A Conversation with Liz Prather and Sarah Zerwin - Season 4, Episode 4

Welcome to The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning. In this episode, Julia Torres holds a conversation with Liz Prather and Sarah Zerwin on their teaching journeys and ways to disrupt literacy instruction as we currently know it.

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Creators and Guests

Guest

Julia Torres

Julia E. Torres is a veteran language arts teacher and librarian in Denver Public schools.

Guest

Liz Prather

Guest

Sarah Zerwin

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Julia Torres 00:05
Hi. This is Julia Torres here with the Book Love podcast, and I am very excited today to be speaking with my dear friend Sarah zerwin and her dear friend Liz Prather. We are going to be talking about their books. We're going to be talking about writing. We're going to be talking about a lot of good things. So have a seat. Get yourself something good to drink, relax and settle in. And we're going to talk about some ways to disrupt what you may think of as writing instruction. So the first question that I want to ask the two of you, maybe we should back up. Liz, why don't you introduce yourself to the audience, and then Sarah, why don't you introduce yourself?

Liz Prather 00:46
Yeah, so I'm a Kentucky teacher. This is my 25th year in the classroom. I teach at a school for Creative and Performing Arts and a large urban school in Lexington, Kentucky, but I've taught a lot of different places within the Commonwealth, so yeah, that's me.

Sarah Zerwin 01:06
and I'm Sarah Zerwin, and I'm also starting my 25th year in education this year, and I teach at a large, traditional public high school in Boulder, Colorado, and have been there For 13 years and have taught just about everything you can imagine under the realm of language arts, but mostly seniors, is what I've been doing lately.

Julia Torres 01:29
Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much, both of you for joining me today. It's always an honor for me to be able to learn from folks who are teaching in different environments and also who have taught for longer than I have, which both of you have. So thank you for your work, for your words, for the time that you put into writing these books to enrich other people's lives with your thinking and with your practice. Question number one has to do with being writing teachers, and so I'm kind of going to weave these in conversationally, but I might periodically, you know, dive back into the questions and it might feel more like a formal interview. The first question is, as writing teachers, you both clearly have a passion for supporting student development with regard to creativity and self expression. So how is this related to or separate from the language we are taught of standards, skills and achievement.

Liz Prather 02:24
You know, I don't think there's an inherent conflict in the language that we use to talk about standards and skills. I mean, my my classroom creates a community standard, for example, within the first two weeks of class. And so there's expectations and standards and things that we want to achieve, and there are skills, obviously, that students want to cultivate. So I don't think the language of those two things are necessarily. There's no tension there, but I think they're the language around achievement is problematic in writing, because we like to talk about mastery, and I think that is just a bridge too far. I mean, you know, Kelly Gallagher tweeted last week that he was writing a paragraph for three hours, that he had, he had, he tweeted that he'd only written the paragraph like 7000 times, and the paragraph was worse three hours ago, you know. And here's a person who's written his whole life. And, you know, I think about all of the writers who say that in regards to their writing, and myself included, I think mastery is a lie when we talk about students achievement.

Sarah Zerwin 03:37
I absolutely agree with that, Liz, and I think it's all the language that surrounds standard skills and achievement that gets in the way of writing instruction, because it does suggest this mastery focus. And as you know, like if we tell students Your job is to master these skills, then once they've quote, unquote mastered them in our class, they feel like they're done. But writing goes on. You know, every every different situation you're in that demand something new. Of you as a writer is a completely new ballgame. So mastery language is really, really problematic. And achievement, that whole conversation about achievement, makes it all high stakes too. And I think as soon as students realize or think that the writing that they're doing has any kinds of high stakes attached to it, then they're afraid to be creative. Their self expression goes out the window. They don't take risks. They don't do all the things that writers need to do to be really successful writers.

Julia Torres 04:32
And then it gets it gets even more complex, right? Because everything we do in school has to have this system of measurement. Which leads me to my next question, which is about evaluation. You know, what would you like for people to think about with regard to evaluation, given the fact that we just mentioned several things that are problematic about that label of achievement or mastery, which is implying that there's like a finish line when really we know that writing is this beautiful ongoing process.

Sarah Zerwin 04:59
Yeah, I mean, I would say. Did teachers evaluate writing as little as possible? And I know that that sounds really impossible to a lot of teachers, but or try to evaluate their process instead of the final product, so that the emphasis is put on the process instead if you must use a rubric, because I know that sometimes we have to like the rubric, don't make it a high stakes grade. I mean, the evaluation data that comes out of a rubric can certainly be helpful for student writers. I mean, I would say, throw the rubric out if you can, but if you can't, just use it as as data, as information, as a conversation piece, not as a like a final high stakes grade. I teach AP Lit, and the AP rubrics are new this year and this past school year, and they're actually really pretty good, so I put them in front of my students to help them understand that task that they're going to be asked to do on the AP exam. But it's never a high stakes grade. It's just information for us and something for the students to talk about with each other, to understand clearly what this task of writing is.

Liz Prather 05:55
Yeah, I think teachers have to make peace with the paradox of writing. You know that, I think what happens is that teachers, you know, there is both intention in writing and there's both spontaneity in writing, and there are rules in writing, and there are no rules in writing. And so I think teachers come down on one side of that seesaw or another, and they defend that territory, and they evaluate that territory, maybe because they don't know how to evaluate the other side of that. But it's, it's, it becomes about the teacher, then it becomes about their purposes and their intention and their direction. For the students writing instead of the student in my classroom, my students create the rubrics so they have self directed projects. And so they create something we call an individual evaluation form, and it comes out of the goals and the inquiry questions that they've used to support the project throughout the whole project cycle. And so that evaluation is really authentic and it's really purposeful, and it's really meaningful to kids, just like Sarah's students who write the reflection letters, you know, for her no grade process.

Julia Torres 1 07:08
Yeah, and that's one of the things that I think I've always really enjoyed about Sarah was one of the first to get me interested in going gradeless In My classroom, and I heard her and Jay speak at NCTE, and one of the things that was that's difficult for me is that I'm in a high stakes environment. I'm in an environment where they don't really encourage people to do things that are, you know, unconventional, or things that are, you know, not going to guarantee results the way that they are used to seeing results produced through writing, you know. So they, they really, in my environment, skew toward, okay, the district, or Big Brother has produced this rubric. We have decided that this is the rubric that everyone is going to use. So you need to use this too, so that your stuff is consistent with what everyone else is doing. I was able to get away from that a little bit because I became an AP teacher. So I was teaching AP, which was like separate from the standard English 9, 10, 11, 12, classes that were kind of more uniform in the district. But you know, in the current system, we've got to have some way of measuring achievement, and I know that you both have kind of more innovative, or we might say, non traditional, ways of coaching students and then getting that measurement for achievement, and you have systems for measuring achievement. So how do you support your students knowing what their progression is, and then how do you communicate that with your larger school bodies?

Liz Prather 08:47
Well, I think, you know, you hit on like the test prep model, which is like Big Brother, or, you know, high stakes in your district, and the test prep model is just so short sighted, and it does absolutely nothing to cultivate critical thinking. I mean, we know this, right? We know as teachers, and I think we need to do a better job of pushing back against administrators. And you know these, and Pearson, you know this, these giant, these giant educational monoliths who are determining what's best for our students and and and their own, their own journeys. And that's just, we just need to push back against that. And the way we do that is we defend our practice. The way we do that is we go into our classrooms and we shut our doors and we do what is best for them and how. I mean, I've been teaching for 25 years. I've never had an administrator say to me when I refuse to do test prep, you have to do this or you'll lose your job. I mean, if I can demonstrate that my practice is just as effective and that my practice gets gets not only what they want from the student, right, but also beyond that, which is an actual writing practice and thinking and critical thinking and creativity and community and all of those things, I think we're really short sighted if we limit ourselves to those models?

Sarah Zerwin 10:03
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And Julia, when you sent this question to us, you said, how do you support students use of systems for measuring growth? And I really loved that phrasing, because we forget that the students really should be the most important users of our classroom assessment data. And when I started thinking about that, I started thinking completely differently about what kind of assessment data I needed in my classroom. Is, in the end, I have my students write these stories about their about their journey as learners, and honestly, they're focusing on growth more than they're focusing on achievement, because I asked them years ago. So if we're going to do something different with grades, what should your semester grade reflect your mastery and achievement or growth? And 100% they wanted it to focus on growth. And so that's what I've been focusing on with them. And so what I have them do is I boil down all of the classroom, all of my curriculum expectations into a nice, tight List of 10 goals that make sense to my students. And then I have them pick three, and each kid traces their journey towards those three goals. And they don't just use the goal my words, they put it into their own words. And they write about, where am I now, and where do I want to be, and what I'm going to what am I going to do to get there? And then they focus on those three goals and their journey toward those and I have them reflect every week, and they track, they track their learning and their writers notebooks, and they do all this stuff to get them super focused on the process, rather than that end semester grade. And then at the end, they look back over all of that and all of the assessment data that I've collected on them and that they've helped me collect on them, and they write a story about their journey as learners, and in that story, they tell me what grade they think they should have, and it just puts it all on them and gives them the agency to be in charge of their own learning in my classroom. And the best test prep is solid reading and writing instruction. Right? Man, yeah, period. And that's the best practice that they need to do, is read and write a lot, a lot, a lot. So I'm just trying to get focused on that and get the students focused on their own learning and their own journey.

Liz Prather 12:14
Yeah, test group is just so disjointed. I mean, that's the thing that I see. There's no connection to the larger, richer world of thinking. That's what is so disheartening about people who buy into it, and why districts buy into these kind of, you know, delivery method methods, is beyond me. I don't understand it.

Julia Torres 12:32
It seems very reactive to me. It seems like, okay, we're panicking because we're not getting the results that we want, and what we've always done isn't working with this new group of students. So rather than thinking about how education has to evolve and the way that we are teaching students has to evolve, which is what I like so much about the two of you and your studies and your work, is that it is an evolutionary thinking about how we coach students to write. It's not so much you're reading this, and then you're writing an argumentative or persuasive essay about it anymore. It's more I want to learn these different genres of writing. And then what do I need to do as an individual writer to, you know, sharpen my skills. What tools do I have at my disposal? And I love that. I wanted to talk a little bit here. Liz about your book. Story matters because, you know, Sarah, you were mentioning that students have to, kind of like trace their journey to becoming writers, well, in a way that is creative nonfiction, or that is, you know, them writing the story of becoming writers. So, um, you know, we have this constant interplay right between argumentative and Creative Writing, and I've noticed that creative writing has fallen off drastically in schools in terms of what we are given time to do. We're told that we need to focus on argumentative writing, at least in my environment, which, again, is one of the more restrictive, more high stakes environments. So could you both speak a little bit about what you perceive to be that balance, or interplay between time given for creative writing and time for argumentative writing, and how folks who are in more restrictive environments can achieve better balance. I know Liz, you're at a at a an art school, so you know that makes sense for your students to be encouraged to do creative writing. Mine are definitely not. So could you both speak a little bit to that?

Liz Prather 14:27
Yeah, so it goes back to the seesaw. It goes back to the paradox that you know it all. Writing is creative. If you're writing an argument or an analytical essay or a lab report, it's all creative. You are creating something that has not existed before. And so if we come down on side of that seesaw and we say, you know, this is the analytical approach, or this is the creative, this is the imaginative or writing approach, then you cut your students out of all the dishes on the buffet table, right that they can use so, and I know I'm mixing. Metaphors here, but I'm picking up what you're putting down. You know? I mean, like the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we were the first state in 2000 and whenever it was 10 or whatever, to adopt Common Core. And it was because I think a lot of post secondary educators were pushing back and saying, students are arriving here from high school and they don't know how to write an essay. You know? They don't know how to write an argumentative essay, they don't have an analytical essay. Well, what was the response? Let's throw out personal narrative, let's throw out the short story, let's throw out poetry, let's throw everything out, and let's concentrate on argument. Well, you can't do that because everything is an argument. A movie is an argument, a poem is an argument. And so you can teach argumentative strategies with a poem as well as you can with an analytical essay. And so I don't know if that you know we have to just be a lot broader with our definition of what that is.

Sarah Zerwin 15:49
I think, I think the the Common Core, like as it's set, asks us to teach argumentative, informative and narrative writing. So if that is there as a support for us to make the argument that we need more room for other types of writing. I think what often happens for English teachers is we start by thinking about what books we want to teach when we're thinking about curriculum, and then if the curriculum is super focused on the books we're teaching as units, then the writing is by default about the books, and then teachers go to literary analysis, about the books as the main kind of writing that students do, and then before you know it, the only work that they're doing is that kind of work. I think there's room for so so many other kinds of writing in our classes. And Liz, that's one reason why I love your book so much, because it really does give students so many options for writing gives teachers vision and ideas for how they can make more space in their classrooms, for more options for writing for their students.

Julia Torres 16:50
So on those lines, I would love to hear about, if you can think of one, or maybe a great success story from a student. What is something that a student told you or something that you witnessed that was just like an awesome experience with either of your approaches or both or combination?

Sarah Zerwin 17:14
Well, I filled my book with these letters from my students, because that, for me, is where it becomes so clear that the work I'm doing to step away from traditional grading in my classroom is working and matters. And so every time I read them, I think this is really important for me to be doing this. And I can tell you about one particular student there, and actually the the lesson that she talked about was more about reading than about writing, but she she wrote this in her letter about her story as a reader, and in her letter, she ended up asking or saying to me that she thought she should have a C in the class, but she wrote this really long, beautiful story about how she really became a reader, and it had to do with her group that she was sitting With and wanting to never disappoint them, to not having had the reading done, and how she started reading more in her life outside of school so she could have philosophical conversations with her dad. And it just was this beautiful letter that at the end she wrote something like I used to have, like nail polish and Netflix or something, and now I've got Eckhart Tolle and these other philosophers, and it just by giving her the space to set that goal about herself as a reader, and then to focus on her journey as a reader, she was able to see all of that. And had my grade book been focused on points, then she probably would have ended up with the same grade as C she did choose not to do some of the work of the course or to finish some of the work of the course. And so I thought that the grade that she selected for herself was pretty right on, but a grade book that was just about points and numbers and all that, we would not have seen that beautiful journey that she went on as a as a reader, and she might not have seen it either. I mean, the letter She sounds like she has so much power in her own journey and her own like, where she's standing as a reader and heading forward. So that's stories like that are what really make me keep going, because what I'm doing is hard and it goes against what people expect me to be doing. But I will keep doing it, because I get stories like that from my students.

Julia Torres 19:21
I imagine there's a lot of community at times. There's people who just don't understand what you want to do, and they don't see the bigger picture. So there's that process of, you know, trying to explain to them that this, what this is, and how it's going to be empowering for the students. But there's nothing like student voice to be able to explain exactly what you're doing. Liz, what about you?

Liz Prather 19:42
Yeah, well, in Sarah's letters, let me just say the letters in Sarah's books are incredible examples of literacy narratives that use information and make an argument about what about what they should you know, what grade should I get? They're making an argument. They're making a claim, and they're backing it up with this data, this information from their story, from. Their lives, and they're beautiful examples. They're great mentor text. Actually, I think for me, about success stories. Every year, around October, I will get an email from a graduate who is now at college or a university or somewhere, and they will say, Thank you for teaching us more than writing like because writing is really about social intelligence. You know? It's really about, how do I manage my time? How do I divide a large project into small chunks? How do I prioritize? How do I communicate? How do I read the room? Right? All of those things are necessary. And so those are the skills that kids are don't have a lot of times because they've never had an opportunity to practice in high school, and so when they get to college, that's really the currency in college. Those kinds of things are what makes the college experience, and that's what most kids learn their freshman year, is how to navigate that. Well, if kids come to college having already navigated that, that's what I think is a success.

Julia Torres 20:57
I love it. I love it. Well, I am very happy to have had this chance to talk with both of you today. Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives and your experience. I know new teachers, especially are going to be very excited to pick up your books Pointless and Story Matters and Project Based Writing, right? Yes. So I know that we have some reading and studying and conversating that we can do about all of these things. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for both of you.

Sarah Zerwin 21:27
Thank you, Julia, really good to talk to you both you.