necessarily equipped to teach well.
• Strong writers have advantages that are significant in society.
• Writing tends to be very personal.
• Sharing writing requires a significant degree of vulnerability.
• Constructive criticism can feel like an attack on the writer (no matter if it's teacher or student).
• Kids don't necessarily see writing in school as an enjoyable activity.

One of the underlying subtexts here is that there's a dearth of methodology, and I guess this is where pedagogues like Professor Layne come in with ideas for explicit instruction of writing. 

He starts with the assertion that building a sense of community is the best way to facilitate efficacy among students. A writing community will assist with breaking down the barriers that prevent students from sharing their work (or even writing in the first place).

Some things that the Professor puts into place to encourage this are (and he gave this information to us teachers at the beginning of his session too, much to our collective relief):

• There will be no collecting of writing.
• He's not going to ask us to share our writing with the person next to us.
• We can trust him.
• We don't need to pull an idea out of thin air, so there is no pressure to come up with original ideas.
• If we have something on our mind to write about, we can do that.
• If we need a stimulus, there will be one available to use.

Professor Layne gave us a stimulus, a song called Ellsworth by a country band called Rascal Flats, which deals with Alzheimer's Disease. The guidelines above applied - we didn't have to follow the stimulus if we didn't want, but there was one interesting addition; the Professor used a document camera to show that he was writing too. 

This helped show us that we had become a writing community. I didn't actually read what he was projecting because I was also busy writing but the point is that it showed us he was writing too. That he was doing the exact same task.

It's a little dark, but that's Professor Layne in the left-hand corner writing while his hand is projected onto the screen.

Furthermore, students can become more comfortable in a classroom-community by being asked to come up the front to share their work (no matter how small). This will eventually become something that they're comfortable with, with the caveat that they never race away after reading (the Professor says this is akin to the student silently apologising for their work). Afterwards, the student/writer stays up the front where they can receive commentary from the class, however, it is important that the other students who give feedback are given time to contemplate directly afterwards before offering any such feedback. This allows for the thinkers to start gathering their thoughts, and means that the student who reads aloud doesn't ever walk away thinking that no one has anything to say (which can be damaging to their self-esteem). The teacher should also use this opportunity to give specific positive feedback, asking for a particular sentence or word or idea to be repeated or explained.

All of these things let the student-writer know that their work matters to this classroom-community. 

Another of Professor Layne's 'Top Tips':

TIP #2: Don't consistently ask students to write a complete piece - target an area and do substantial teaching, thinking, and discussing before assigning any writing. When you do assign something- assign only what is necessary to assess - and what has actually been taught.

For example, get students to focus on Thesis Sentences. Even in writing fiction, there should be a sentence or part that tells the reader what the piece if about. It focuses the text, and it isn't the same as a 'hook' or opener. We can target this skill by giving students a piece of writing, even just a paragraph, and ask them to trace what they were thinking while it was being read to them - what was the story about in their mind when they heard the first part, and then what was it about further into the piece, and at the end? 

From here, what does the student think the thesis sentence is?

Another approach is to give the students a prompt (EG. Identify the best TV show ever and give reasons to support this). Add to this 4-5 possible thesis sentences with various degrees of quality in response to the prompt. It's important to include off-topic thesis sentences and other statements that don't adequately respond to the prompt so that students can see what doesn't work.

Most importantly, this little lesson should be repeated many times with students writing their own statements. This way students have a real chance to learn it.

One of the presenter's books

Anyway, I enjoyed this workshop and got some really great ideas out of it. Thanks Professor Steven L. Layne!

Website: Steven L. Layne, Ed. D