NINE PD DAYS. AND IN EDMONTON TO BOOT. HOW GOOD CAN IT BE?

I recently arrived back in Calgary from a nine day stint marking the written component of the ELA 30-1 Diploma Exam.  This year the college sent four English instructors to join around 80 of their colleagues from across the province to toil at in what I always regard as both essential professional development and a profound privilege.  The 8^th and 9^th floors of the Financial Building in downtown Edmonton is a familiar spot for many of us as who regularly coalesce with the 70,000 (give or take) final exam booklets.  These booklets, these prayers for marker kindness are - in all their beguiling individuality - rife with ideas (spanning the irrelevant to the illuminating) and, regardless of their depth and quality, are all valiant attempts by students to wax profoundly upon a writing topic provided.  Days later, instructors stagger home after reading hundreds upon hundreds of the Critical, Personal, Persuasive and, in all manners and degrees of mastery, exploratory written responses.   I know with certainty there isn’t one of us “assessors” who doesn’t smile tiredly in wonder at this remarkable opportunity.  This because we are actually blessed to enter into the creative and critical minds of Grade 12 Alberta students of all ages and backgrounds.  Most if not all of these student writers are seeking, under a decidedly challenging and time-constrained exam process, to write effectively and in turn start to realize their post-secondary plans.  Performing well on the English 30-1 or 30-2 final exam is a must for moving on.  To liberally quote just about any admission officer at any post-secondary institution, “The rest of your grades are okay but I need to know how you did in English?”

When the session is done, I blinker my way home to Calgary to fashion more fully in my mind some new perspective on this experience.  Here I’d like to reflect a little on why this particular professional development opportunity is, to my mind, so valuable for English instructors.  But first, just a quick bit on ELA “importance” through the eyes of the prompt.

THE JANUARY 2014 ELA 30-1 EXAM WRITING PROMPTS

In ELA 30-1, students were asked this year (as usual) to write two pieces, a Personal Response and a Critical Essay.  Year in and year out, the writing prompt has been the same for both the Personal and the Critical.  This year a change was made.  The Personal Response prompt was:  “How do significant events impact our ability to determine our destiny?”  The Critical Essay writing prompt had “kindness” substituted for “significant events” thereby narrowing the focus a little. (The next part is not as "quick")

ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS HUMANIZES US

I have been asked, more than a few times, “Why in ($#&^@*$) is writing about something that seems so impractical as how kindness impacts our ability to determine our destiny important?   How is that going to help someone get or even keep a job?”  And more:  “People just need to learn specific skills.  They have to communicate clearly about what they do, for sure, but why about something as nebulous as kindness and destiny?"

Well, writing – the primary way of digging into and lending some actual shape to actual ideas -serves to solidify and aid us in our understanding in what we all know about and struggle with as human beings.  A full and even effective existence is made up of broad-reaching important concepts and the complex behaviours that define them.  It is very important to give some thought to not just what kindness or destiny might actually “be” in our lives but also to be asked in a serious moment of one’s life (an important final exam) to try communicating clearly about the wonderful and puzzling complexity of how we behave toward each other and what our path in life is or might be. All of us have faced “types” of kindness that can be both supportive and manipulative.  Most of us have been “cruel to be kind”, too.  Sometimes we use kindness to save ourselves from despair.  Does kindness even matter much when where we are heading is fixed in stone?  On and on the ideas around such a writing topic might and can go. 

 

English instructors love this stuff.  We also love assisting students in their taking a focused view of excellent writing.  Why not explore Hamlet from the standpoint of kindness?  Why not think about what this behaviour might actual do to a character’s personal abilities?  What does this all mean in terms of where any of the play’s characters are going in our lives?  Does kindness in some unique way alter or confirm what they individually define as their “Destiny?” 

Again, these speculations both in terms of ourselves and in terms of meaningful texts broaden our perspectives and perceptions of what it means to be a human being.  To nurture these thoughts can help us excel in communicating something of purpose in light of a great play, a novel or short story and can, by default, enlighten whatever life tasks all of us confront, relish and endure.  English instructors choose significant texts for their students that kindly enable these speculations.  We try to support and build the skills that allow students to synthesize their personal ideas in the light of these texts so that they can springboard with them to even more complex and critical investigations both with reference to literary art and also in their personal lives.  ELA instructors help students to build upon their proficiencies to interpret strong texts (for marks) and in doing so contribute to an environment within which they can better determine their individually-embraced postsecondary “destiny”.   Get or even keep a job?  What professional recruiter wouldn't want to consider hiring a thoughtful, personally reflective and critically engaged person? 

And so…

*To sit at a table with ELA practitioners for a sustained period of time immersed in the good, the bad, the ugly and the transcendentally beautiful ideas Alberta students endow for our humble and accurate assessment is at the bedrock of our practice.  There is no better way I know of becoming a reflective part of a provincial family of thinking people than to swim through and around their communicated mistakes, their shared creative insights, their unguarded and ill-conceived judgments and their confidently discerning spiritual understandings.  Instructors find themselves in a crucible of ideas that scream towards our very best practice.  We learn again and again what, why and how writing works or doesn't and we are able to sharpen our assessment skills in ways that are quite simply profound.  English Language Arts is vitally important and we come away from the marking sessions knowing with certainty why this is so.  Any good musician will tell you that practice, practice, practice is essential.  This is our best practice.*

WE ARE ACTUALLY ABLE TO QUANTIFY THE WRITTEN EXPRESSIONS OF THESE NEBULOUS THINGS

Some smiles early on.  That's Murray in the back.

We have the “bedsheet”.  This is just a homier way of saying Rubric.  For 9 days we all repeatedly refer to the large 11X17 “English Language Arts Scoring Categories and Scoring Criteria” as we plow, skip, swim, wade, drag and fly through exam after exam.  We read carefully the introductions, the body of the texts and the conclusions keeping in mind categories of Thought and Understanding, Supporting Evidence, Form and Structure, Matters of Choice and Matters of Correctness to assess within each of these categories if the student’s attempt is Excellent, Proficient, Satisfactory, Limited, Poor or, alas, Insufficient. 

This has been often described by even highly-experienced markers as “working with mercury”.   To grasp and confine this mercurial material, we break daily from the marking to face “Reliability Reviews”.  These are concocted by the few best and most experienced markers holding positions as “Standards Confirmers”.  They are forever on the lookout for student writing that will generate a broad range of assessment.  These are texts that might look ever-so persuasive in terms of textual evidence but really offer inaccurate support.  These tricky ones might appear subtle and distinctive but are, in fact, incomplete or merely plausible at best.   These samples texts come with a carefully crafted critical analysis to be revealed later.  The markers get the puzzle text, quietly grade it and then explain (hiding their nervousness) how their evaluations were made.  Then the “answer sheet” (a beautifully composed category-by-category analysis) comes out and we are kindly given a good dose of what it is to be “reliable” in our efforts to grade accurately. 

*This reliability process is, in itself, vital.  Instructors that experience this hothouse pd can not only be assured of their accurate assessment of our college’s own important Equivalency Exams but they can also use this hand’s on experience to shape ongoing English course development.  Through this process, we learn what is clearly required to meet and exceed each grading criteria; we can identify what writing obfuscations and misdirections can cleverly look like and, as a result, give us the intellectual pause to address these tendencies; and we can build our understandings of how missed or poorly-planned instructional opportunities actually serve to impact weak and/or generalized student writing.  We can shape within ourselves a deep and real understanding of how to encourage students to write with purpose and insight.    

Through these accumulative perceptions we can actually be reborn as instructors.  We can come away from this marking hothouse with vital understandings that can most-decidedly impact our ability to alter our student’s postsecondary destinies.  We can buttress our course construction with the valuable knowledge gained from these 9 long days in Edmonton and we can find new energy to approach our student’s essential English writing needs with the kindness that comes from real sensibility.*

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“The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” (NCTE – National Council of Teachers of English) outlines the “Essential Habits of Mind” for writing that meets “college readiness”.   These “habits” keep peeking out at markers and become more and more real for instructors who read and read and read student attempts to realize them.  It is the repetitiveness of this busy place of assessment that confirms its value as the highest-level professional development.  Instructors do not just grow to re-know what they need to do to in terms of designing more effective learning and writing opportunities they also come face to face with all the old instructional demons.   From the Framework:  “Standardized writing curricula or assessment instruments that emphasize formulaic writing for nonauthentic audiences will not reinforce the habits of mind and the experiences necessary for success as students encounter the writing demands of postsecondary education.” 

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What are these “habits of mind”, according to the NCTE? 

Curiosity, Openness, Engagement, Creativity, Persistence, Responsibility, Flexibility and Metacognition.

*Our marking attempt after attempt after attempt made by students to:  know more about their world, consider new ways of being, invest in their learning, use novel approaches, sustain their interest, take ownership, adapt to situations and to reflect open their own thinking actually does “reform” one’s professional understanding and commitment.* (For a lovely expansion along these lines see Michael Gaschnitz’s http://acfonthesamepage.blogspot.ca/2014/02/creativity-tools-not-light-bulbs.html)

WHAT STUDENTS WROTE

To close, I thought I would share just a few of the remarkable controlling ideas (or thesis statements) offered by some of the student papers that caught my eye.  Remember the writing prompt? 

“How does kindness impact our ability to determine our destiny?” 

 “When an individual neglects kindness, assuming that it will not better his destiny, it will trigger a lifestyle of materialistic, shallow, egocentric habits resulting in nothing worth living for.”

“When attempting to discover one’s own true destiny, unclouded by the influence of others, an individual must recollect on their past treatment of peers and decide whether or not they truly deserve to know their own destiny.”

“The belief that a person’s path in life is predetermined is only an excuse.  The truth about destiny is that an individual is able to decide upon their fate based on their actions.  Kindness, itself, specifically kindness to and from others, plays a minimal role in determining one’s destiny.  Kindness takes a back seat to ability and effort.”

“It is better to be kind than right” is true, but it can only go so far.  When it interferes with destiny one must be willing to make themselves a priority instead of the happiness of others.  Excessive kindness permits others to force their desires on to an individual, diverting them from their true course.  Achieving one’s dreams and destiny is a possibility only when one doesn’t permit kindness to interfere.“

“When an individual is kind in nature, they often allow their destiny to be chosen for them and let others be happier.”

“Kindness to others can only serve to create ‘issues’”.

“The simple act of kindness can mean the world to an individual faced with a personal struggle.  The most meaningful gifts are not wrapped in paper or made of plastic.”

*What a privilege.*

Murray Ronaghan