Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Karen R. Harris
Dr. Karen Harris talks to us about Self-Regulated Strategy Development, elements of and strategies for writing instruction, and how social inequities can influence learning. Dr. Harris is best known for developing the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model of strategies instruction. Her research, which has primarily been conducted in under-served schools, focuses on effective instruction for complex learning areas. Karen has conducted research on the SRSD model of instruction for learning to write, as well as close reading to learn followed by writing to inform or persuade among students in inclusive classrooms. Self-Regulated Strategy Development has been deemed an evidence-based practice by the Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearing House and there are now over 200 studies of SRSD for writing across several countries. Dr. Karen R. Harris is Regents Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University.
Resource list mentioned in this episode: https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/s/SRSD-resourcesinfo-list-11823.docx
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Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. In each episode I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences. In this episode, Dr. Karen Harris talks to us about self regulated strategy development, elements of and strategies for writing instruction, and how social inequities can influence learning. Dr. Harris is best known for developing the self regulated strategy development or SR SD model of strategies instruction. Her research, which has primarily been conducted in underserved schools focuses on effective instruction for complex learning areas. Karen has conducted research on the SRS D model of instruction for learning to write, as well as close reading to learn, followed by writing to inform or persuade among students and inclusive classrooms. self regulated strategy development has been deemed an evidence based practice by the Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse and there are now over 200 studies of s RSD for writing across several countries. Dr. Karen R. Harris is Regents Professor Emeritus and research professor at the Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink. And join me your host Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Karen, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Karen Harris:Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
Lindsay Persohn:So from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Karen Harris:Absolutely. I had my first experience in education as a tutor in high school. I had a wonderful teacher in high school, I've moved about every three years, I hit this high school that was progressive, and it was college oriented. And before that, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And I got involved in this tutoring program. We were tutoring elementary grade children who had moved into inner city Chicago in at that time, what was a very low income area, and primarily Appalachian families. So they were coming from the mines, West Virginia and other places. And working with that young girl and learning from this professor opened my eyes to the lack of equity in this country and to the impact of poverty on children. That young girl I tutored happened to be white. But there were children of various races living in this area. And it was a uniform impact across children that was highly negative. So I understand and I and I know that in this country, far more children proportionately live in poverty who are children of color. But what I saw was the leveling effect of poverty in general. And my heart went out to these families, I visited the child's home. Her parents were caring and deeply wanted her to do well. But there were eight or nine people living in a one bedroom apartment difficult for her parents to help her with her schoolwork because she was getting into things by middle elementary school that they weren't able to help her with. And just that whole big scenario of what goes on. In fact, maybe one of the most illuminating experiences from that was my best friend and I invited our little girls for a sleepover. And we drove out of the city into what was then country now it's all city in that area, but the girls immediately became anxious and disoriented. We learned later that they had not been more than four or five blocks away from their own homes and their school. And then they saw cattle and fields and we stopped to eat and we thought it would be fun for them. We went to a restaurant where you threw peanut shells on the ground and it was just a fun place but they were totally overwhelmed with the whole thing. And they order hamburgers, but they came with grill marks on and they hadn't seen that before and they didn't want to eat. And then we didn't even make it to our, our houses for the sleepover our homes, they wanted to go. And so we took and to understand that by third or fourth grade to have your life impacted so negatively, and so strongly by that lack of experience that so many of us take these experiences for granted, going to zoos going on vacation things that these, these girls had never done. And I ended up choosing to teach my first teaching placement was in West Virginia, in a coal mining community, because I wanted to continue working with to face these challenges. And I learned a lot more from my fourth graders that year. So those are two things that have stayed with me throughout my entire career and have pretty much affected everything I've done.
Lindsay Persohn:Karen, your story reminds me of how many assumptions we tend to bring to life in general, but certainly to teaching situations, it made me think about, you know, in my positionality, in Central Florida, we tend to think that every kid knows about Disneyworld and the beach. But it's just not the case. You know, when you live 45 minutes from the coast, that doesn't mean that every kid has been there. And so just you mentioning that the children you worked with hadn't been more than four or five blocks from home. It really does reframe experiences all together, and what we might think we know about people and their interests, their experiences, their relationship with the world around them. And yeah, I think it's so important for us as teachers to first learn about kids and who they are, and where they come from, and what they like and what they don't like, and you know what they've experienced so that we can relate with them better, right, and then provide opportunities that make sense to them. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us.
Karen Harris:Well, I fell into that assumption that if you live near the ocean, you must have been to the beach, both in my team and I our work in Florida, and our work just recently in California in in very low income underserved schools. And we use acronyms to help children remember major elements of the genre, people often misunderstand that all we're teaching are acronyms because we tend to say things like, Oh, we're learning tide, or we're doing tree, but tide is an acronym that we use for the parts of informative writing. And parts are only a little bit you have to learn so much more. But the parts are pretty critical. And I kind of thought kids would understand that a tide was it rolls in, it's powerful. And title, make your writing roll. And, and you know, it would turned out very quickly, we realized that some of these kids had not seen the beach. And we could either use a little video to give them the concept of what a tide was. Or we could just kind of act it out. So they would understand. And they'd love to do motions and chants as well. So that all worked out. But boy, again, I'm like, I've been at this for 50 years, I should have known better. So just exactly what you said.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, I think it takes those little moments to remind us to kind of check ourselves and check our assumptions. So yeah, yeah, it's true. It's very true. So Karen, what do you want listeners to know about your work?
Karen Harris:Well, mostly, I wanted teachers and administrators and anyone else interested. I also work often with speech language pathologists who get involved in in the instruction in such wonderful ways. But what I really want them to know is that we now have about 200 studies of self regulated strategy development instruction for writing shortened to SRSD, probably not the best name I could have come up with, maybe I should have come up with something more like grit, but it is what it is. And it took a long time to get to that final name. And so I'm not changing it any further. But the most important thing is that it works. Not only does it work, but in part because teachers aren't prepared to teach writing. That's just a fact in this country, very, very little. In service preparation and writing. Most teachers report having gotten only one session or an hour in a course on reading. And then the professional preparation they get after graduating with their degree tends to be either centered around a commercial curriculum, or readers and writers workshop, and I love Readers and Writers Workshop, but it is too limited to meet the needs of a large majority of our students. So I would like to just start with look, this works here. Kids move up a great deal in their capabilities, we now have several states that are beginning to use it even as low as kindergarten, the kindergarten teachers wanted in. So they're in, and what they came up with the background knowledge and the fun and the little plays they put on and all, but all of it aimed at this academic language and understanding of the kinds of writing that we do for other people, whether it's a play and how we want it to be fun, and they just start doing so wonderfully. The younger we start, the better most of these children are in writing by second grade, third grade, fourth grade. And if we carry it forward, they're learning really powerful writing strategies and capabilities for middle school and high school. So if we could get this scaled up, and in the hands of more teachers, that would be so critical. And I guess the second thing that's really important to me to emphasize, is that SRSD is in no way scripted, that there's a huge faith in teachers. And it is absolutely necessary to differentiate SRSD instruction. It's one of the key tenets. Yes, there are components. Yes, there are six general stages of instruction, you need to use all of that. But you need to break your classroom up into small groups of some one on one, a lot of peer work that really helps both the peer who's more ahead and the peer who is not quite there was so much that teachers have to decide what and how to do in their own classrooms. This is a tool designed for teacher leadership. It's not designed like a curriculum, and I understand what writing curriculums are up against this commercial ones. And I have helped with a couple of them. And they want to do everything as evidence based as they can. But you've got three states in this country that control writing, curriculum and instruction. And when they want 24 forms of writing taught in fourth grade, there are 24 forms of writing taught in fourth grade. But we do not open a book and say you do this today for 20 minutes and this tomorrow. The pacing is Teacher controlled, but students need to meet initial criteria. As they move forward. They meet that criteria and they move into something more complex and more challenging. I guess one more thing I'll add this is getting to be a long answer. But it is not a panacea. SRSD instruction in writing is powerful, but it's only part of what students need to learn. It has to be integrated with evidence based practices in handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, and vocabulary. We just did our first set of studies Yong Kim at University of California, Irvine, and I and our team just did our first set of studies where we actually put those together, first and second graders learning close reading, and marking up text and writing to inform. And the text is all aligned with Next Generation Science Standards. And that study is now coming out. We learned a lot about first grade, this was an initial grant, we are fine tuning our first grade expectations and progression based on teacher feedback and Kid feedback. Our first graders were amazing. Our second graders were amazing. Everybody improved, everybody didn't start at the same place and improvement didn't always get every child to the same place. We were only there long enough to teach the initial close reading, marking up of texts, and then writing then that needed to be followed by and we have strategies for editing and revising. And then that needs to be followed by further sophistication. It's, you've learned the beginning. Where are you going to take this now goal setting is done for every student. Some goals are across the whole classroom. But otherwise, goals are differentiated. And you have to work at meeting students where they are, meet them where they are. And if schools would just give us the time. We could take them so much further in schools gave us more time than normal, but not enough time to keep going from there. So that is a long term goal and inspiration for me, a couple of states are doing this. Teachers have gotten together and created an across grades curriculum. This is what will happen in kindergarten, first grade and second grade and on through fifth and sixth grade and my understanding is several states are now working on Middle School in high school and the outcomes in those schools. The gains are so positive, but you administrators you need to work with your teachers and give them the time that it takes SRSD is also used in reading, and not just reading for writing, but in reading, to learn, writing in response to text, and so forth. So, I'm going to be leaving a resource list that will give you access to a great deal more information, where the books are how you can learn these strategies, that, Oh, there's all kinds of free videos on YouTube. And so that will be there to be to be helpful to teachers who want to go further. And there are two companies, both of which I voluntarily advise, I have no financial relationship with either and they'll be on the resource list SRSD online and think SRSD, and they put up a ton of free materials, and videos. So for anyone who's interested, and leaves here going, Yes, I want my kids to be able to do all this. It was amazing to see our second graders, and our first graders markup text really well. So they they were learning while they did that, because they could find the big idea that topic sentence, they could find important things people need to learn and know, and are more advanced second graders who were ready for it could add details to those important things. And they knew how to craft a good ending. And in the opening, they knew how to hook a reader. Now, I would love all teachers to have access to this. We don't sell it as a commercial curriculum. It's not that I would be against somehow being able to do that. But that's not what writing curriculum companies right now are looking to invest in. We're trying to give it away for free as much as we can. And we'll continue trying to do that. It's not just me, it's it's all the SRSD research community will freely share their materials for teachers and students.
Lindsay Persohn:That's wonderful that and thank you for so much for that Karen, will make sure that the resource page is posted to your guests page on the classroom caffeine website, and we can link to it in your show notes as well. So thank you, thank you for that. There are a couple of things that that really struck me as you were talking and I think first was one of my own moments in teaching that may be kind of stop and regroup was when I first started teaching pre service teachers, college students. And after reading their writing, I thought, why don't I understand what they're trying to convey to me. And sometimes I remember thinking, it's like, we're speaking two different languages, what I've asked for and what they submit. And I realized in that moment, it was because those students I was teaching, they were brought up in the traditions of five paragraph essays. And so when I asked for anything that wasn't a five paragraph essay, it seemed as though you know, if we weren't to kind of unpack this, like what's going on here, they weren't sure how to handle a writing task that was outside of really that singular structure, they had been taught for a test. And so it reminds me that generationally in teaching, and particularly, I think, for some of our newest teachers, teaching, writing has got to be really difficult when you don't have writing strategies yourself. Right, exactly. And I'm sure that you, I know you found some of this in your own studies, which is why I'm so grateful for those professional development resources for our listeners, because it's, you know, again, you can't teach what you don't know. And so I think that that's such a critical component of what we're talking about here is that yes, for young people, for the school age children that we are teaching, it's so important for them to learn how to write because we know that writing gives us power in the world, we know that writing is a tool to share our own voice. But when writing is reduced to a task for school taught to you by someone who also experienced writing as a task for school, so much of that power is gone. Yes. Right. And so is there anything else that you that you want to share in relation to those ideas around, you know, that kind of generational impact of what writing looks like and how we can work to collectively boost our efficacy in writing and sharing our thoughts?
Karen Harris:Oh, so much. Let me start with a couple of things that really popped into my head as you were putting forth that information in question. It's important to say for me over and over again, that I love Writer's Workshop. But it's not enough. And unfortunately, one of the things we're not doing in this country and in direct response to your question, what do we need to do? We need to quit pledging allegiance to some single way of teaching writing writers workshop, I mean, Don graves, I started the development of SRSD in the 1980s and Don graves was very important to me, but Don graves himself said in an interview later in his career, and I can put the reference on the resource list for you. He was asked him really hard questions by this interview. And the interviewer directly wanted to know he thought writing was better. And what Don said was, I see a whole lot more writing going on. But I don't see better writing. And nobody listened. This is the father of the whole thing. I mean, yes, Lucy Calkins, others, but really it was Don Graves who started it in my opinion and just reading the literature from the 80s. Forward. There were other wonderful people who took it further to get to college to highs, I mean, it was just wonderful work. But what was happening, as Don said, For Later in the same interview, we need to teach other things, kids need to be able to spell they need to be able to handwrite they need to know conventions. And we're not doing that. And what happened, I think so often happens when a movement takes hold people reimagine Writer's Workshop in a way that wasn't quite what was initially meant. And people turn to vygotsky, so many readers, but vygotsky, vygotsky, this is all vygotsku. And this is what vygotsky said. And I think, but that's vygotsky is rolling in his grave. The truth is that vygostsky wrote about how critical adults are in learning. He wrote about how critical adults were in guiding learning. Oh, he didn't promote, stand and deliver. But the whole concept of Stand and Deliver That's so old, we have moved away from that decades ago. And there are times when stand and explain and discuss are absolutely critical and important. And there are times when Guided Discovery and supported scaffold of discovery are also critically important. And we we are divided up in this country, into pro Writers Workshop, anti writers workshop, and the misunderstandings and the lack of preparation for teachers only make this worse. So that's a first a first response. My second response is that I'm a little tired of the arguments over and this is not how you intended it at all. But in my circles, hearing constantly about how awful the five paragraph essay is, there's nothing wrong with a five paragraph essay, it's a starting point to be able to do that much. What is wrong with this, that's the only thing that's expected and the only thing you learn, so you get the situation you described, right? So students need to learn to write for so many purposes for for example, Linda Mason and her colleagues have done wonderful work on writing in response to reading. They have done wonderful work on writing to sum up what you've learned, but without worrying so much about a five paragraph essay or a paragraph structure even so that you are capturing key points for your own learning. They've done all kinds of wonderful work that isn't necessarily genre based, a specific genre, the big three, of course, being narrative, persuasive, argumentative, and inform, and the all of that matters. Now, we have kids in our third and fourth grade work, who are not yet even able to do a five paragraph essay. And is that an inappropriate goal to get them to understand that the introduction doesn't just have to be a sentence and a hook. But it can say more, even further engage the reader. And now that you can write more, let's even write more. And then let's figure out ways to chunk this for the reader and say more about each main thing we want to get across, again in ways that engage the reader. And those are called paragraphs. And it's nice if you can have two or three. And then you need a good ending. But what about kids who are ready to write seven or eight paragraphs, we have one kid, we get high performing writers in our work. And even in some of these lower income communities that we're in, there are parents who are able to help or there's tutoring or there's an older sibling, or these kids are have that they just really glom on. That's my scientific word to writing and it goes well for them. And it's easier for them than others. And we get kids who are writing two or three pages, I'm not going to tell them to write less. So what we do, the goals that we set for students are differentiated by where are they coming out. And that means that every student starts by writing something for their teacher the best they can do, but it's not going to get a grade. Let me see what you can do. And it might be writing to tell about one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to you is sort of personal narrative, or inform or persuade one group of kids that we worked with we did. They read a lot of different texts on different topics and one of them was all the wonderful things you can do in Orlando. of Florida. And then the task was right to persuade your classmates that your class trip should go to Orlando, Florida, we read other things like put all about putting on a play. And they wrote to their principal, which they actually did. And they got to put on a play, and so forth and so on. So writing to persuade they love writing your opinion, writing something you want. This is children love this from first grade, right on up to upper elementary, we got a whole lot of kids who went home and wrote letters to their parents, and often got something they wanted, including a little girl who came back to school, she'd done it all it was it had a great hook. And she shared it with the teacher, she wanted a pet. And she named the pet and she named all the things she would do to take care of it. And she then went on about what she would learn by having a pet. It was beautifully done by the parents couldn't have that particular pet right now. So she felt like she had failed. And the teacher said, Well, you need to understand and we emphasize this, just because you can write to persuade doesn't mean you're going to persuade people all the time. You did your best. Did you talk to your parents about why and then write to them again? Anyways, it worked. And we had a little girl who wanted to sleep over but she had unfortunately, been asking for one that evening. And she wrote a beautiful persuasion letter to her parents. But being in third grader, she wanted it tonight. And she came back similar to the other little girl. So I failed was didn't work. And the teacher said, knowing this tune, she said, by any chance. Were you asking for the sleep over tonight? Little girl said Yeah. And she so what do you think might happen? If you asked about planning asleep over in advance, and you rewrote your letter to your parents, and she did and she got her sleep over. And again, she promised to be responsible, they would go, you know, be quiet and go into the bedroom when they were told to they would clean up after themselves. It was a great experience for her and the parents were thrilled. So there is so much more students need to learn, and that interacting with your audience is such a big part of it. So
Lindsay Persohn:yeah, I would agree. I think all of that is so important also. And it also made me think about writing for authentic audiences and how much power there is in that for kids rather than just, you know, writing to my teacher, because it's a class assignment, you know. And I think that these are our big ideas that as we are planning for writing instruction, they have to be considered right, in order to really get the most out of the time that we are able to spend on writing instruction. I wanted to get back to some other ideas that you'd mentioned. Because I think that we know that the handwriting debate was was really hot topic, even politically for a while about kids, and handwriting. But in my mind, that's largely misunderstood, right, because you know, handwriting is really writing fluency. And maybe typing is taking some of that place. But I don't think, you know, just like when e readers came along, and everybody predicted print books would go away, just because we have computers, it doesn't mean that we're never going to have to write anything by hand again. And so you know, understanding that things like handwriting things you mentioned spelling, right, not struggling for how do I spell this word and spending all of our cognitive energy on how to spell a word or how to even put down the sounds that we hear, you know, we need to be able to communicate in more conventional ways so that other readers and writers can understand what we're saying. Same thing for I think, sentence construction, and also even for vocabulary, word choice, right? I think that understanding how they fit into a broader context of writing is just so critically important, because that's how I think we get to what you were talking about with differentiation and, you know, a tool designed for teachers to lead, you know, we have to have a broader understanding of each of these concepts in order to know when to use what so to speak, or when to take up which ideas and what sorts of skill needs our students have, so that they are able to get what they want out of life or to share their message with the world.
Karen Harris:Yeah, and you know, that means that teachers and all of us together need to take more responsibility for whether kids are learning to write or not. So sentence construction, for example, is critical in good writing. But our work from first grade through sixth grade has clearly proven that you can do both together. It is not necessary for students to spend weeks or even a couple of months doing nothing but sentence writing and sentence construction. That is not necessary. And in Writers Workshop, has Donald graves also said in this interview, we can't do it all in conference. We were wrong and On, you have to take control over writer's workshop so that everyone is learning. What we see in so much of the literature on writer's workshop are examples of the very best work that students can do. And we don't see what's happening to the other students. I had a teacher flat out, tell me, if a child isn't reading and writing in the school, there's something wrong with the child. And in fact, I recently listened to to soul the story, which is a whole nother issue. I think phonics is critically important. And as it should be, it's it's certainly highlighted there and highlighted in the reading Wars issue. But there's also a lot more to reading than phonics as she knows the wonderful person who did that podcast, but she had several teachers, teachers who made the same comment that their years in Writers Workshop, they would frequently say, Well, we're doing we're doing it right, we're doing great. So there's something wrong with the child? Well, we have only 27% of our eighth and 12th graders in this country, performing at a proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in writing, that is a disaster. We have a crisis in writing, we've made more progress in reading than we have in writing. One of the problems is too many people assume that if you can read, you can write. And that is a tremendous error. There is so much to learning to write. For. For listeners on the resource list, you'll have the link to a video that I absolutely love. It's a short video by Dr. Deborah Mckeown. And she talks about everything it takes to learn to write, and I just use it all the time. Now, it's titled writing matters, and you can find it on YouTube. But it is incredibly difficult to learn to write. And it takes all these other skills. And we haven't even talked about self regulation of the writing process, and self regulation of me, the writer how I manage myself. And all of this is so critical. But yet Writer's Workshop allows choice and it has all these wonderful aspects. And teachers have owned it and have come up with wonderful ways to get students involved in writing, I would never teach us a child or an adolescent, that I'm working in a classroom with something they can already do. And most classrooms have a huge three to four year grade level spread in writing, just like they have in reading. So by fourth grade, we've got kids who are reading and writing at the first and second grade level. And we have kids in the classrooms who are at the sixth grade level. And that was what I also experienced as a fourth grade teacher SRSD is an opportunity to say, look, I'm going to meet every one of you where you are. I'm going to do this in flexible ways. But I have really powerful things to teach you. from third grade on our first and second graders were such a delight, they had no negative attitudes toward writing, they were excited to learn it. But from third grade on one of the first things we do in SRSD is just a discussion in a group in a safe place about how do you feel about writing? What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say we're going to write today are your teacher gives you a writing assignment and from third grade forward? It's almost all negative. Yes, we get a few kids who put up their hands, like, oh, it's gonna be fun, and I love to write, but the large majority of the classroom are like, I'm no good at this. It's boring. I hate this. And I had one student that was working with a small group who just looked at me and he goes, Look, I was just born this way. And you are never going to be able to teach me to write and this was fourth grade. And what I said to him, and what we explain to the students is that most people feel that writing is hard. And it is hard at times, and at times it is fun. But the reason that you're having trouble with writing isn't because you were born this way. Nobody's born a good writer or bad writer. And we say to them, look, the reason that writing is really hard for you right now is that most teachers don't know a lot about teaching, writing your teachers working with us to learn some things that work and that kids are learning. And kids who felt like you do now know how to write, and they're able to do it and they can enjoy doing it, even though sometimes it's hard. In fact, some of our kids say, as one little girl said in fourth grade, I wish we could clone ourselves and just write all day, and the other kids could go back to the regular classes. And we say to them, if you will agree to learn these really powerful tricks and lower grades, we call them tricks and then we start using the word strategies as well. And if I work hard to teach you and if you agree to work hard to Learn them, you will see how your writing improves. And will you work with us to learn these powerful tricks about writing? And you know, most kids come around and say, yes, they will. And then for some kids who are still resistant, as they're involved in small group and peer and learning, they begin to open up to a superintendent who's on the resource list, you can listen to him talk about how he visited a classroom, where they're doing SRSD across schools and districts. And he was so impressed because the teachers gave them a very challenging writing test to begin on that day. And the kids were thinking and making notes. And you could see that it was difficult for some of them, and one of the young men who was having difficulty, he all of a sudden just raised his fist and said, It is better to try than not to try at all. And the superintendent made a whole blog about this experience in this classroom, and also the kids who after class, came up and told them, I love to write now at why didn't somebody teach us this before, and he was just so moved by all of that. So when students see that they can learn, nothing succeeds, like success. And once you get them started, they want to know more. So that is part of what we do. And we, they do goal setting, and they monitor their progress. And they graph when they achieve their goals. And it's just watching them come alive to writing. And being able to accept Yes, sometimes it's hard. That's the way writing is. But sometimes it's fun. And it's real fun when you've got too good to be. I would say one more thing, I think it's really critical to understand SRST many teachers today model, teachers know that modeling helps, and many teachers out there doing good modeling. But what isn't being done in most classrooms that I visit is true self regulation, modeling. That means that teachers talk themselves through and we don't stand and model and kids just listen, that doesn't work with most students. And when you get to large size classrooms, it really isn't going to work. What we do is we do what's called collaborative interactive modeling. They've learned a lot about the genre, the tricks, they're starting to use them. And the teachers model, thinking out loud, oh, and having trouble. Okay, today, I get to pick a topic. Oh, my God, there's so many things. I don't know what to calm down on now. Okay, the teacher said, I could talk to the teacher about topics or think about what we've been learning or think about something that really matters to me, okay. I can do that. And then she starts interacting with class or he, what are some things some of you are thinking about, you might want to write about, and they start discussing that. And then she says, okay, that helped me. I'm going to do this idea. And then she goes, Okay, how do I get started? I know, I have a trick for this. I know how to start, are very young students learn. Pick your idea. Organize your notes, right? And say more power is an acronym for that. There are others tap to decide my topic, my audience my purpose, we learned that one from teachers in Maryland, three decades ago. And they learn then, okay, that means I have to have an idea. Now I need notes. Alright, how am I going to do that? Oh, I know. I know. This, this acronym for this kind of writing. If it's stories, it's www what equals to how it was to when you get older, it's C space, which is much more involved. ideas I've mentioned for writing to inform the topic sentence the big ideas, explanations and details and ending and tree for writing to persuade is our beginning strategy, topic sentence, at least three powerful reasons why your, your correct and your persuasive. Add details, and then have a good ending. Those are beginning strategies, there are strategies that then go from there and go much further. So I have that. Alright. I know how to make my own note page. So they often start with a graphic organizer, we hand out but many teachers just like, oh, no, they can. They can make it on their own paper. It's gonna go straight from there, like you own it. You need a graphic organizer, but if that's what your class is ready to do, go for it. And it has worked for them. So they learned to make that and it's more structured. It's not one of these webs where kids can get stuck down then they don't know what to do with it. What do I do with this? So it's a bit more structured, but it's flexible, and they learn to Do not just follow the outline blindly. Pow IS pick your idea, organize your notes and write and say more, you're not stuck with your outline. And they add, they reorder. So then they write in all the way through, she talks this out, but she keeps asking them for help. Oh, I'm stuck here. What should I say now we have this one on video, this little girl goes. Fourth grade, oh, you can say to yourself, that this is not boring. This is fun. And it's just hysterical. Every time I share that video with teachers, you know, we all start laughing. And this is a little girl who hated writing and said she'd never be able to write. And you see her through this ASCD video as she progresses and how excited and happy she is. And she does have a learning disability. And she's in an inclusive classroom. But many other students felt just like her who did not have a learning disability. So it's all of these pieces put together that teachers need. And in addition, we use model text. Now, one of the problems that I see in classrooms is that there's excellent model texts read and discussed, but it's not at students writing levels. Okay. Excellent example. I was in a classroom, and I love this book, I wanna Iguana. So it was third grade. And they going back over I wanna Iguana, which they read much younger, but they were choose doing great stuff with it like, so what kind of writing is this? And they knew this was writing to persuade. And what do you like in the book, and they were finding, you know, this was funny, or this, this was really important for the reader to know and know, this little boy wants an Iguana. And so after they did all this great discussion, using some good vocabulary, some good knowledge building, good teacher, excellent teacher, okay, and I want you to write about a pet you want. And you know, think about what might persuade your parents. And she was very good, because it's really misleading if students think they're going to learn how to write to persuade, and then get what they want. Because that's often what they want to write about. And so they have to understand it's a discussion and you're not always going to get what you want. But But she said, let's give it a try. So just try the writing it you don't necessarily, it doesn't have to be something that goes home. But I'd like to see what how you could persuade me or your parents, that you should have a certain pet. Well, the kids were stumped. And then all this behavior goes on pencil sharpening, talking, all this off task behavior. And one of the things we heard we hear most often from our teachers is my kids know how to start. They're not sitting there wasting time, they're not lost. They're not engaging in behaviors that get them in trouble, because they know how to start. They're not sitting there staring at blank paper. They start by writing out their graphic organizer. And they they brainstorm, and we do modeling and brainstorming, and they help with the brainstorm and all this. So we've created for instruction, writing level, excellent models, rather than reading books that students a third grader can't write I wanna Iguanna, but a third grader can write a hook and a good opening and reasons why they should have this pett and some details to go with those reasons. Like, oh, I would learn responsibility and, and details, how would you learn that And anyways, and they get a lot of inspiration from I want to equal on it. But what the teacher found is that when she entered into SRSD learning, and she started SRSD in her classroom, these kids now knew and understood writing to persuade in a way that they had never understood it before. We call it reading with a writer's eye, and she did a great job of that. But then to write, you have to master important knowledge about that genre. Most teachers don't even know that important knowledge they need on genres as genres over the grades become a bit more extended, a bit more challenging, and a bit more intricate. And there's more to them. For persuasion, we learn to use emotion, we learn to use logic, we learn to use ethics, or ethos, all of these things are important. And all of them belong in a service SRSD instruction, but you don't just dump all of it on a kid at one time. What we've actually found in our writing to inform in writing to persuade is that many students go ahead and use the motion, even though we've never talked about it, they'll reach out to the readers emotion, or they'll reach out and use logic. We do saving water is a is a common topic that we work on. And they'll make an emotional plea even though we never mentioned it. And then however, is this means this is a trigger to us that we need new goals for for kids. And it's time to start talking about how to use these in your writing. So we never ignore any Part of writing, often as far as SRSD gets misrepresented as formulaic and scripted, and there is nothing further from the truth than that.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, I think what really strikes me is that it seems SRSD makes writing tangible. And I think that's one of the hardest things about writing is that we're actually talking about ideas, ideas that live inside someone's head ideas that we cannot see. And I always think about the writing process as sort of taking this web of ideas, it's inside of our head, and then having to turn that into something linear, that makes sense to somebody else. And it is complex. But I think that the acronyms you're sharing with us, the structures, the strategies that you're sharing, really do help to make that invisible process much more tangible and much more visible, even talking through a think aloud, right, where we are making our thoughts tangible to someone outside of ourselves. And I think that that's, it's just critical to successfully sharing ideas with others. And particularly, you know, I do think writing is hard. I mean, even you know, for me, now, I find writing to be tremendously difficult. And it requires extensive revision, and, you know, lots of planning and lots of research to, you know, to know what kinds of details you want to include and what you want to say. But like I said, without making those ideas and those processes, explicit, without expressing what that looks like, it really is just this mystical kind of process, I think, for kids. Yeah. And thank you for that.
Karen Harris:You're welcome. And I think, in addition, it's so important to model feelings, the good feelings that you have, while you're writing the bad feelings that you have, like, I'm stuck, I don't know what to do here. And then she, the teacher, she or he will have the class help them get through that. They'll model being stuck fell model. I don't know what word to use here. But then the students help them. So it's very interactive and collaborative. And then peers plan and write together and give each other feedback and help each other out. There's all kinds of peer activities that we do in SRSD. And many of those are up to the teacher. In addition, it's so important that people understand that SRSD isn't just about the parts of the genre, and the language and the knowledge that comes with parts. We teach so much more. So even at the youngest grades, we have goals beyond the parts and our kids use we use rockets, ice cream, cones, whatever. And yes, they'll know if they have all their parts, and they'll be proud of that. But in addition, we have stars and all this other stuff that they can color in or mark off for great vocabulary choices. Unusual attention, getting linking words, setting the topic clearly. But then using a hook that gets that reader even more involved. And a topic sentence and a hook can take more than two sentences. What about a little story? This is a great technique. Okay, so kids are riding on school uniform. So can you do you have a little story about a school uniform? Did you ever have to wear one? Do you know someone who wore one? What was it like for them? And they just they begin to learn these other tricks that good writers use. I'm so many teachers have never been introduced to what these are. And there's a wonderful book. Oh, I'm blanking on the title, I'll put it on the resources. There are wonderful materials out there that can help teachers learn about genre. This is part of why so many teachers do turn to Writer's Workshop, they're seeing what what they've been doing isn't working. But if they can open up a genre or writing test to kids, so they understand it, give them ownership over it. And they're hopeful that the students will will go further with that. And that works for some students. You know, I swear there are kids. When I taught kindergarten, when I taught fourth grade, I swear there were kids, I could have stood in a corner on my head. And they would have gone right on learning. I mean, if it wasn't hard for them, and it wasn't hard for me. But there were also so many kids in my my kindergarten in my in my fourth graders who weren't thriving in the classroom. And I think when we think about social equity and what writing means, and getting jobs, and succeeding in going into higher education, or going into community college, going into training in crafts or occupations, writing is so important at a police officer in one classroom. He asked the kids how they felt about writing and the kids were like, yeah, and he said, Well, look, if you want to be a police person, you will have to write every day. In he said, I have used my gun only once or twice in my entire time as an officer, but I have to write every single day and it was like these kids were like Taken aback, and we need to think about this if we want equity, if we want all children to thrive, then we need to teach all children where they are. And that's what SRSD does. And when we teach all children where they are, and when children are thriving and learning, we are part of creating equity. And we have to look at Writers Workshop, the research on it, yes, it gets effects. They're very small, even on the National Writing Project, the best writers, workshop materials and articles and so forth that I've seen and how they coordinated across schools and what they do with writers workshop, it's so impressive. But their effect sizes are small, they're .2 .3 effect sizes for SRSD. And some people don't believe this till they see the research. But they range from about .70, which means the classroom is moving forward, a very good distance to over to one point something is unusual. But there's two reasons for that one, they're not getting taught well about how to write. And two, it is a powerful method of learning. And if teachers could say I can embrace SRSD, and I don't have to give up other stuff that's working for me in writing, that it's so important that they understand that we're not asking you to give up stuff that's working my technical language stuff, we're not asking you to give that up, we're asking you to integrate it. And SRSD doesn't take place all year, how long it takes place. And when it takes place? Well, it needs to take place long enough that every kid gets to the all the initial criterion, and some kids will get far ahead. But then other things need to happen. And then they need to be integrated in what they've learned. And it it takes teacher control teacher planning. Right now there is no grade by grade curriculum that integrates us SRSD into the rest of what kids need to learn, except in a few places, like parts of Tennessee, on the east coast, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, where the teachers are making that happen. And it's a challenge. It's a big challenge to teachers, but I know that our teachers are up to it.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, I thank you for that. And you may have actually just answered my last question for you today. Given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear
Karen Harris:that we can make a difference, that we can't do it alone, that as I've written about the social equity issues we live in, live with. They are complex. And in fact, I believe in complexity science, which teaches us that there are so many intertwined factors going on that create what we have today in teaching and learning. And that in order to make a big difference, we're going to have to come together around these things. We're not going to make a big difference alone, but we can make a meaningful difference in our classroom for our kids. Teachers need to know in their hearts and believe and understand that they matter. Despite what our culture sometimes tells us about schools and teachers, they know that when they see children learn, they know it when they see children have joy in school, because they can do something new. They need to also know and understand this is not all on them. That until we come together as a nation, until we are willing to spend what it takes so that every child gets a quality education until we are willing to invest in their parents, their families in their communities, until we take a really strong position that all families should thrive and all children should thrive. Teachers are doing everything they can and they are making a difference. And many children are thriving, who would not have without them. But it's not on them alone.
Lindsay Persohn:What an absolutely critical message and I could not agree more. So Karen, I thank you so much for sharing your ideas today. I thank you for your time, and I thank you for your tremendous contributions to the world of education.
Karen Harris:Oh, you're so kind. Thank you very much. I so appreciate this opportunity. Thank
Lindsay Persohn:you. Dr. Karen R. Harris is best known for developing the self regulated strategy development or SRSD model of strategies instruction. Her research, which has primarily been conducted in underserved schools focuses on effective instruction for complex learning areas. Karen has conducted research on the SR SD model of instruction for learning to write, as well as close reading to learn followed by writing to inform or persuade among students in inclusive classrooms. self regulated strategy development has been deemed an evidence based practice by the Institute of Education Sciences, what works Hearing house and there are now over 200 studies of SRSD for writing across several countries. Her current research focuses on refinement of SRSD. Practice based professional development for SRSD. Validating needed writing interventions, development of further writing and reading strategies to address close reading and writing to learn across the grades. Technology supported SRSD instruction, and integrating SRSD instruction with evidence based practices in handwriting spelling, sentence construction and vocabulary in first and second grades. Dr. Harris has led effective professional development in SRST with both special and general education teachers. Over 20 studies of professional development on SRSD have been conducted for writing for teachers most by independent researchers, with all finding strong effects on students writing after Professional Development. Dr. Harris is a former editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology, and associate editor of exceptional children and a former senior editor of the American Psychological Association educational psychology handbook. She has served as president of the Division of Research for the Council of exceptional children, and as president of division 15. That's educational psychology of the American Psychological Association, as well as in many other leadership positions. She is the author of over 200 peer reviewed publications, and she contributes a leading research and practice journals in general education, special education, learning and teaching. Before earning her doctoral degree. She taught fourth grade students in a coal mining community and then students receiving special education services. Dr. Karen Harris is Regents Professor Emeritus and research professor at the Fulton Teachers College Arizona State University. For the good of all students classroom caffeine aims to energize education research and practice. If this show provides you with things to think about, don't keep it a secret. Subscribe, like and review this podcast through your preferred podcast provider. I also invite you to connect with the show through our website at WWW dot classroom caffeine.com where you can learn more about each guest. Find transcripts for many episodes, explore episode topics using our tagging feature, support podcast, research through our survey, request an episode topic or a potential guest or share your own questions that we might respond to through the show. You could also leave us a voice message or a text message at 1-941-212-0949. We would love to hear from you. As always, I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me