Using Micro Mentor Texts: Standing Next to & Teaching Beautiful Writing

In this S2E31 Schoolutions conversation, Penny Kittle lives by her words, "When you stand next to beautiful writing, your writing is just kind of set free." Penny shares how her latest book, Micro Mentor Texts: Using Short Passages From Great Books to Teach Writer's Craft offers a process for studying and teaching on the shoulders of incredible authors as mentors to transform student writing.

Ep. Mentions:

• Donald Murray
• Donald Graves
• Thomas Newkirk
• Tom Romano
• Book Love Foundation
• Matt de la Peña
• Kelly Gallagher-180 Days & Four Essential Studies
• Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Rebekah O'Dell
• Kwame Alexander (My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past—and My Daughter's Future)
• All Parents are Cowards 
• Sarah Zerwin-Point-Less
• Ezra Klein 
• Chris Crutcher
• Peter Elbow
• Jacqueline Woodson

Penny's Recommendations:

• Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts 
• The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching  
• Craft and Process Studies: Units That Provide Writers with Choice of Genre 

Penny's Selected Writing:

• On Joy, Teaching, and the Deep Satisfaction of Writing
• NCTE Speech: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in Teaching 
• Engaged in Young Adult Literature: A Collaborative Conversation

Connect:

• via Website 
• on Instagram (Penny&Book Love Foundation)
• on Twitter
• on LinkedIn
• on YouTube
• on Mighty Networks

Schoolutions is the podcast for educators and school leaders, families and homeschoolers, and the coaches, counselors, and mentors who believe every student deserves to thrive. Join our community of educators committed to cultivating student success, inspired teaching, and creating inclusive classrooms with a pro-kid mindset focused on the whole child.

🌿Ready to grow alongside your children? Book a coaching session with me here. We'll unlock the expert who is already within you and surround you with a community of educators committed to forever getting better through collective expertise.
🎵 Music: Benjamin Wahl

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#schoolutions #schoolutionspodcast #forevergettingbetter #curiositydriven #evidencebasedstrategies #classroomreadystrategies #TeacherPodcast #WritingInstruction #MentorTexts #InstructionalCoaching #TeacherTips #StudentEngagement #EffectiveTeaching #ProfessionalDevelopment #WholeChildEducation #TeachersOfYouTube #PennyKittle #TopTeacherEpisodes

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Schoolutions - S2 E31: Using Micro Mentor Texts: Standing Next to & Teaching Beautiful Writing with Penny Kittle

[00:00:00] Olivia: Welcome to Schoolutions, where listening will leave you inspired by solutions to issues you or others you know may be struggling with in the public education system today. I am Olivia Wahl, and I have the honor to be in conversation with teacher, author, and advocate Penny Kittle. While Penny's currently teaching first-year writers at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, she was a teacher and literacy coach in public schools for 34 years. She is the author of nine books and is the founder and president of the Book Love Foundation, which annually grants classroom libraries to teachers throughout North America.

[00:00:42] Olivia: Penny works beside teachers and leaders across the world to empower young readers and writers. She believes in curiosity, engagement, and deep thinking in schools for both students and their teachers. Penny stands on the shoulders of her mentors, the Dons (Murray and Graves) and the Toms (Newkirk and Romano), in her belief that intentional teaching in a reading and writing workshop brings the greatest student investment and learning in a classroom.

[00:01:13] Olivia: Welcome, Penny. It is such a privilege to have you as a guest on Schoolutions.

[00:01:18] Penny: Thank you, Olivia. Congrats on your podcast.

[00:01:22] Olivia: Thank you. Um, I love to kick off every episode asking my guests who an inspiring educator is from their life. I'm sure it will be challenging to pick just one for you.

[00:01:32] Penny: Oh my word. There are so many, but I have to pick my daughter, who is a fifth-grade teacher at the Browne Middle School in Chelsea. Massachusetts. And I have listened to her becoming a teacher for the last, um, many years. This is her fourth year of teaching, but she was in other capacities in education for about five years prior to that.

[00:01:55] Penny: So I've just listened to her come to be and her incredible investment in kids. And the amount of things she buys with her own money for the kids and for the classroom is just incredible. But she really believes in books and reading, and boy, those kids are reading. 

[00:02:12] Olivia: Yeah, it's wonderful. So, every time I have the gift of interviewing someone, I always have issues that I'm seeing in public education and schools in mind, and then I try to find a guest that is addressing these issues as a change maker in some way, shape, and form. So, something that I am seeing all the time these days is teachers feeling pressure and compelled to teach to the test. I hear it; whether it's teaching to the formulaic structure of a Regents exam, um, or even a third-grade ELA test. It's daunting. And those structures are rigid. They're not real world at all and really not very fun. 

[00:02:53] Penny: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:58] Olivia: And with that happening, then we lose sight of the writing process. We lose sight of mimicking authors’ craft, and it's just sad. I think of a conversation I'd had with Maggie Roberts about the paralysis of the blank page and how many of our writers need a mentor to lean on, and boy, how lucky we are that your most recent book was just published, Micro Mentor Texts. It is a solution in many, many ways.

[00:03:26] Olivia: In Matt de la Peña's words: “Penny Kittle's brilliant book, Micro Mentor Texts is an invitation for teachers to forever change the way their students engage with writing in the classroom. Truth is, the best writing teacher in the world is great literature. But in this book, Penny not only curates a wonderful range of diverse short passages, she also invites teachers and students to look closely at the craft moves writers have made before sharing some of her own rich insights about each passage.”

[00:03:58] Olivia: Beautiful. 

[00:03:59] Penny: I love Matt.

[00:04:01] Olivia: Oh, come on!

[00:04:01] Penny: I just so appreciated having him write that forward. Oh, just such a writer. Thank you.

[00:04:07] Olivia: It's so beautiful, and you've been instilling a love of books for many, many years through a variety of ways. So, I wanted to kick off our conversation. You established the Book Love Foundation in 2012. It's been a while. How has your vision evolved, and what are your hopes for the future?

[00:04:28] Penny: Well, when we kicked it off around my dining room table, a couple of very good friends and my husband and I, we, um, expected that we would raise a little bit of money and be able to grant a few libraries every year. We didn't really have a process. My daughter was xeroxing applications that came to my address here, and, um, we were reading them together and, as a board deciding who to fund.

[00:04:51] Penny: It is now a whole lot of readers we're grateful for. We get hundreds of applications every year, and we've raised over a million dollars. I would never ever have believed that. But the things that true, we give away a hundred percent of what we get in donations, and we are all volunteers. 

[00:05:10] Penny: We don't pay anyone for anything except our summer book club, which we have costs associated with the books and the shipping and, um, that Summer Book Club community has been as high as 1,450 teachers in a summer from 15 countries. 

[00:05:27] Olivia: Amazing.

[00:05:27] Penny: So all of a sudden, our shift has gone from simply giving teachers grants to build their own classroom libraries to helping all teachers think more deeply about reading and writing through our Summer Book Club.

[00:05:42] Penny: And all of our generous, wonderful speakers - I think we had 45 last summer - and we have, um, as a foundation committed to doing some work towards reparations by paying only speakers from the global majority and not our White presenters for their time each summer. And that has, um, also been a part of the evolving nature of the work, which is we have deep conversations about equity and conditions in schools for readers and for teachers. 

[00:06:15] Olivia: It's interesting too that the Book Love Foundation was established in 2012, and the concept or the idea for this book really bubbled up in 2014, even though it was just published. And so the full title of the book, um, Micro Mentor Texts: Using Short Passages from Great Books to Teach Writer’s Craft. So how did that thought come about in 2014, and how did it end up in our homes right now?

[00:06:45] Penny: Yeah. Like why did it take so long? Is that really your question? Because…

[00:06:49] Olivia: Kinda, but I love, I love that you stuck with it, Penny

[00:06:54] Penny: …I started it, um, because all of my reading life for as long as I can remember, I turn over pages and books, and I highlight things on my Kindle because I find passages that I think are so interestingly crafted. And so it's just a habit of me as a reader. And in doing that, I had come to a place after writing book that I wanted to do a notebook book.

[00:07:19] Penny: And so I had that in mind and an enormous amount of passages I was collecting, I was doing in my classroom was asking kids to find a passage they loved in their independent reading, and then we would cover these whiteboards all over my room with their passages. But I could teach off of them for weeks, and I would say, like, this is amazing.

[00:07:39] Penny: I love that you chose that passage, and let's just look at that more closely. So, the work has been in my work forever, but I couldn't get there because, in 2014, Kelly and I decided to, let's answer the question, how does it all fit? By writing curriculum in a 2015 to 2016 school year, which became 180 Days.

[00:08:04] Penny: Then we wrote the follow-up, and once that came out, I said to my, um, editor who was now retired, I've gotta finish this, and I did. 

[00:08:15] Olivia: Well, lucky us. Lucky us. 

[00:08:19] Penny: That's nice. 

[00:08:20] Olivia: Well, it's a beautiful resource and just steeped with a variety of mentor texts, and the micro aspect is just even better. It's short little clips that we can mimic. What I love, though, is you offer us a process. It's not just a book of a mentor texts. So, I'd love for listeners to first know how in the world did you choose these texts because there's a million out there.

[00:08:43] Olivia: How did you narrow the selection down?

[00:08:46] Penny: Okay, so there's a practical one, which is some of them were too expensive to use, so we didn't use all the passages I collected. It was, you know, permissions, um, are quite a challenge. And Scholastic, I went to them originally because my first editor at Heinemann had moved to Scholastic, and I was working with her on the concept, but even more so, they have an entire trade book division.

[00:09:13] Penny: And so I could use passages more easily from Scholastic books. And, of course, there are so many brilliant writers that cross different publishers, so I could use Matt's work, but I could also use Andrea Davis Pinkney's work and so many others. Choosing them then was a process of narrowing them down to what did they show.  

[00:09:32] Penny: Because I designed the book around craft moves. For example, um, artful organization of a sentence. I have two chapters: one called The Power of Three and one called The List. And the thing that I love about both of those chapters is that once you study it, you're gonna find it everywhere. I was just reading a book this weekend, and I was like struck by the list in one character's explanation, and I was like, I'm using that, and I, you know, turned a corner down.

[00:09:59] Penny: So, the beautiful connection between you're already reading, and then you notice something about how it's crafted. And when you mention the process in the book, um, the way I teach it is what's presented for these different craft moves. So, we study it, and I always start by having the kids tell me what they notice.

[00:10:20] Penny: And then I add to that with what I notice, and I ask teachers to go through that process, um, by giving them passages where I don't tell them what I notice that are in that same chapter. And then having the students get out their writer's notebooks and imitate the craft move. When you stand next to beautiful writing, your writing is just kind of set free.

[00:10:41] Penny: And to be able to stand next to a passage and say, I'm gonna take this first phrase, and instead of writing about the dinner at Easter, I'm going to imagine myself taking my dog for a walk. But I'm gonna use the same craft move, and I walk through what I do in my classroom to model the process of imitating great writers and inviting kids to do that as well.

[00:11:04] Penny: And then teachers will just be delighted by what their kids produce. It's amazing. 

[00:11:10] Olivia: They will. And it's interesting because I think there's this notion that copying is a, a bad thing…

[00:11:17] Penny: Uh-huh.

[00:11:17] Olivia: … or mimicking is, is a bad thing. And I've heard (especially in high school) I've heard teachers say, I'm not giving an example…

[00:11:24] Penny: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:24] Olivia: … because I don't want the kids to copy. And it's so the antithesis of that. It's studying the moves, but what is your response when teachers say like, I don't want kids copying work.

[00:11:35] Penny: Oh…right. Well, it's a really simple dilemma they're in because if you're asking all kids to write the same piece, then you can't imitate it for them because, of course, that's the example. The teacher's always the best writer in the room. So, if you're gonna stand up there and show them how to write the exact thing that you want them to write, that will never be a good way.

[00:11:53] Penny: But we don't want kids to all write the same thing! I 

[00:11:55] Olivia: No, we don't.

[00:11:56] Penny: I mean, that’s the thing that always strikes me – is - why would I want all of my students to write THE same essay? So this is the opposite. This is saying all books are great writing teachers, and what we wanna do is begin to recognize, kind of effortlessly, oh, I've seen that before.

[00:12:13] Penny: That's parallel structure. How is it used here, and for what purpose? And that allows every writer to begin to collect this toolbox of things I can use. You know, we wanna move beyond the opening paragraph does this, too. I could write a vignette. I could write a, um, conversation. Like, how would that look? And who's done that?

[00:12:34] Penny: Who can I stand next to? 

[00:12:36] Olivia: Yeah, and I think, too, the whole idea of the why, and so something you do so beautifully is always put yourself in the shoes of the author or the writer of the why. Why did this person choose to do this? And for students, that's what, to me, makes it stick, right? If I'm thinking and analyzing why someone chose to use that move, then when I want to affect my readers in that same way, I can try that on.

[00:13:02] Olivia: So it's the why behind the choices that I love is part of your analysis work.

[00:13:08] Penny: In that question, though, is there's a vast difference between decision-making and following rules. And so kids who are asking: Why was it done here? Recognize that writers make decisions and that writers have multiple ways of doing just about everything. But if instead they see writing as a series of rules, they think it's right and wrong, and there's one thing - or it’s opposite the wrong way. And I think that's thinking we have to change as well. Cause no one's very interested in 35 ways to say the same thing in the same way. 

[00:13:38] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:13:39] Olivia: I'm with you.

[00:13:39] Penny: We want that original story! 

[00:13:41] Olivia: Yeah, we do. And I think it's more exciting for students to know there's not a right or wrong. And to be able to take risks without judgment and to play. The workshop, to me, is it's play and just to experiment. 

[00:13:53] Penny: Right.

[00:13:53] Olivia: Right? It's beautiful. And so, if I'm a brand new teacher or if I'm a person new to experimenting with mentor texts, and I wanna give this a go, what's your recommendation for starting with a mentor text?

[00:14:05] Olivia: And then flip the switch, what's your recommendation for someone that's used mentor text for a long time?

[00:14:12] Penny: Yeah.

[00:14:12] Penny: I think when you're starting, um, Rebekah O’Dell said something really smart. She's one of the authors of Writing with Mentors that I got to write the forward for those two brilliant women. Um, and she said once that if you're designing a unit, choose just three mentor texts. That's plenty to get going.

[00:14:29] Penny: That's the advice I give new teachers. Take three examples of whatever it is. So you're writing essays about food, you can find three essays about food, and then you study them as Kelly and I say in 4 Essential Studies from the drone view, which is where we ask kids to step back and look at the whole of it and say, this does this, and this is the transition to this next piece.

[00:14:53] Penny: So, you want him to see the whole of the piece. Cause those three food essays are gonna operate very differently. Like Kwame Alexander's one on fried chicken is a list, and it's, um, numbered, right? But that's different than All Parents Are Cowards, which is one that has three really big ideas being a child, his relationship with his mother, and then becoming a father.

[00:15:14] Penny: So that view allows kids to go, oh, as a mentor, text, this is how it works. Right? And if you give them three, then they have three different ways to think about organizing their own ideas. Plus, all the ways we haven't, you know, given them in that essay. And then at the micro mentor text, the reason I use that term is that I want them to zoom in on a few sentences at a time because then we can really tease out all the richness that is there.

[00:15:40] Penny: Without it being four days of, let's look at every single paragraph, just pull out some part of it. And so, like, really great verbs in this paragraph. Let's just look at where are those coming from; um, how are they used? That idea, both parts. 

[00:15:56] Penny: Now, if you’re really experienced with mentor texts, what I've found with teachers is that the micro level allows them to make this direct connection to independent reading and book clubs. And I started back when I was, you know, just independent reading was primarily my focus. I had students collecting passages from the books they were reading across their notebooks, and it became this brilliantly titled two-page spread.

[00:16:22] Penny: Sorry, that's the best I thought of. And that concept of just collect passages for the book you're reading morphed into doing that for your book club unit because then kids had very different and original ways to enter the conversation of book clubs because students need something to stand on to have these conversations lots of times.

[00:16:45] Penny: And that was a great intro. And now I've been using it with lots of classrooms around core texts. So every kid is making their own, and they're getting even more creative and inventive for displaying the quotations they're collecting. But for me, it's the idea that you could pull anything off of their two-page spread and say, talk to me about what the author's doing here.

[00:17:09] Penny: How does it work? 

[00:17:10] Olivia: Yeah. And Penny, you have so much experience working with writers, and something that's really important to me as a teacher is ensuring that students can get their message across to the audience that they want to address and not have to come up with the exact same product. They can work in different forms and probably still work under maybe the umbrella of a mode of writing, perhaps.

[00:17:35] Olivia: What's your best tip for teachers to create an end goal for the students? And so, if we're talking about grading, most of the lens can be on process, not product, but the students can have an end in mind.

[00:17:50] Penny: Well, I think there are a lot of layers there that you're talking about at the same time. And one of them is grading, which, um, students are setting goals in independent reading. They’re setting goals as writers. And so, when you are focused on, um, what do you wanna get better at? That takes some of the sting out of what is this grade?

[00:18:12] Penny: And so you might be working towards a portfolio, for example, and the portfolio needs to have evidence of these six things that writers do. 

[00:18:19] Olivia: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:19] Penny: And you're going to, at the end of the semester, say, in my narrative, I did this, and in my research paper, I showed this, and you are providing evidence to support the grade that you believe you deserve.

[00:18:31] Penny: Right? And a lot of that thinking in Sarah Zerwin's Point-Less is so practical and simple for teachers, but a lot of systems don't allow you to do that. 

[00:18:40] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:18:40] Penny: So, in that case, as Kelly and I did in my system at the time, we created criteria. These are things that happen in narratives or informational texts, or digital documentaries. And this is the criteria for excellence. And you're gonna try to get as close to that as you can. 

[00:18:55] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:18:55] Penny: And we're gonna show you examples of that. This is what it looks like, um, so that it allows you in a unit, say, on story to have kids write fiction, other kids write nonfiction or memoir, and have other kids making digital documentaries, but they're all after the same things.

[00:19:12] Penny: You have to reveal moments in time. You have to establish a setting. Um, in documentaries, my kids often use video to help establish this, you know, mood for the piece, and all of those variables exist. I mean, one of my biggest mentors, Donald Murray, said that the moves are the same no matter what the genre is.

[00:19:33] Penny: Writers are trying to figure out how to connect with an audience…

[00:19:37] Olivia: Yes.

[00:19:37] Penny: …um, how to show them something important, and then how to frame your entire piece to clarify for that audience. This is what I wanted you to hear from me. This is what I want you to know. 

[00:19:50] Olivia: Yeah, something Matt says in the forward is the whole idea of writing for real. And oftentimes, in ELA classrooms, the students do have an opportunity to write and play more, but then you bounce into social studies, you bounce into science and math, and the whole idea of what writing for real means, it shifts sometimes.

[00:20:14] Olivia: So how do we try to stretch that idea of using mentors across content areas?

[00:20:21] Penny: Well, because there are gorgeous non-fiction books, there are journal articles, there are beautiful picture books even that are across all content areas. So we can certainly find the mentors. 

[00:20:33] Penny: What I found that was really helpful for me was working as a literacy coach for all those years with the content area teachers around; if you're studying, for example, the Civil War, your uh, minilessons can give the context of that time, but kids can be in book clubs around different books that are set then, and likewise writing as some of my students began to do for U.S. History,  writing scenes of soldiers at that period of time allowed them to use both their skills from ELA with the content from their history teacher.

[00:21:10] Penny: And I think that what we miss when we aren't doing that is that the kids don't see ELA writing as crossing all those other content areas.

[00:21:18] Penny: They think of it as, oh, that's just English class. And particularly when we get siloed into literary analysis, which doesn't exist anywhere, but in English literature courses.

[00:21:29] Penny: Which, as I'm sure you know, 1.6% of college students major in English. So, most kids will practice something in high school so much that they're kind of surprised it doesn't exist in their new major of nursing or chemical engineering or whatever it is. And I think that we need to do a better job of bridging that because everyone wants to read a really compelling piece of writing in, whatever the content is. 

[00:21:58] Penny: You know, you know, right now because of the podcasts that are out, I dunno if you listen to Ezra Klein, listen to him all the time. And he's so good at interviewing these people who are experts, but they tell stories.

[00:22:09] Penny: They frame the big ideas of what they have to say in a very cohesive way. We want that for all writers. 

[00:22:16] Olivia: Yeah, we do, and I worry so much to that there's always a focus on just the structure of writing, and it takes over students’ ability to take risks and be creative. What do you say to teachers when that becomes the focus and the kids don't have the flexibility to be more creative, not focused on only the structure and grammar?

[00:22:43] Penny: Yeah. I think that the part that's hard for teachers, particularly if you're preparing for a test, there is a particular form that is valued there, and it actually can be useful. If you've got 20 minutes to write an essay, which doesn't occur much in the real world, then following some formula is probably your best bet.

[00:23:01] Penny: Cause someone's gonna give it very little attention in reading it for a score. But the problem is that the more you practice that formula, the less students realize their own creative skillsets, and they aren't using them. And it isn't just that it's over-practiced, but that they don't even imagine how to write differently.

[00:23:21] Penny: I gotta tell you, for the kids that come into me in the fall and they've, you know, left high school three months before, almost every one of them has no confidence as a writer, particularly if they aren't given the form. And so they enter college, and in many colleges, the five-paragraph essay is simply not allowed.

[00:23:40] Penny: And now they can't lean on the structure they practiced the most. And I see this every fall with my students (there are no rubrics and no templates), and how am I supposed to write this? So, the problem isn't that, oh, we're grading that paragraph as right or wrong, as much as it is our students don’t know how to paragraph, unless you, as one of mine frankly told me: You didn't tell me what goes in each paragraph so I didn't put any in!

[00:24:04] Penny: Right? But that's a pretty big leap for a kid who was simply doing what was assigned to him. And so, the fault of the system to have created this, you know, test-driven idea behind the teaching of writing is disappointing, but it's just so shortsighted because you and I, I don't want my grandmother to write me a five-paragraph essay or to have a voiceless serious, um, analysis of some issue.

[00:24:33] Penny: I wanna hear why does it bother her so much that we're not funding free lunch programs in the city and that it's because she grew up hungry and you know, there's a humanness that is essential to writing, and we're missing it when all we do is have them write these lifeless, voiceless, never use I; those are really silly rules, and they don't, they don't exist in the rest of the world.

[00:24:57] Penny: So writing for real, as Matt talked about it, was that if he had started doing that more and earlier, how much more he would've written. Right. And his writing is gorgeous. And Chris Crutcher, I spent years working beside him at the Boothbay (Literacy) Retreat, and he would always say, you know, I listened to what you and Linda Reef are doing in writer's notebooks.

[00:25:18] Penny: And I would think if I was in that class, I would've written my first novel sooner. I want more novelists. I want more poets. And I also object to the right and wrong argument because it's based on a standard of English that's very white-centered that does not embrace the many multilingual kids who take different languages and blend them and their, oh, their liveliness with language.

[00:25:44] Penny: I had these two kids who were, um, doing a documentary, and they said: Miss Kittle, you gotta come listen to this! And I grabbed my AirPods and ran over there, and the girl goes:  Oh, you got all the drip, Kittle. And I'm like: Drip? I got all the drip? I love this word! Like you guys are always creating your own language! But…

[00:26:00] Olivia: Yeah.

[00:26:01] Penny: …that doesn't feel respected with the right or wrong crowd. So, I just ask people to embrace all that's changing in our world, um, because that's the world that our kids live in. 

[00:26:14] Olivia: It is indeed. And I'm thinking of a dinner table experience I just had. Um, I have a 15-year-old and an 11-year-old, and I had said to my youngest, you're going to go to bed a little bit earlier tonight.

[00:26:28] Olivia: He was fit to be tied. What do you mean I have to go to bed earlier? And for some reason, when my. Preteen and teen are conspiring against me. As long as they're working together, it doesn't bother me. I dunno why. And Henry and Ben, they disappear into the other room, come back, we're at the dinner table, and Henry goes: Mom, I just need to read something to you.

[00:26:50] Olivia: And he has Ben's phone, and he starts reading me this essay about why he shouldn't have to go to bed early. And it sounds almost robotic, but I'm like, he's reading it, and it does have some reasons thrown in. And I thought, what, what just happened? And he goes: Mom! It's this thing called ChatGPT. I told it to write an essay for me to be able to stay up later.

[00:27:14] Olivia: And he goes: And, and it did it! It’s just crazy! And I sat there, I thought, oh my God, this is nuts. And obviously, I know about ChatGPT. They were shocked that I was in the know. Um, and he also sat there as a fifth grader and said: Remember that essay I had to write on zoos? My gosh, this thing just wrote an essay about why zoos should or shouldn't exist in three seconds, Mom! Three seconds!

[00:27:41] Penny: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:27:41] Olivia: And I spent a month doing it! And I paused, and I sat there, and I said: Well, what's missing from what you just read, what's missing? And he said: Well, it doesn't have like my voice or my reasons for really what's happening. 

[00:27:57] Olivia: So I'm interested to hear your thoughts because if we're studying craft…if we're standing alongside authors with heartbeats that are making choices, where does ChatGPT fall into this?

[00:28:14] Penny: It's, it's a good question. I'm not sure because it is new to me as well. You know, it's just been since November that it kinda burst on the world. I would say that one of my favorite colleagues, um, texted me the first day that the news broke and said: Well, this is gonna write all the things that nobody wants to read anyway for them.!

[00:28:36] Penny: Right. And I was like, hmm, there's some truths to that. Right? And then, I dunno, if you saw in the New York Times, you could use ChatGPT. They set up this template to compose Valentines, right? So the first one I created for my daughter a romantic Valentine - and this one, you could do it to your partner in the style of a Taylor Swift song.

[00:28:56] Penny: And it comes out sounding like Taylor. And I'm like, wow, this, you know, this has some fun to it. But, of course, it misses the actual sound of an author. And I came across this, um, statement cuz I know, I don't know if you know the site DealBook?

[00:29:12] Olivia: No. 

[00:29:13] Penny: But DealBook asked ChatGPT itself whether open AI should be worried about the growing competition from other AI developers.

[00:29:21] Penny: Its answer: No, I am a language model Without personal thoughts or emotions. My goal is to provide accurate and helpful responses. Well, as you know, there is some question about whether or not those responses are accurate…

[00:29:35] Olivia: Yes. 

[00:29:35] Penny: …since some of the citations are created and don't exist. What to do with it? You know, I went to a National Writing Project webinar in January where about 3000 of us teachers said: What are you gonna do about it? And they had teachers on who are using it in very innovative ways. 

[00:29:54] Olivia: Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:55] Penny: I don't know yet what it's gonna look like in my work in September because I only teach in the fall semesters, and it wasn't there, and my finals are not something you could ask ChatGPT anyway. But what will it mean? I think that we will always long for real stories.

[00:30:12] Penny: And the real voices of people telling those stories. Is there a shortcut to giving me the comparison of Oregon with the state of California in economics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? A lot of kids will benefit by having somebody do that thinking to imagine how it could be constructed. 

[00:30:31] Olivia: Yeah. 

[00:30:32] Penny: Right? If you looked at a model and they've done a good job of showing ways to construct something, perhaps that's a way to lead kids into a deeper look at construction. But I still feel like I'm gonna turn to the best journalists and the best writers out there instead of ChatGPT. What are we gonna do as a world if kids need an application to write something? Right? Maybe it'll be as simple as a calculator, right?

[00:31:02] Penny: Maybe it'll be that simple, and everyone will have one, and it'll be an accepted thing, and we'll all look like dinosaurs who still carry around our notebooks. But I do know that my students say they develop their confidence because we write every single day in class, and they're writing in response to poetry or ideas with their first thinking.

[00:31:21] Penny: As Peter Elbow said: When my, my brain's the freest, and it just comes out, it's the fast thinking that I'm capturing before I've muddled it up. They tell me it is a game changer for them, and I'm gonna keep doing that as long as I can. Chat won't do that for me. 

[00:31:36] Olivia: No, it won't. And I think that's what we even need to do for our youngest writers of giving them the opportunity to respond and have their notebooks.

[00:31:46] Olivia: Because especially after COVID, where people were so reliant on a screen, on that digital world, let's go back to analog and write and, and just experiment with craft. So, I value that.

[00:31:58] Penny: Yeah.

[00:31:58] Olivia: And I think that's what's helped both of my boys grow. Which is fascinating because even my youngest, when he was in third grade, he had the gift of an amazing teacher that happened to be virtual, and the instruction was only half a day.

[00:32:14] Olivia: But he had a writer's notebook, and he had a process, and Jake, his teacher, had Alex McConduit zoom in and confer one-on-one with kids from New Orleans, um, to help coach them. And it was this experience he had as a writer. And the book (Amazing Activists) ended up being published on Amazon. Um, and he'll never forget that. He says: I'm a writer, Mom. I have a book that's for sale with my class on Amazon. 

[00:32:43] Penny: Yeah.

[00:32:36] Olivia: You can't create that with ChatGPT, so it's just fascinating.

[00:32:43] Penny: Or any digital (platform). There's a lot of people out there working on digital platforms for delivering reading and writing instruction, and every kid is, you know, in their cubicle with their headphones on and their tablet, and it scares me that we think that somehow will be enough.

[00:33:01] Penny: We've all watched kids on Zoom with their phone in one hand and something on the TV, and you know, that is never gonna be enough. And how do we still have the humanness of the relationship between teachers and students? 

[00:33:18] Olivia: Well, and I think that's the biggest piece too, of being in the classroom, having students write in front of you because that's where the coaching happens.

[00:33:25] Penny: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:26] Olivia: Right? If kids are writing at home using ChatGPT, then you lose that essence of conferring where you're right there with the student naming the moves, helping them see the amazing things they're doing. 

[00:33:36] Penny: Exactly.

[00:33:36] Olivia: Right? 

[00:33:37] Penny: Yeah.

[00:33:37] Olivia: Um, so I know for the book, you had the gift of doing some of the filming in your daughter's classroom. Is that correct? 

[00:33:45] Penny: Yes, we did! It was, um, Miss Kittle, and then they called her Little Miss Kittle cause she's five feet tall. So the two Kittles were the teachers, um, that was such, I'll never forget it. We did a couple lessons that are online. If you purchase the book, they let you watch them. And we were just trying to show that with her fifth graders, they could all engage in ways that surprised her, surprised all of us with the deep thinking about what the author was doing.

[00:34:13] Penny: And then their own attempts to imitate that author, which were just amazing.

[00:34:18] Olivia: It is amazing,

[00:34:18] Penny:  The craft. Yeah.

[00:34:19] Olivia: So, that, that's it. Right? Um, so Penny, if you can leave listeners with a call to action, what's our next step when it comes to continuing to embrace study and craft in this very digital world? 

[00:34:36] Penny: Well, I think the biggest piece for me is we're all reading.

[00:34:41] Penny: And I would just say slow down. Jacquie Woodson said: I was always a slow reader because I read sentences over and over again, and that she was constantly rushed through books in school. And I think that the, the thing I love most about independent reading is I always tell kids, just slow down and enter the story.

[00:35:00] Penny: And there is no winning a race here. There’s no I'm first. You're all reading different books at different rates, and that slowing down allows you to hear the voice of such well-crafted sentences. Right? And so when I say, is there anything you read today that you'd wanna hang onto? You think that was just really well said.

[00:35:22] Penny: They often have it, and that's the piece we need to make that link between our beautiful libraries filled with incredible literature to the act of teaching writing. 

[00:35:34] Olivia: Yeah. 

[00:35:34] Penny: Because if they're not writing about the literature, which is a very different form of writing, if they're just writing their own lives using the moves they see in books and articles and blogs, then all of a sudden the world is this enormous place of diverse thinking and experiences, and writers are unstoppable.

[00:35:58] Olivia: Yeah. Well, your book is one more step in that unstoppable journey for students and it really is a gift. So thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. I'm grateful for you, and you've been a mentor for me as a teacher and so many others for many, many years. So thank you, Penny, for all you do. 

[00:36:17] Penny: Yeah, well, thank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure to meet you. 

[00:36:22] Olivia: Take care. 

[00:36:24] Penny: Thank you. 

[00:36:27] Olivia: Schoolutions is a podcast created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Special thanks to my guest, Penny Kittle. Thanks to my older son Benjamin, who created the music that's playing in the background. If you like Schoolutions, please share rate, review, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @schoolutionspodcast. If you want to reach out, leave me a SpeakPipe voice memo at my website: www.oliviawahl.com/podcast or via email @schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Don't forget to talk about us nicely on social media, and please keep listening. Let's continue finding inspiration together.