Theodora Johnson

2011 Little Rock Writing Project

Position Paper

1

Next Steps
To whom much is given, much is required. This is the mandate for those of us who have
completed the Writing Project. Actually, the mandate gets personal for me because I have been inundated
with tools and information to build teachers and to raise student achievement levels. I have spent the
entire year of 2010-11 in professional development provided by the Arkansas Leadership Academy
(ALA)/Teacher Leader Institute and now the Little Rock Writing Project, so I cannot go back the same. I
will not be the same Instructional Facilitator I was last year. As a result of being given so much
knowledge through the workshop and the ALA professional development, Ill be a better, more equipped
Instructional Facilitator. As the result of all the PD Ive received this year, I have learned that as a
teacher-leader I have multiple responsibilities: to facilitate PLCs, professional development sessions, and
workshops to empower teachers; to fulfill a leadership role within the building and to work with students
to encourage them to increase their achievement levels. This is a massive amount of work to do, so to
narrow the work load down, my next steps will be to take what I have learned in both the ALA and the
Writing Project and make the central focus of improvement to that of working with teachers to create
student-centered classrooms, and working with students to have them writing to learn.
We are starting a ninth-grade learning community at my school this year, and one action
I plan to facilitate is conducting a book study of Because Writing Matters to acquaint the grade-
level teachers with the strategies in Chapter Two. Donald Graves is quoted in this chapter as
saying the following:
Learning to Write presents: . . . its not effective to teach writing process in a
lock-step, rigid matterif kids dont write more than three days a week, theyre
dead, and its very hard to become a writer. If you provide frequent occasions for
writing, then the students start to think about writing, then the students start to
think about writing when theyre not doing it. I call it a state of constant
composition.
With ninth grade being such a pivotal year for high school learners, the strategies will be
great for the teachers to incorporate in their curriculums. I am willing to test these strategies and
see how they work. Last year, I was asked whether the ninth graders should be writing essays.
The question floored me because I assumed that all ninth graders would and could write essays
by this time. I hope that once the teachers get on board with these strategies, we will be able to
Theodora Johnson
2011 Little Rock Writing Project
Position Paper

2

collaborate and start early on to build a family culture among the students through their writing.
My hope is that by using low- stakes writing, low-stakes assessments, and student voices, both
teachers and students will create safe learning environments in which they can grow
academically and socially. The overall objective of forming a community environment with the
ninth graders is to create a family culture so students will feel unthreatened in the room, raise test
scores, to increase the graduation rate, and to decrease discipline problems.
While at the Academy, the teachers formulated some action steps to put into place for the
next school year that Im going to incorporate into this position paper. They are as follows:
What do you want your students to know and be able to do?
o I want my students to become high-achievers by knowing their content areas and
reaching mastery in them. I want my students to know that failure is NOT an
option. They can fail, but need to understand that they can get back up through
intervention. I want them to be able to think outside the box with their knowledge.
The low-stakes writing assignments and assessments Ive learned about in the Writing Project
will be some first steps to implement to get the students and teachers on track to believe in their
abilities. Teachers will be encouraged to have their students keep learning logs about their
chapters in content areas. This activity will generate higher-order critical thinking skills. I would
also encourage teachers to imitate the activity the teachers did in the writers project: they could
have students take on the responsibility to bring quotes from their reading assignments for the
class to write and talk about during their bell ringer time. The writing and sharing will, I believe,
give the students a safe harbor to learn the joy of writing instead of fearing it.

What student achievement issues are urgent in your school?
o Graduation rate is currently 61.4%
o Not reaching AYP because of IEP students are passing with proficiency.

The low-stakes, culture-based writing assignments would be a great way to pull these lower level
students into writing in a non-threatening way. Using technology to encourage writing is another
low-stakes way to get this subpopulation into writing. For example, showing a You Tube video
and asking the students to write responses to it using sites like Todays Meet, Twitter, or
Facebook, or other social networks encourages a safe way to write without fear of being judged.
Theodora Johnson
2011 Little Rock Writing Project
Position Paper

3

After a comfort level is achieved, teachers could lead them into higher-stakes writing
assignments.

How does this differ from what you are presently doing in your classroom in your
classroom in your school/district?

o The Teacher Leader Institute is different because it is focusing more on student
learning as opposed to teachers teaching. Most of the teachers on my campus
focus more on teaching whole-group lessons instead of allowing students to have
time to work in groups and collaborate to figure solutions themselves.
The Writing Project is different because it promotes a learning environment. One thing I will
take away from it as it applies to this issue is to encourage teachers to present the workshops
during PLCs and for PD. I hope teachers will adopt a feeling of ownership in their professional
development by being responsible for helping other teachers. I also hope that this responsibility
will empower them to feel comfortable while facilitating them in their classes.

The resources that would help me address the achievement issue are
o Instruments to incorporate more technology in the classroom.
o PLCs to empower and teach skills to teachers.
o Professional Development to train teachers to employ more student-learning
strategies such as Differentiated Instruction, increased creativity, and problem-
solving skills.

The workshops, common readings, and research in the articles that weve studied in the Writing
Project have given me both the fodder I need to enrich students writing skills and the skills base
needed to build a safe, low-stakes writing community to help them succeed. Some areas I want to
implement with teachers cooperation are the writing-to-learn concept, the Where Im From
piece, portfolios and reflection writing, and the Whats In A Name Posters. All of the
workshops provided great writing venues, and all of the content-area teachers will see them in
our PLC/Professional Development sessions. Some that I will use for 9
th
grade, with the
teachers approval, are Listography, Multi-genre writing, Whats Your Story?, Flow,
and Dot Stories. I hope these activities and workshops will turn the teachers focus to student
learning and using writing to help the students learn. The project has also armed me with plenty
of information to implement PLCs and staff development with relevant, motivating research-
based materials.
Theodora Johnson
2011 Little Rock Writing Project
Position Paper

4


I will also continue to increase the use of technology in classrooms. One of the first steps
to get that started is to train teachers during PLCs. We will start with basic programs like Word
documents and scaffold to sites on the web, such as Web 2.0, Edutopia, Prezi, and Livebinders to
name a few. I will also lead the way to start a Professional Learning Network so teachers can
connect to current trends on sites like getaflipchart.com or RSS and blog about them with one
another for 21rst century staff development.
In reference to bringing technology into the classrooms, I like what I read in Troy Hicks
book, The Digital Writing Workshop. He speaks of teacher researchers like Donald Graves,
Donald Murray, and Lucy Calkins and their ideas that have implemented writing workshops;
then, he asks the question: What happens in the writing workshop when we introduce digital
writing tools and processes? The answer: By bringing a laptop into this writing workshop, it
creates new opportunities and challenges in the teaching of writing that the previous authors
discussing the writing workshop model or the use of particular technology tools have not fully
addressed (Hicks 3). I agree with him. Allowing our digital natives to write in their element
would not only boost their confidence in their writing, but it would create student-led learning
opportunities for them. I would love to see them set up presentations using Prezi or Xtranormal.
In Xtranormal they have to write the scripts for the characters in the movie. That is a great
venue for low-stakes writing. They could deepen their writing ability by creating multimodal
essays and research papers. They could also create anthologies of their class assignments to show
their parents, school officials, or peers.

The Writing Project has been an empowering event for me this summer. Although I will
use what Ive learned with my teachers this year, I will be campaigning to bring the Institute to
our school. I cannot wait to see the outcome.






Theodora Johnson
2011 Little Rock Writing Project
Position Paper

5


Work Cited
Hicks, Troy. The Digital Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009.