Cheri Dotterer 0:00
Welcome to the writing glitch. I'm Cheri Dotterer, your classroom coach. Today we are with Christine tehan. She is the co director of academics at the writing revolution, which was founded by Judith C Hochman. Writing revolution 2.0 was just released recently, and thank you for sharing a copy with me today we're going to answer this question about guiding, advancing thinking through writing. So keep that as your thought as we're going through this conversation with Dr Tien. Before we start though, I'd like to go through an ad. Pause, pause, Cheri, before we begin, here is a word from our sponsor, disability labs. At disability labs, we are committed to impact the journey of 200,000 teachers by 2030 so that they can reignite their passion for writing. Our professional learning series focuses on math and writing skills and strategies to help students in their classroom. These interventions improve students with and without disabilities. All students have access to the mathematics and the writing skills. We have an e book called the pizza problem for 1495 see the information in the show notes. What is the pizza problem? It introduces the concept of squares to students, whether you're a teacher, an occupational therapist, speech therapist, or any paraprofessional, parent, it doesn't matter. This problem uses vision to develop conceptual knowledge from kindergarten through 12th grade, it increases complexity with based on the student's knowledge and improves number sense. Now. Christine tean, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit a bit more about yourself.
Speaker 1 1:56
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. So as you said, I'm the co director of the writing revolution, and prior to joining I was a classroom educator. Teaching is a calling for me, more than a passion. It's a calling. I've wanted to be a teacher my whole life. I was inspired by the birth of my youngest brother who had Down syndrome, has Down syndrome to specialize in special education, which is what I have both my bachelor's and my master's degree in right out of grad school, I got a job at a school for that specialized with for with children with language based learning disabilities. And there I received some incredible professional development that really outshined my my grad work in particular, and in that training, I've received training in advancing thinking through writing, which is the course that goes through the Hockman method of writing. And Dr Hochman herself taught the course. At that time, I taught grades five, six and eight. I was a classroom teacher, and I got to teach all subjects, reading, writing, science, math, social studies throughout the years. Each year may look a little different, but the thread through all of that was the Hockman method. I used it in every single content that I taught every class every year, and the impact of that on my students, on me, on their families, really is inexplicable. Fast forward, many years later, when this organization was founded and starting to grow, I had a friend reach out and say, Hey, I know you love your classroom job, but this organization is really special. And I had already been thinking about how I wanted to do something more and get something like this out to the world, because it really is something that any classroom teacher can use, no matter who their students are, and that's what we do. So in this role, I get to teach, create, revise these courses and workshops and webinars that the writing revolution offers, helping teachers and schools all over the country, in the world to bring the Hawkman method to their classrooms.
Cheri Dotterer 4:04
Fantastic. I believe that we met at the International Dyslexia Association conference last year, and we talked a little bit about the writing revolution. Now you have the new book out. Tell us a little bit more about what is this Hoffman method. Yeah,
Speaker 1 4:29
so the Hoffman method, developed by Dr Judith. Judith Hoffman is a really structured, explicit method of teaching writing, and it is something that is it is a method. It is not a curriculum. It is not a program. It is something that is meant to be used in any content at any age, because it really is something that it were the students are meant to be writing about whatever it is that they're learning. And the method takes. Students. What takes teachers from the sentence level all the way through the essay level, it breaks down strategies in such a way that it can meet students wherever they are, and you can scaffold them up and down. It builds on itself, and it really neatly builds in retrieval practice. And just the recursive nature of the method really helps students to own it and become proficient in the strategies over time when it is used consistently. So it's grounded in six principles, which you can certainly read about in the book and on the website. But essentially, we know that students need explicit instruction in writing and through a gradual release method, we know that grammar is best taught in the context of student writing, not in isolation. We know that retrieval practice is so important and so the students need consistent and deliberate practice in these writing skills, because writing is so difficult to learn and it's just something that is very usable. And Dr Hockman developed this method over decades. I'd started when she went for her doctoral degree back in around 1980 or somewhere around there, she was working with children, particularly with learning disabilities, and just desperate for something, so she went out there and started to put together something on her own. And it has evolved, and now it's TWR 2.0
Cheri Dotterer 6:26
as an occupational therapist, we think a lot about letter formation, and I get a lot of questions about, what is dysgraphia, and is this dysgraphia? And a lot of what I get to see is illegible handwriting with younger students, but I believe the DSM five, which utilizes the definition of punctuation, capitalization, grammar, sentence structure, spelling, vocabulary and paragraph or an organization, takes the idea of writing to a totally different level from what I've gathered by just glancing through the book. That's where you have taken that letter formation. You don't talk about that. It's that next step. How do you bridge that gap between those basic learning how to write the letters and bring it into something that potentially an occupational therapist would be interested in using, because that is some of my audience. The other part of my audience are teachers and parents. But there's always this misunderstanding with this connection. So how does the writing revolution bridge that gap? Oh, that's
Speaker 1 7:46
a really good question. There is a lot of misconception around even when people hear about a writing program, people automatically go to the spelling and the letter formation and the handwriting, which isn't a part of what we do. As you say, there is a next step. There's a there are a lot of programs out there that do offer that type of instruction that work very neatly with the writing revolution. I would say I could go on and on about that question, but concisely, it's always a matter of thinking about where students are in their writing progression and meeting them there. So if students are still focusing their cognitive resources on forming letters and spelling and just getting the things on the page, if writing is physically a strain for them, then these met this method and these strategies can be used in oral language instruction, and it can stay there for K through two, we have a course that specifically is first educators in grades K through two, and that's a big talking point for kindergarteners, with or without dysgraphia. There's no need for them to be writing at length, because their brains can't really do that. Yet they're not ready for it. But that doesn't mean that they can't learn how to organize their thoughts, and that doesn't mean that they can't learn how to craft sentences, but instead of having them actually put the pencil to the paper during that particular part of a lesson, you can have them look at it on the board, and you can lead them through crafting those sentences orally. And that is a fantastic practice. The teacher can be at the front of the classroom with a big SPO, single paragraph outline, walking them through, organizing their thoughts, picking the most relevant information from what they just learned, and getting that idea of a paragraph structure early on, before they even write it down on a on an actual SPO themselves, whatever, wherever the students are in their journey, If their time with the pencil to paper is focused on spelling and letter formation, that writing instruction can still happen at that oral language level.
Cheri Dotterer 9:50
I think that really parallels what we're learning about the science of reading, and that is we need to have the oral language. First before we can create written language, and I believe that's the what the DSM five was really trying to reflect, by its definition, between reading and writing. Do does the writing revolution help support math as well? Yeah,
Speaker 1 10:21
got I was my first love in school was always math. I loved reading, too, but math was always my number one subject, and I had always planned on being a math teacher. Started college as a math major. This is near and dear to my heart, this topic. Of course. I changed my course along the way to special education, but I did get to teach math for almost the entirety of my teaching years, and I use this method, and I now teach. We have a course to specifically for teachers of math and science, and how to embed this method in that in those courses. There's so many ways, but one of the one of the things top of mind is especially with the standardized tests and the way that students are now expected to be able to explain what it is that they did, justify an answer, analyze an error, and all of that in writing. That is one of the most difficult tasks. Even for the students who can do the math like that, being able to explain it is harder because there's, I just got it. I did it. What do you mean? There's the work right here, and putting it into words can be really challenging, but what the Hoffman method can do, and especially when students are learning the writing strategies in their actual English classes, the math teacher can then just use those strategies to provide structure for those responses. If it's a word problem and they have to give an answer, it's an if, then answer if. In English, they learned how to use if as a subordinating conjunction. And then they come to math, and they see that same structure of a sentence the teacher has set up to respond to that word problem. Then they're able to actually focus on the math and the part where that they need to explain, and they're not so stuck on oh my gosh, I have to write in math, our sentence expansion strategy is a really great one. For example, if a student has to analyze an error, the teacher can give them a kernel sentence that says it is incorrect. What's incorrect? The Susie's answer, why is it incorrect? She subtracted five instead of adding five. So focusing one piece of that at a time and then putting it all together to say, Susie's answer is incorrect because she's subtracted five instead of adding five, but that helps to break down that task into these little manageable chunks. And the more practice they get with that, then the easier it starts to come to them. And they know what is expected of them, and they know what they should be providing in those types of answers.
Cheri Dotterer 12:46
It's almost like you're taking the idea of number sense and putting it to literacy. So if anybody has not heard that term before, number sense really is the innate understanding of the magnitude of number magnitude being like the size of it, which is bigger five or 10, and just innately knowing that. And a lot of students, especially the brilliant ones, just know the answer. They don't know really how they're coming up with the answer that they're coming up with. This sounds like a structure to help break down the parts from an integrate the language into what they're trying to say, as far as their math goes, interesting just glancing through the book, not knowing your system at all, I would not have come up with that initially, but now that you're talking, I was like, oh yes. Incidentally, before we go on, I'm just going to click over here and share my screen so that everybody can see. This is the new edition of the writing revolution. So those of you who are watching the video feed, you can see a copy of it if the link will be in the show notes. So stop share and come back to Dr Hagan. So tell me a little bit of some of the structure of the Huffman method, some of those key points that you were talking about in the that are in the front of the book. One of them was sequence of sentences, activities. Another one was organization and study skills. I often get asked the question about organization and study skills. Are there any intervention techniques that you can share with the audience today that just one that you utilize to help improve study schools? Well. Oh yeah, just one.
Unknown Speaker 15:01
Okay, okay,
Cheri Dotterer 15:02
okay, two. Two is a bonus.
Speaker 1 15:05
Yes, two of the I would say the two. Well, let me name three, because I think it's really important, and they all really relate to each other, starting with note taking, we offer. Dr Hochman offers an explicit set of note taking skills and strategies and walks teachers through how to actually focus instruction on that and even integrate it and weave it in a way that doesn't feel like you're spending a ton of time teaching note taking. But the fact is that Note taking is one of the most important skills you can give your students, and they won't just learn it naturally. It is cognitively demanding to read something, to listen to something, and put that information together, pull out what's most important, organize it in a certain way. That's a difficult task. And so when a student, when students are given one strategy, and they are taught it explicitly, and it's used consistently from year to year and from class to class, then that just becomes a way of them to think and process information. And it's invaluable. It's really the research says a lot about the importance of note taking and on reading comprehension and listening comprehension, and then with that, so we have this set of skills in addition to just taking notes on something that students have read, they also can apply those note taking skills to various other parts of their learning, one of them being summarizing. There's also explicit strategies for teaching students how to summarize. We know from a very young age, students are told to summarize, and it's really important that they are able to because another really important comprehension skill, but it's hard. It's really hard. I could give a task to any adults and just say, summarize, and most of them would have to sit and think about it first. You have to have a lot of background knowledge. You have to know what's important and what's not. You have to know your audience, and so the note taking really helps to break down the strategy of summarizing, and then a step further is using the note taking skills to outline before writing. Writing at length, whether it's a paragraph or an essay, is a very complex task. There are so much involved, and a student really needs to be taught how to plan out what they're going to say before they actually write. And Dr Hochman has developed these very neat, linear outlines that can be consistently used for any expository writing structures. And the Note taking is what helps make that an efficient process. So when and it also teaches that organization of information, the categorizing, recognizing text structure. And so when you take those together, note taking, summarizing and outlining, they all combine to help students learn how to tackle information, to study it, to learn it and to use it in a really impressive way. What you're telling me is
Cheri Dotterer 17:54
I should have had it her method when I was writing my book, right?
Speaker 1 18:00
I will everybody says that's such a common thing. And even when I learned it, I was sitting in there, just fresh out of grad school, thinking, oh my gosh, college would have been so much easier if I had these skills going in.
Cheri Dotterer 18:12
And you mentioned a third item.
Speaker 1 18:15
That was three. So it was the note taking, rising and the outlines, outlines.
Cheri Dotterer 18:19
Oh yes, you did say three. Forgive me, I don't know how to count today. My number sense is a little off. So one of the items you mentioned in the book in the introduction is that you support speaking activities. Tell us a little bit more about how your writing and speaking go together.
Speaker 1 18:46
Yeah, at any age, by the way, oral language instruction is really important for when a student goes to write, consider everything that is involved in that process, even at the sentence level. There is there's as you said, letter formation and spelling right, even after that, there's choosing the words that they need. There is putting that sentence together, the word choice and the word order. There's the grammar. There's the mechanics, all those discrete skills when students don't have them automatized, that is what they're thinking about as they go to write the oral language piece, especially before writing at length, it can be huge. So we already talked about how if students are still trying to master those lower level skills, that's where their brains are. But even for students who have mastered those skills, who have who are writing at length, the oral language piece remains beneficial, because when it is time to write, it is helpful to just retrieve information. Just have that oral language practice of let's just start naming vocabulary that is going to be used in this piece of writing. Let's start thinking through. Recall the different events that took place, or the different people there and then. When it comes to the actual writing skills, if you're if you want your students to use sentence variety in their paragraph, if you want to see them demonstrate that they've learned these sentence level strategies, it's really helpful to recall that, and you can do that or at an oral language level in a relatively quick way. Remember because buttons. So let's just quickly do this orally, and then to one of my favorite uses of the method, especially for my students who really struggled with reading and struggled with writing, that was their big thing. That was why they were at the school. And it was a lot of intense instruction. When we would read books together, we would read a couple paragraphs out loud, take turns and pause, and I would ask questions. And sometimes those questions actually not were not questions. I would integrate the writing strategies to elicit the information. So I might say Jonas was Jonas was nervous period as an illustration, and then I would pause and say, Can someone finish that sentence using that transition as an illustration? Someone tell me in your own words how Jonas showed that he was nervous, provide that textual evidence so they weren't writing, but they were required to answer in that written language structure. So there's really ample application at that oral language instruction level.
Cheri Dotterer 21:27
I keep thinking as you're talking about kids who say it, and then just totally forget what they have to say. And one of those strategies that I use with my students is otter AI where I can record it, I can get an audio file and a transcript from that resource. Do you ever incorporate those technologies with the Huffman method?
Speaker 1 21:53
I personally have not, but I have seen it used, and I have worked with families who do use integrative technology, I think it's really important for a lot of students, especially those with dysgraphia, who really struggle at the actual physical level of writing, to have those tools, because it helps them to get their thoughts out. So whatever technology they need is fabulous. We know that it's about balance, of course, but yeah, I haven't personally used those tools, but I know a lot of people who have, and I think they're great.
Cheri Dotterer 22:26
And speaking of technology, I see in the book that you have online resources. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have to offer as far as online resources? Yeah.
Speaker 1 22:37
So we have two different pages. We have our Book Resources page, which is free for all. You do have to register and you'll get an account, but it doesn't cost $1 and that book resources page align, aligns with the actual book. When you read chapter two and word chapter three, you have read about these certain strategies. You go on to the Book Resources page, you'll you can click on Chapter Two or chapter three, and you'll see example templates of that strategy. You'll see examples of that strategy in a particular content area, maybe some other resources. So there are things like the supplement the reading that you're doing when you have the book. And then for anyone who takes one of our courses, they automatically get access to our resource library, which is an ever evolving place for information. We have videos of class of the Hockman method in action and classrooms. We have hundreds of customizable templates so teachers don't have to recreate the wheel every time they want to teach a subordinating conjunctions activity they can go on to our website. They can just on Google Drive, just down, quickly click that it saves onto their Google Drive, and they can just put whatever content they're teaching right in there. We have webinars that get released once a month for free, along with resources we just we have classroom posters of all kinds, with transitions, with the note taking symbols, and we just actually, last week, launched our new Spanish templates, which is so exciting, as well as our Spanish classroom posters. So we have a team who works on that resource library. It is coming along beautifully, and it's going to improve with each day
Cheri Dotterer 24:24
Spanish speaking and the bilingual that's we. It's so nice to have that side by side for a lot of the students today, we have so many students that speak in other languages around us. That's fabulous that you're doing that. Gee, is there anything else that you'd like to share with the listeners? Remember the audiences, parents, their teachers, their occupational therapists. So there could be something that parents that we haven't really dealt with, the parents and touch a little bit more on. How an occupational therapist can work with you.
Speaker 1 25:04
Yeah, there are. I could go on. I'm quite passionate about this work as as far as those who are not classroom teachers, anyone who's not a classroom teacher, even just to have the book and have those strategies and know about that, oral language instruction is really huge, even for parents. I just as one example, I have three children myself in grades kindergarten, second and fourth right now, and when they come home from school, How is school good? So there's always that part of me I have to hear more and okay, it was good. Let's come up with another word, right? Let's vary that vocabulary, that's a revision strategy in the method. And then it was good, what was good and or it was fun, what was fun? And why was it fun? And now put that together in a sentence. Or, I had a great day, but was there any little thing that went wrong today that you might want to talk about? And so just even being able to integrate some of the strategies into conversation and using them as a way to get more out of your kids is something that it's once you start doing it, it just becomes a natural part of conversation, right in the car, on the way home, getting off the bus. And so there's just plenty of ways that this benefits students, especially that consistency and using those strategies across contexts. We know it really helps with the transfer of skills and knowledge. And the other thing is, too, that writing, you mentioned in the earlier, the advancing thinking through writing, and we were talking about math, a huge piece of this is that think writing is thinking so to when, even for me, who I've been writing my whole life, I'm a good writer. I still write all the time journal. I journal all the time. I make it a practice, because while I'm writing and what, when I think I even know what I'm going to sit down and write about, somehow it evolves, and somehow I get somewhere else, because I start to really dive into things that I wouldn't necessarily dive into as I was just sitting here and thinking. So the the when you start writing about topics you're learning, then you start to remember them more, and then you start to think further, you start to ask questions that are a little bit off the page, and you it really starts to become part of habit. And so to give students the tools they need to be able to think deeply about anything in life is something that it just is a gift that just keeps on giving. And so we really feel strongly about providing students with any opportunity as possible. And a writing is a huge writing is just such an important part of that in their educational journey.
Cheri Dotterer 27:30
So one of the things that we do as occupational therapists is, so what did you do this weekend? And we get crickets, so we have students who really just can't get over even the oral language. Sometimes in our sessions, when you have a student that is having that much difficult time, even with oral language, how do you get them started?
Speaker 1 28:01
First of all the when you see the strategies in the way that they are presented, you'll see that they're usually given a little something, a little sentence to expand, a sentence, stem to elaborate on. And then the modeling piece becomes really important for students after that. So if you did say that and you got crickets, let's write, I'm going to write this sentence on the board over the week, the weekend was exhausting, or it was exhausting. What was exhausting? Gosh, I cleaned my house on all of Saturday. So cleaning my house was exhausting. Did you do anything exhausting? But modeling for that, that for them first, and giving them a starting point, sometimes that really helps. So giving them that stem and giving them that kernel and modeling for them how to respond to it, and just giving them that that place to start is can often be very helpful.
Cheri Dotterer 28:50
Thank you. I was thinking that's where you were going with that, but I wanted an occupational therapist to hear that. So thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for Dr Huffman for doing all this research. Kudos to you for coming on board with the program and being a teacher of this model. It's very much needed. People do not understand anything about what's happening behind writing skills. It's very untapped area of expertise. It was a pleasure having you here today. How can people find more information out about writing revolution and yourself?
Speaker 1 29:37
Thank you. I first of all, thank you for all the work you do. I did look into all of the disability labs, the writing glitch and the courses you offer and the resources you have, they're incredible, and it's an area that needs advocates like you. So I also appreciate everything that you do, and in terms of learning more about the writing revolution, best place to start. Is the writingrevolution.org The book is around $20 and it can be purchased on Amazon, but going just going to our website and going to the Book Resources page, that is a great place to begin your writing revolution journey.
Cheri Dotterer 30:15
Thank you, listeners. Remember you were put here for such a time is this. Go be awesome. Be brilliant. Teach those struggling students with the strategies you learn here. Thank you Christine for being here. Thank you Cheri, for having me. Thank you for your time. And go be blessed by the rest of this beautiful day.
Speaker 1 30:38
You as well. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye, bye, now, bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
