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Posts from the ‘Guest Post’ Category

Sep 23

Thinking of Using EdTech AI Inside a Writing Classroom? Focus on Small, Strategic, and Humane

by Mary Ehrenworth and Philip Seyfried; Co-authors of AI & Reading Instruction; AI-Enhanced Literacy; AI- Supported Teaching for Multilingual Learners

There are ways that AI can help you amplify your best writing teaching. It can help you get more feedback to more kids more quickly. It can help you better see your multilingual learners’ gifts. It can help you offer grammar lessons based on kids’ individual writing. It can study kids’ writing and suggest strategic partnerships. These are among the many surprisingly beautiful and helpful ways that AI can extend your powers as a writing teacher. We’ve worked with EdTech AI in many classrooms, and we see kids’ faces when they receive immediate, warm, expert feedback as soon as they write. We’ve seen teachers breathe as they realize their twenty-three fifth graders, or one hundred and twenty-three ninth graders, will each get a personal, specific compliment and a tip, today, as soon as they draft, freeing teachers up to help kids implement that feedback.

We’ve also felt the palpable anxiety of English and ELA teachers as they consider how AI might shift the balance of humanity in their classrooms. It’s good to be cautious, to be careful. After all, school is a place where young people learn to share parts of themselves and deepen their connections with the community of learners around them. Any technology that diminishes our young people misses the mark, but when used well, technology can help them flourish. Focusing here on EdTech AI, that gives kids an AI thought partner and coach, such as Flint, SchoolAI, MagicSchool, here are five practical tips for introducing AI in ways that may deepen the humanity in your classroom.

  • Focus on more strategic technology use, not more screen time. Nobody wants kids on screens more – not parents, not teachers, and (this is less clear), not most kids. So, don’t think about ‘AI class periods.’ Think about short, controlled, strategic doses of high impact feedback and coaching. For example, in a writing unit that spans three weeks, students might get feedback three times across the writing process, from their EdTechAI partner, each time for a five to ten minute session.
  • Set up your EdTech chats to offer thoughtful, manageable, controlled feedback. Remember that AI is programmed to be helpful. That means that it will often do not only what you ask it, but more. If you invite it to offer kids feedback on their work, it will offer a lot of feedback. It may offer to help kids draft. We usually tell our EdTech AI that we want it to focus on feedback that will help kids not only with this piece, but as a writer overall. We suggest that it gives three compliments and three possible next steps. We tell it not to draft for students, with the exception of sometimes giving a one sentence example.
  • Insert AI ‘partner’ chats between peer partnerships. Imagine that Sara and Amber have done a little drafting on their literary essays, and each has spent five or ten minutes getting some compliments and next steps. Now, each of them can jot some notes, and then meet as a peer partnership, to share the feedback they got, and strategize about which of these next steps they want to try. The AI feedback is just a first step in their peer partnership work.
  • Teach kids to negotiate AI feedback, to make their own choices, and to be metacognitive. We usually set our EdTech chats for kids so that their AI partner will give them more than one next step or tip. That way, you teach students to make thoughtful choices and develop agency. They can work with you or a peer partner to negotiate these choices. Partnerships can also study the quality of AI feedback – good EdTech AI will offer feedback that is warm and specific. Students can learn about feedback, so they can strengthen their own abilities to give feedback to peers.
  • Teach kids to come to AI with ‘Brain-first’ work, and to learn to train their AI partner. We’ve written a lot about the idea of brain-first work in our books. The idea is that you teach students to come to AI with notes, ideas, drafts, goals. When students learn to talk to their AI partner about what kind of support they want, they also learn to train their AI partner. They can learn to tell it how much feedback they want, or when it is getting too bossy, or doing too much. EdTech AI use is apprenticeship for the AI use kids will do outside of school, and we want them to develop a sense of agency.

If you’re thinking of introducing AI into your writing classroom, know that you’re teaching kids about AI use as well as about writing. We want to introduce thoughtful, ethical norms. School is the place where all kids get equal access to learning about technology, and where all kids need to grow as writers. We have a technology now that can help more writers get more feedback, more writers get focused tutoring. Let’s work with it carefully, in ways that amplify the best writing teachers.

Nov 29

NCTE November: Bringing together a Community of Educators

by Liz Corson

I arrived at the Baltimore Conference center on Thursday morning and happily bumped into Pauline Schmidt, PAWLP director, who had invited me to join PAWLP fellows to lead a roundtable the next day. This was my third NCTE conference and, by far, the most transformative, because of how much I felt a part of communities of educators.

One of these is an on-line community of educators. Through @ValBrown’s #cleartheair and #disrupttexts, I began learning from educators of color and reading books such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and White Rage by Carol Anderson and Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed.

At a Thursday workshop on Identity, Inquiry, and Equity, Jess Lifshitz, a 5th grade teacher who I followed on Twitter and through her blogs (https://crawlingoutoftheclassroom.wordpress.com/) shared how she teaches a critical reading process. “We can give them a critical reading process that they can apply to the reading they do in the world and the ways in which they live and interact with others in the world” (J. Lifshitz, NCTE 2019). This is something I am striving to do with my students constantly and year round. 

Another presenter, Sara K. Ahmed, shared the importance of examining our own privileges as well as helping our students to recognize their privileges. On Saturday, I was able to speak with Sara in between sessions in the hall and thank her for her book, Being the Change, that a year ago, gave me the courage to start to explicitly bring identity into my classroom with my fifth graders through choices of texts, topics we study, and discussions we have. 

Tricia Ebarvia, a PAWLP fellow and #disrupttext founder, led us in creating our own timelines and explained how our students’ time lines can be shared and discussed. Tricia shared Beverly Daniel Tatum’s (2000) work, “Who I am? The answer depends in large part on who the world around me says I am” (Tatum, The Complexity of Identity: “Who am I?”).

In addition, I grew closer to the PAWLP community. I became a PAWLP fellow two years ago. I had the pleasure of presenting at last year’s PAWLP day and am a part of the Anti-Bias Book club. Hanging out over dinners in restaurants, sharing pizza in a hotel lobby and talking long after the pizza had gone cold, enjoying s’mores and finding more books to buy, and diving deep into our passions and worries as educators, wives, mothers, and citizens, we connected and I felt lucky to be part of the PAWLP community. 

And that was even before the Sunday brunch when PAWLP directors, Mary Buckelew and Janice Ewing, authors of Action Research for English Language Arts Teachers: Invitation to Inquiry (Routledge, 2019) presented. I had attended their workshop the previous day, along with other PAWLP fellows, and loved being guided by Mary and Janice and Liz Mathews to creatively reflect on my research question through sketching and poetry and sharing. At the brunch, in addition to hearing Mary and Janice talk about action research, we also got hear from Brian Kelley about his use of sketching to help slow down kid watching and noticing, and from Courtney Knowlton who shared her discussion with a colleague that helped her refine her action research, and Liz Mathews’ use of art to reflect. I felt lucky to be a part of such an incredible group of educators and grateful I had been able to spend time with fellow PAWLP educators.

Nov 24

NCTE November: NCTE Stands for Something More

By Chris Kehan

Although NCTE stands for National Council for Teachers of English, after experiencing their national conference in Baltimore, Maryland this weekend I can see those letters standing for something more – Networking, Collecting, and Teaching Excellence.
Walking the long halls and gathering in the rooms enabled teachers an opportunity to network across districts and states.  I was able to talk with teachers from around the country and make connections through our common desire to discover best practices in the teaching of reading and writing and bring them back to our students and colleagues.

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Sitting in each session and writing quickly all of the strategies and amazing quotes provided by the speakers inspired me to continue to grow as a teacher and a person.  I collected numerous strategies and books throughout the days I attended, and I am anxious to share them with my school community when I get back.

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Attending this conference was such a treat.  You find yourself in awe of the teaching excellence that abounds among the presenters, the authors, and the attendees.  I loved my experience and I hope to get another opportunity to attend this incredible conference.  Attending the NCTE Conference is something EVERY teacher should do at least once in their career.

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May 10

Book Review: Sparks in the Dark by Travis Crowder and Todd Nesloney

by: Anne Busciacco, Marissa Caldwell, Lauren Foley, Erika Hunsicker, Tom Lang & Dan Lonsdale

sparks in darkNavigating through a maze of students absorbed in their independent reading books, I pause before Ryan. Our second-day-of-school conversation echoes in my mind . . .
“I don’t like to read,” he declared, doubtful seventh grade would change anything.
 His friend, Charlie, smirked at him, “That’s because you only read teacher-assigned books.”
 Now, four weeks later—after interviewing many texts and abandoning two—Ryan sits nestled in a bean-bag chair, engrossed in Booked by Kwame Alexander. During our last conference, he claimed it as one of the best novels he had ever read.
“ # What child have you seen impacted by a different kind of teaching style?” (79).
 In Sparks in the Dark, by Travis Crowder and Todd Nesloney, you will meet a plethora of  students like Ryan whose lives were forever impacted by the power of choice. Read more

Oct 24

2 Comments

Guest Post: Is reabhloideach mise.

by Meg Clementi

b4ce9c74625bfa28595da719e6f32686.jpg-2.gifIs reabhloideach mise.  I am a revolutionary.

As a math teacher, I am questioned by peers as to why I have my students write.  What is
my purpose in asking students to explain their thinking?  Why have I attended conferences, courses and programs whose attendees are comprised of 99% English teachers and Elementary reading and writing teachers?  I stand at the edges, accepting the shaken heads and wonderings of my peers.


Is reabhloideach mise.  I am a revolutionary.

I have my students write because their ability to explain their thinking is important to me.   Their ability to justify their processes and answers is critical.  Their depth of knowledge is essential.  My students write because as their teacher, I demand this level of participation, performance and comprehension from them.  I am not satisfied with them simply renting knowledge and discarding what they have learned as they place their hands on the doorknob and walk out of my classroom for the last time.  I want them to own knowledge.

Is reabhloideach mise.  I am a revolutionary. Read more

Apr 27

2 Comments

Where a Poem Belongs is Here (Guest Post)

by Paul Janezcko

I didn’t start out to be a poet. I started out as a kid in New Jersey, who had two major goals in life: 1) to survive one more year of delivering newspapers without being attacked by Wink, the one-eyed, slobbering, crazed cur that lurked in the forsythia bushes at the top of the hill; and 2) to become more than a weak-hitting, third-string catcher on our sorry Little League team. I failed at both.

I didn’t do much better in school, where I played the part of an affable kid who endured uncountable hours in a desk that was designed, I was convinced, in a 15th-centry Spanish dungeon. Poetry meant no more to me than 1066, George Washington’s wooden teeth, or the chief export of the Belgian Congo, which was, I still recall, flax. The only times I was gifted was on Christmas and my birthday.  Read more

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