Changes in Education : Writing: A special summer program helped teachers to write better so they can pass on what they learned to students.

There’s no such thing any more as traditional summer vacation for many teachers. The demands of year-round schools, of learning new curricula, of becoming comfortable with new ways of teaching, all mean summer “classroom time” for thousands across California and the nation.

Teachers in San Diego County this summer have worked to improve themselves in various academic subjects. Among the special institutes for them are ones in writing and in multicultural history.

Nationwide, statewide, countywide, school boards plead, cajole and demand that teachers have their students do more writing--not just for English classes but in all subjects, including math, science and social studies.

But there are thousands of teachers like Rosalie Rota, a longtime substitute for the Encinitas and Escondido elementary districts, who have written little since high school, have little confidence in their ability to write clearly and creatively, and find they are uncomfortable teaching writing.

For about three dozen such teachers, immersion earlier this month in a San Diego State University writing institute gave them the same apprehension about putting pen to paper that their students often have.

In fact, they themselves became just like their students in practicing how to become better writers and learning how to make the teaching of writing fun. During the intensive one-week course, the teachers moved from fear of writing to a willingness to try, to actual enjoyment by week’s end.

“I feel much better about what I’m doing now,” said Leah Fisher, a first-grade teacher at Knob Hill School in San Marcos. “I was terrified at first!

“Now I’ve learned not to feel wrong (with a report) if you don’t always have a topic sentence, three ideas that follow, and a closing sentence in the same order.

“I even went out and bought a diary at the end of class so I can continue writing at home.”

“I used to hate doing reports of information as a student,” Rota said, “but I found out that they don’t have to be just collections of dry and boring facts, that you can use adjectives and adverbs to make them interesting . . . and the more you write, the more comfortable you’ll be.”

Those impressions are exactly what the San Diego State education professors running the institute hoped to instill.

“We want teachers to get insights into writing by doing writing and then extrapolate from their conclusions to their own teaching,” Professor Leif Fearn said. “We’re working with a lot of (teaching) folks who, if they were taught about writing at all, were taught badly.”

“From the first moment of the first day, when we had a name-tag exercise, we were having them write about their hometown, their favorite place, about the people they had just met,” Professor Robert McCabe said. “By the end of the day, they had gone from a five-minute writing sample to 400 words or more down on paper.”

The two professors, along with Professor Nancy Farnan, believe so strongly in their Developmental Writing Institute that, for the second year running, they put on the summer program without pay because the university lacks state funds to provide such training.

“Teachers just don’t write all that much any more, even at the university level,” Farnan said. “Most just write short reports, and not very well, yet they are the ones we have teaching our kids.”

Teachers who took last summer’s institute, the first offered, have found it valuable in the classroom.

“I definitely have more empathy for my students,” said Jenifer Consunji, a third-grade teacher at Sunset Hills School in Poway. “By having been in a child’s place, you realize that sometimes you just don’t want to write. So now I think about how to be more creative in giving them a topic, or in having them do constructive criticism of each other’s writing.”

McCabe encourages the teachers to play with different ways of developing students’ fluency and improving clarity, such as having them write a persuasive essay to their parents arguing for an increase in allowance.

“Don’t make instruction so formulaic that the students feel boxed in,” he said.

“I give my (first-grade) students a word from a story and have them write a sentence, and then have them share their sentences with each other,” Barbara Hightower, a teacher at Lakeside’s Lakeview School said. “They love it. It’s like a game” so they don’t realize that they’re learning the basics of writing, she said.

The sentence “game” builds control of the language and is important to Fearn’s notion of writing as a developmental craft, approached in the same way a woodworker would put together a piece of furniture by thinking simultaneously about both design and technique.

In that regard, the institute’s philosophy moves beyond the various writing project workshops in California, which stress the need to have students write, and write often.

“It’s better in the sense that it shows us how to proceed developmentally,” Ciel Kellogg of Canyon View School in Rancho Penasquitos said. It emphasizes the “glue” that holds paragraphs together--sentence structure, length, word placement, as examples--as well as the process of thinking about an idea and putting thoughts down on paper, she said.

Kelly Calhoun, a member of this summer’s institute, is already back at Emerald Middle School in El Cajon, giving her year-round eighth-graders a taste of what she learned.

“You start by giving them the word rain, for example, and having them make up a five-space sentence with the word in the fourth space,” she said. “Then you ask them to move it to the second space. Then you give them a second word to place, and they’re soon writing a longer sentence, and then two sentences, and then all of a sudden they have a paragraph.

“And this is from kids, many of whom were not able to write coherent paragraphs until now.”

Ciel Kellogg said that after doing the sentence manipulations herself during the institute, she understood for the first time why giving actual examples to her fifth-grade students works better than talking about “nebulous concepts such as sentence connectors.”

For example, Kellogg will now give her students three words--such as glasses, small, bowling--to use in constructing two sentences that are related. The students will then find the word in each sentence that connects the two together, such as when they replace “bowling” with “it” or “the game.”

“It clicked for me, it was a major ‘Aha!’ experience,” the Canyon View teacher said. “I have tried a lot of writing things with my students, including a lot of cooperative activities, but until now with marginal success.

“You can use formulas, such as the ‘hamburger paragraph,’ with the topic sentence as the top bun, the ideas, or meat, in the middle, and the conclusion, or rehash, as the bottom bun, but the kids didn’t really envision real writing from that.”

Lillian Granger, who teaches math at Valhalla High School in El Cajon, said many of the ideas are tougher to fit with math lessons.

“I’m a rule-follower; after all, I teach math,” she said, laughing. “But what I liked is the idea that guidelines are just that, that there still remains the freedom to be creative, to put your information down but in an interesting way.”

Elizabeth Goldman at Ada Harris School in Cardiff said she has found the approach useful in all the subjects she teaches her sixth-grade class.

“I ask students to describe to me how to solve a long-division problem, by first starting out by writing directions from the classroom to the office, or to the drinking fountain, in a narrative form--without listing,” she said. “Then we’ll move to explanations of how to file baseball cards, and then on to subjects not so familiar.

“I’ve even used it with my own children.”

Professor Farnan said she wanted teachers to understand that everyone approaches writing “a little differently.”

“The notion that you have to take notes on Monday and do a first draft on Tuesday, etc., is something” we want to dispel, she said. “It’s like the essays we modeled on reporting and inquiry writing. We wanted the teachers to see that not all essays are five-paragraph models, or even that all writing has to be completed at a certain time.”

The San Diego State professors admit they have a long way to go before enough teachers to make a difference are trained to teach writing. The professors are gradually infusing their regular courses for teachers-to-be with the same ideas, but their flexibility is limited by state requirements for teacher education.

“I’ve been in the profession for 30 years and I see us saving one teacher at a time, hoping our influence spreads from teacher to teacher and from school to school,” Fearn said.