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Our students can learn to adopt our attitude toward reading, writing...and most especially, struggle. I do not have an answer for you regarding how to teach embracing the pleasure in difficulty when much of the architecture of school communicates that the results of struggle are undesirable. Labeled basic or below basic seek to remediate young people so that they no longer struggle. I realize we feel as though we work from blurry topographical maps when strategize interventions intended to help students achieve and while still allowing for a certain degree of challenge in each student's journey. For as convenient as one street map to a standardized destination would be, few take identical paths in their literacy processes.


How can we teach students to learn to sit with difficulty when the stopwatch of learning is very real in the design of school?


I just like this question, this idea, that Katherine Bomer presented in The Journey is Everything. My personifying difficulty in the sketch above helped me internalize taking the edge from the question. Pop a big rubbery nose on my sketch of difficulty and he/she/it might resemble Elmo or Grover from Sesame Street. Friendlier. Fuzzier.


For now, all I can offer is my thinking. Difficulty, observing it, is going to be in the forefront of my mind--and I am going to start asking students about it so that I might learn how I can best help them sit with (face?) their individual struggles.




If grades do not inspire, motivate, or communicate, then what do they accomplish? They rank and sort adolescents to be ranked and sorted teenagers to be ranked and sorted college students to be ranked and sorted professionals.


Perhaps change comes simply by asking one another what the purpose of the grades are in our classrooms. Perhaps asking that question of our administrative leaders is another place to carry on the conversation.


If we are being honest and if we are making informed decisions (what the research demonstrates), then we might someday creates schools focusing on what adolescents and teenagers can do...and be able to communicate it together.


How often do students and parents scratch their heads over what "the B" means? Rightfully so.


How often do students and parents engage with teachers over what the student can do completely disconnected from any value-judgement? If they aren't, they should start asking.


That discomfort education may feel will only come if people speak up: students, parents, and especially teachers. Going forward in silence about the state of grading in middle schools and high schools only sugar coats reality--a reality built on tradition, not research. No research exists that shows grading helps learning. It only ranks, sorts, and (worse) sugar coats--especially when students get an A. What is there left to talk about?


This page excites me. This page is alive and crackling with thinking and growing, isn't it?


There is so much worth hearing about in the rough hewn drafts in our students' notebooks. In many respects, this image more than enough for assessment--especially if the assessment is driven by the student tell us about the decisions he/she is making.


We can have rich conversations about organization, word choice, ideas, punctuation, sentence fluency. This image is from a notebook in my classroom and tells me so so so much more than a final, polished essay.


There was a time when I might look at this page and think "my gosh, look at all of these mistakes." But these marks are not mistakes, are they? They are the moves of a craftsman at work.


There is an opportunity here to change the way young writers see their work--to elevate them in their own eyes. To point to this, call it beautiful, to let them see us smile about this work, and to celebrate their ability to tell us what they can do...and then help them with what they want to learn how to do next.

​© 2017 by Brian J. Kelley. Proudly created with Wix.com

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