The Missing Link: Teaching and Learning Critical Success Skills

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my good friend, Steve Pehoff. We're here today to talk about Steve's new book, Be a Better Writer, for school, for fun, for anyone ages 10 to 16. The second edition is out now.

[00:31] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:34] SPEAKER_02:

Steve, I want to welcome you to Principal Center Radio.

[00:36] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin. It's really a pleasure to be here.

[00:37] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'm excited to talk about this book, even though it's a book that's aimed at students. And, you know, we tend to cover books on Principal Center Radio that are aimed at administrators or in some cases teachers. But today I'm really excited to speak with you about what the writing process looks like for students and what we can do as leaders to kind of create the conditions where students don't just do writing, where they don't just have assignments that they complete and turn in, but they actually leave school seeing themselves as writers. And I wonder if you could start by telling us about some of the work that you've done throughout your career working with schools on writing that kind of led up to this book.

[01:15] SPEAKER_01:

In my first couple of years working with kids, I think I struggled as much or more as any teacher does. And writing, I struggled with the most, despite the fact that I was a professional writer prior to working with kids in the classroom. And I realized that I needed to know how to do things with kids and writing in a very specific way, saying pick a topic and write differently. was not getting the job done and i started very slowly just developing what ended up being a repertoire of procedures to get kids to pick a topic to get kids to write a lead to get kids to add detail to get kids to share their writing give feedback use feedback etc etc etc and i built for myself a pretty large repertoire when i started training i knew i had to cut that repertoire down I knew I had to get down to eight or 10 or 12 really high value or high payoff practices.

[02:11]

And that's when I sort of designed a set of sometimes people call them strategies. I call them patterns. It doesn't really matter. The book is full of these strategies and practices. And the advantage that I see or have seen for myself and for the teachers that I've worked with over the last 20 years has been that these are reusable. They've been used at all grade levels.

[02:37]

They've been used across the curriculum. They can be flipped and used for reading. And that a school or a teacher or a group of kids can get a long way with learning eight things or six things or 12 if they want. And they can also combine them and vary them. I've always felt that it's a good spot between a programmed curriculum, which I think has some positives, but a lot of negatives for teachers and kids, and essentially no curriculum, where often there's too much chaos between grades or something like that. This is more of a framework and a repertoire of techniques.

[03:17]

And you mentioned a really important thing, kids feeling like writers, not just writing to complete a sentence, but really feeling like writers. And I've asked myself what makes kids feel like writers, and I've come down ultimately to one thing. A kid feels like a writer when they are aware that they are using a technique that they can name to produce better writing. That's it. The minute they know how to use the what, why, how strategy to get started on an expository essay, they feel like a writer. When they go to the list of 23 good leads we have and they pick number 17 for a reason, they feel like a writer.

[03:58]

And I suppose that's exactly the same as a musician would feel or a gymnast or a dancer would feel. I feel like I'm a good pianist when I know I'm using certain techniques to get a certain result. I have my intention and I reach my goal.

[04:16] SPEAKER_02:

Well, that idea of kind of an identity as a writer is one that I first encountered working with the Lucy Calkins Teachers College Readers and Writers Workshop curriculum, which is a fabulous curriculum. I know you're a fan of that too for the elementary years and reaching up a little bit into the middle school grade levels. But in adopting that curriculum as a school, we found that in a lot of cases, there's not really much that's standardized that, you know, that's kind of a shared domain of practice in a lot of schools. when it comes to writing. Writing is something that often we just kind of assign. We expect teachers to teach writing, but there's not a curriculum in the same way that there often is for math or even for reading.

[04:53]

Often there's a much more structured curriculum for reading. And I think that comes from just the fact that when students are writing, they're not all writing the same thing and they're not all encountering the same challenges. So one thing I've noticed with the teaching of writing is that often we teach the format of the final product like we say five paragraph essay you have to know this to get into college or we say five paragraph essay you have to write one of these on your state test or we say diamante poem or haiku or whatever because those are formats that we can issue to students as an assignment collect back from them and see if they did it and we can feel a feeling of success but i think what we don't get as an outcome of that is that student identity as writers. We don't necessarily make students feel like writers just because they did a haiku and turned it in. So I wonder in kind of developing that repertoire of moves or of key patterns, what are some of the first patterns that you tend to emphasize when you're working with a school?

[05:49]

If we're going to get beyond just, you know, here's how to teach a five paragraph essay and really help students become people who see themselves as writers, what are some of the patterns that can get us there?

[05:59] SPEAKER_01:

Well, first of all, the patterns that we have to give kids have to produce the same results professional writers produce. So the first thing professional writers can do is pick their own topics or at least pick their angle within a topic assignment. So my first set of strategies, I call them topic T-charts. I have about six of them. Each is a sort of an opposite list, like, don't like, fun, have to, proud of, regret. And after filling out five or six of these lists, kids have about 120 topics.

[06:32]

And that's the end of I don't know what to write about anymore. So that's where we start. Then, of course, we hit the next problem, which is what do I write? And so the next obvious thing to teach is a kind of early pre-writing strategy. I have one called idea details, which is as simple as possible. Tell me one thing about your topic.

[06:51]

Great. Now think about the questions the readers are going to ask and write down on the other side of the chart three bullet points. And it instantly makes a paragraph. So I can get any kids, even as low as kindergarten, to come out with a cohesive paragraph of something. And for me, that's all I need to do to get into really working with a kid, because now I can ask them questions which they can answer. I can work on sentence level things.

[07:17]

I can simply say, what's the next thing you want to talk about? Start a new paragraph. Use this strategy. So I could. And what I've liked about this, this repertoire based idea is I know a lot of teachers who only use two or three sentences. of the strategies I have.

[07:32]

And they're extremely successful. Some of them are the most successful teachers of all. On the other hand, I have about 40 or 50 to choose from, and they go all the way across the curriculum and so forth. So the real important thing about the connection between the strategies and the writer's identity is, just as you said, we are historically and traditionally working with what I call form-driven instruction. We let forms drive what we teach. What we need to do is...

[08:04]

simply technique-driven instruction because every form requires the same basic set of techniques. Every form has a beginning. I have to come up with a good lead. If I don't know how to do that, then no form you give me will be that successful. Everything has to have an ending. Everything has to have details.

[08:26]

Sentence structure comes up in every single type of writing. So it's not that I'm form agnostic or anything. I love teaching forms, but my driver is technique.

[08:36] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and that gets back to something I've seen in the writer's workshop curriculum, which, again, I'll go back to that because that's what I've seen the most in terms of writing instruction. And you do have those teaching points or those strategy lessons that are designed to teach kids, you know, here's how you generate ideas. Here's how you get started. Here's how you add detail. Here's how you add dialogue if it's a story. And as the student's writing progresses, those techniques become optional, right?

[09:02]

You know, they're starting off with, you know, everybody has to generate ideas. Everybody has to have a first paragraph or whatever. But over time, you know, as you get into revision, every student needs to revise in a different way. And that those strategies start being taught as kind of options or as kind of a repertoire for students to pull from and apply to their writing. As they look through Be a Better Writer, it seems like it's loaded with those kinds of strategies. I know you wrote this with students in mind.

[09:27]

It's not a teacher-driven book. It's a book for students to actually use as they're improving their writing. What's your hope as they pick up the book? You know, they say, OK, I see myself as a writer. I'm looking to improve my writing. And my teacher gave me this huge book called Be a Better Writer.

[09:41]

What do you envision that students will do with that?

[09:43] SPEAKER_01:

I hope they do exactly what any of us would do when we have a text that is essentially a reference text. I have a problem I want to solve. I look in the table of contents. I pick a technique and I use it to see if I can solve a problem. Writing on one level is full of problems and the irony of it is the problems are always there. You can write

[10:11]

And you're still set up with the same set of problems. So what I want is exactly what you said. And I favor the writer's workshop model too, though the techniques are not exclusive to writer's workshop, just a good environment. Kids tend to learn these in a very tight procedural way. Do this, do this. Then it gets a little looser and then they internalize it.

[10:35]

Kids can add details themselves. They don't need a practice or a technique or a tool. So the way I envision this is essentially two ways. Either the teacher has it and is teaching from it directly because these really are just my lessons and me talking to kids. Or the teacher has no knowledge of it at all. The kid just has it at home because their mom or dad thought it would be helpful.

[10:58]

And they come home with a piece of expository text or something they're supposed to do. And they flip the pages and they go, oh, the what, why, how strategy is designed differently. to do expository texts. It's perfectly designed to do that because it's based on the structure of logical argument. I had a mom and a family recently tell me it was the what, why, how strategy was very good. I had a little thing in there about how to answer an essay question in a logical way.

[11:24]

Kids taking AP World History, almost all his tests are essay questions. He used that the first time. It worked. And I just said, now he knows how to write a logical essay question. And he'll just continue to do that whether his teacher uses the tool or not. I based most of these techniques on linguistics and the way we talk and think in Western society.

[11:47]

These are very enduring patterns. They're ones that have existed for thousands of years, and they won't change. A well-organized answer to an essay question or a well-organized research paper will always have the same formal organization, pretty much.

[12:03] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I love that focus that starts with, where are you stuck? Are you stuck with, I find it difficult to write, I find it difficult to come up with a topic, to organize my ideas, to improve my sentences, or make my voice come through better? Or is it about word choice? And you've got chapters and sections on each of those. and I wonder if we could kind of zoom back to the leadership level now. Speaking as an instructional leader, I think writing instruction in a school where there's not a very tightly laid out curriculum like writer's workshop or like somebody who's following one of your programs, it's often a very difficult subject to observe because you come in the classroom as the principal and students are kind of working in groups, maybe they're revising or getting feedback, or maybe they're working independently.

[12:46]

The teacher is not talking to the whole class. They might be working with one particular student. The teacher might even be creating that deadliest of sins. The teacher might even be sitting at her desk And talking with the student there or looking at a piece of work. And it goes against a lot of our big ideas about what a classroom should look like. So in your mind, what should we be looking for when we go into a classroom where writing is being taught well?

[13:14] SPEAKER_01:

I think honestly, again, I'm going to go back to just two or three really fundamental things. The first thing we should be looking for is kids writing. My rule is on average, at least half the period kids are writing. Sometimes it's all day writing if we're behind on something. If kids are writing, every minute that the kids are writing, I should be talking to one or more of them. individually about their work, because that's my high payoff teaching.

[13:40]

I work faster and get more focused. And once we have a shared vocabulary of instruction, I don't have to sit there and pull out information from the kid. I can just say, hey, Justin, you see that bit there about the dog? Give me an idea of details on that. That's five seconds. And that will give the kid five minutes or 10 minutes of work to do.

[14:00]

And they'll add two paragraphs to their story. That starts to become a shorthand. and I'm able to essentially get around to more kids. So the first thing we should see is kids writing. While kids are writing, you should see me talking individually with kids or with small groups. And I think the third thing that you should see if you stuck around long enough is you should see some form of sharing plus feedback.

[14:25]

Whether you want to do that formally with one kid up in the front or whether you're doing it in small groups, you should see a writer reading their writing. And concurrent with that, you should see other writers or the teacher providing what I call actionable feedback. This is not I liked it or good or that was great. This is very specific feedback that the kid can take action on. So they have to know exactly what to do. And when they're up in the front of the room working formally, I make sure I always say, do you know what to do next?

[15:01]

And if they say no, then we go over it again and then they go back to their seat. That's the most important thing all of us need. We need actionable feedback. And so those are the three things, kids writing, teachers conferring, kids sharing, getting actionable feedback.

[15:16] SPEAKER_02:

And so much comes down to, yeah, how are we using that time? Is there a sizable chunk of the class period devoted to writing? And I know in a lot of classrooms, that's pushed to the extreme. There's a few minutes of instruction at the beginning, but then the majority of the period is writing because that's what we're there to do. If they're not writing, they're not learning writing. Right.

[15:33] SPEAKER_01:

There's a little bit of a taper. So at the beginning of the year, I have to introduce the repertoire unless someone in a previous grade. That's the advantage to a school wide approach to this is we shared across the repertoire and I saved the whole month of September. So I have to introduce a lot of lessons first. I have to introduce a lot of classroom procedures first. And I have to build that sense of community or safety for kids who just don't feel okay writing.

[15:58]

That can take four to six weeks before all that gels. So I do a lot more lesson time at the beginning and then I taper it off. I recommend as we hit to the third and fourth quarter that there's very little whole class instruction needed at all. And then we can concentrate on applying things.

[16:14] SPEAKER_02:

One kind of feedback or sharing or celebration technique that I saw used very successfully down to the second or third grade level and possibly even kindergarten and first grade was having students share their work, read it to the class or have the teacher read it to the class, and then having other students notice which techniques that they had recently learned that that writer had used in their writing, and I know within the Writer's Workshop curriculum, often that's done with mentor texts, but it's so much fun to see that being done with the student's actual work, you know, and it's a great compliment, I mean, just to see that shine through.

[16:49] SPEAKER_01:

It is, and so I teach a thing called Read Like a Writer, and this is not an unusual concept, there are entire books written about it, but I mean it very specifically. When we read like a reader, we are reading for what the writer is trying to tell us, what the meaning is. When we're reading like a writer, we're looking for how the writer is conveying that meaning. And I just tell kids how is in the form of a technique. It's either a name technique that we already have. It's up around the room somewhere.

[17:18]

Or you can describe it as whatever you think was going on there. And that to me is, again, that's where kids get to feel like writers. Whether you're using mentor texts, I'm a little more focused on using the kids' texts as mentor texts, but I do exactly the same thing with a kid's text as I do with a piece of literature or a text by another writer.

[17:39] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Steve, I know I'm definitely planning to look through Be a Better Writer as I enter the kind of revision phase for my book, but I wonder for classroom teachers who are looking for ways to more effectively at the secondary level guide students through the process of becoming a writer and then helping them learn techniques to improve their writing, what's your vision for how they would use this book? Is this a book that's designed for the teacher to use or for the students to use kind of as a reference or as a textbook? How do you see that being used?

[18:09] SPEAKER_01:

It is being used in both ways. This second edition follows the first edition that came out 10 years ago. And I'd say about 50% of the users we have are teachers. They teach directly from the book because as I write these techniques out, it's basically what I teach or me teaching a lesson. So it's really easy for teachers to appropriate that for whatever they want to do. And secondarily, I think the obvious use is mom, dad, grandpa, somebody buys a book for a kid who loves to write or a kid who wants to write better or just a kid who wants to get excited about writing.

[18:45]

And they look at it in that problem-solution approach. What am I struggling with? What does Mr. Piha say here about what's the best way? I've got a persuasive essay. This is always my thing in my head.

[18:55]

I'm a kid. I have a persuasive essay due in three days and I haven't started. What do I do? I say, go look at the table of contents and go to page 153. And it will tell you exactly what to do, at least to get started and get a draft. And so that's my vision for students in a pragmatic way.

[19:17]

For teachers, there's a larger vision that has to do with the last 20 years of my work. I want teachers to build their instructional repertoire. I want them to take these basic tools and I want them to share them with other teachers and other kids. And then I want them to combine them, change them, alter them, make them suit reading, writing, writing and social studies or science. The best days I have are the ones when teachers write back to me and say, I just did this with the transition action detail strategy. Is that okay?

[19:52]

And I said, not only is that okay, I'm taking that for my next workshop. That's what I want to have happen. I want 12 foundational tools and I want 12,000 teachers doing them 12,000 different ways so that we can all benefit from a larger community. It's funny when I put my consulting company together at the height of it, I had about 10 or 12 people. And we found that even though we hadn't spent a lot of time together, we could plan what we were doing for a client. And it didn't matter who went to which classroom or what they did because we had this shared instructional repertoire.

[20:28]

And I realized, wow, if we were a school, teaching writing would require almost zero discussion. And my vision is not to stop talking about instruction, but it is to corral that curricular chaos that we often find in writing. And it's to get everybody on an equal footing. Just because you've taught for 25 years and I haven't or I'm a professional writer and you aren't, really the playing field should be much more level so that we all feel like working together. And then an administrator who is tasked with guiding us in a direction knows exactly what vocabulary to use. to help us make progress.

[21:10]

I can't emphasize enough how important this shared language of instruction is. I think we've reached a point in education now where we believe in assessment, so we believe in a shared language of quality, but we do not yet believe that there's a shared language of how to help kids reach that level of quality. And that's why we get a lot of assessment, not so much learning. The key is not assess. The key is to teach kids and teachers the things that help them become better and then use assessment to show them how much better they've become.

[21:44] SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's a powerful idea, the idea of a shared language of instruction. And I know we always have buzzwords. We always have jargon. And within specific districts, we always develop extra jargon to represent what we're up to. But what I hear you talking about when you say a shared language of instruction is is that repertoire of very specific practices, you know, very specific techniques that, you know, when one teacher does it and then they tell another teacher what they did, they both are talking about the same thing.

[22:11] SPEAKER_01:

That's right. And recognition is instantaneous. You know, I use this today. Oh, I know exactly what you did. Now tell me, how did it work or what happened when?

[22:20] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And the big labels that we tend to apply to things like assessment or grading, you know, even getting into more specific techniques like questioning, you know, if you're using Bloom's taxonomy to ask higher order questions, you know, I think if we're going to have people work together using a common language, it's got to be so much more specific than it never has been before.

[22:41] SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And not only specific, I made a rule for myself early on because I was struggling as in the first couple of years I worked in classrooms that I had to be able to memorize the names of everything. I carried around with me probably for 100 classroom sessions, one sheet of paper, two sides with 24 pages. things I could do in writing and 12 things I could do in reading and eight things I knew how to do in math. And if I couldn't get it onto one piece of paper, I knew I wouldn't remember it. So this economy and concision that I think we strive for in writing naturally is really important when we develop this repertoire of instruction.

[23:23]

I can't expect people to speak the same language if the language is really hard to speak. And so it's got to be simple. It's got to be – I realized this. At a certain point, I realized I could invent an infinite number of strategies and I could test an infinite number of strategies. But this would not benefit anyone. What I needed to do is sit down with three or four people who knew the tools and had experience using them and say, guys, we got to get this down to eight.

[23:57]

Got to get this down to six. If you only had time to teach two, you know, I have to get them down to what we call our desert island strategies, right? Because I may be in for just one day. I may be in for a half day some places. Some places I got a year. But the truth is I've had many, many people come back, many principals.

[24:18]

This is important for leaders too because the most successful schools where I've worked have been the ones where the principal has learned the technique first. They're the one who has to move it forward. And even beyond that, I've had a small number of principals, maybe just 10%, certainly not a requirement. They've actually learned a few of the techniques well enough to teach them and to model them in front of their teachers. So before they observe, they actually get up there in that teacher's shoes and teach that lesson. And that's that tool and that strategy.

[24:51]

And that has always been the most successful way type of interaction that I've seen between a school leader and a teacher. When the leader is willing to step in, even for just five minutes, into the teacher's space, stand in their shoes, handle that kid, get through this thing in eight minutes like we say we're supposed to, that makes all the difference in the world. But that can't happen unless things are very specific, as you said, tightly structured procedures, but also simple procedures. Simple things that give us the highest value in the shortest amount of time. There's a productivity term. It's called weighted shortest job first.

[25:35]

When I have a big list of things to do, I want to do the one that has the highest weight, the biggest and most important, but it takes the shortest amount of time. And I give a weight. The weight is basically how important it is for the amount of time that I have. So I make this big list and I say, oh, you know, if all I did today was do five minutes on leads, kids could write for two days. It's not a bad choice. That may be all I do today.

[26:03]

And then I get back to conferencing. I write down a few other teaching points, add those to my list and teach those next. I think if school leaders were allowed, because I think sometimes they're not, if they were allowed to, as though they were taking in an evaluation rubric that had just one thing on it, and the teacher knew ahead of time what that one thing was, and what we were trying to do was see how well is one person doing one thing, and what can we do to help that person do one thing better, as long as it's a high value thing, something that produces a great result. Because then if I get around to your room twice and you get two things, you're still getting big value. If I get around to somebody else 10 times, they're getting big value too. And I don't have to worry so much about, oh my gosh, I've got 167 observations to do in the last 42 days of school.

[26:58]

And those are two numbers I got from a principal in a big high school once. Not hypothetical. Not hypothetical for a day.

[27:08] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Steve, if a principal or a teacher or anyone is interested in bringing your book to their classroom, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

[27:16] SPEAKER_01:

They can reach me at stevepeha.org. So that's S-T-E-V-E-P-E-H-A at tomtommarysam.org. That's my email. You can email me anytime.

[27:31]

I'll even just answer your questions and go from there. The book is on Amazon, and if you'd like to check it out, you can just type my name into the search field. I don't have that many books, and it'll come up number one. If you go to teen writing, it has just broken into the top 10 in teen writing as well, so it's on the top of that page too. But if you need anything, just send me an email. In 21 years, I don't think I've ever not answered one.

[27:57]

I think it's a really important thing. thing that people like you and I do is to help people when they put something in our inbox.

[28:04] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Steve, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. And if people want to find your website, could you give us that address too?

[28:10] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, it's www.ttms.org. It's for teaching that makes sense. It's the name of my company, ttms.org.

[28:21] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much. Great to speak with you today.

[28:22] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks a lot, Justin. It's really a pleasure to be here. And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[28:30] SPEAKER_02:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with my good friend Steve Piha? One thing that really comes to mind for me is the importance of defining a shared repertoire of practices. Like often in schools, we have a common curriculum. We have common expectations. We have common dress code and school rules. But when it comes to the heart of our work, those core instructional practices that really constitute the day-to-day actions that produce the results that we're there to produce, that really result in student learning, often we're all over the map.

[29:03]

And if we think about Wenger's definition of communities of practice from his book by the same name, we often don't have that shared repertoire. We don't have a body of practices that's concise, that's well-defined, that we can all talk about in the same language and actually mean the same thing. So one thing I'm working on with schools in the coming year is developing what I call a playbook. What are the policies? What are the procedures? And most importantly, what are the practices that represent our shared language of instruction, that represent our repertoire of what we do in our school and how we do it?

[29:41]

And if you're interested in learning more about working with me on that process of developing a playbook, I want to invite you to check out the High Performance Schools program. And you can find more information on that at principalcenter.com. I also want to encourage you to get into classrooms on a daily basis and see what it is that your teachers are teaching, what practices. They are using so that you too can learn those techniques. And even as Steve said, model them for other teachers and really develop that shared language of instruction.

[30:12]

So I want to challenge you specifically to develop the habit of getting into three classrooms a day. And over the course of the year, getting into 500 classrooms. For more information on that challenge, I want to invite you to visit www.instructionalleadershipchallenge.com. That's a free program.

[30:28]

At the date of this recording, we've had more than 5,000 people from 50 countries around the world go through that process. And you can do the same. You can get into classrooms every day, have powerful conversations with teachers, and become a better leader. And again, I want to thank my friend Steve Piaf for joining me on Principal Center Radio to discuss Be a Better Writer.

[30:50] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.