Here is the transcript of episode 07 of PoPCast:
Travis: [00:00:00] I'm here today with two amazing educators. I'm going to let them start it off by introducing themselves to the listeners. I'll let either of you start first. Tell us a little bit about you, what we need to know about you.
Nicola: My name is Nicola. The biggest thing to know about me, I think, is really, I love reading, love reading, love literature.I was one of those teachers that you've got that degree in English studies. And then I got my post bacc before I started teaching, I always saw myself as a high school teacher. But, I started teaching at middle school and I loved it and I never, I never left. I know that we're a different breed, those middle school kids just make me laugh.
I've been in education for about 23 years, I was in the classroom for about 15 before I moved into my current position, and I support secondary English teachers and I also, I am an adjunct professor, uh, instructor teaching English methods [00:01:00] for pre-service secondary teachers.
Beth: And my name is Beth and I love those middle school kids too. They do make things fun. I always knew that I wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a little kid. Um, and I even knew that I wanted to be a language arts teacher. When I was young, I was the kiddo who took it really seriously. I planned activities like combing through Shel Silverstein's where the ends to figure out which poem. Our favorite heroine, Laura Ingalls, would like the best.
then went to college, graduated with an English degree, then masters in education, all the things. I've taught high school, those middle school fun kids, um, pre certification teachers, and I still think that the best lessons mimic those that I did when I was a kid.
It's all about learning that's individualized, that's rigorous, and more than anything, that's fun. [00:02:00]
Travis: Well, I am so excited that we are hanging out together and chatting today. Um, so one of the first things that I'd love to hear from you, your perspective is your Patterns of Power origin story. So how did you get into pop?
How did you get started with it?
Nicola: I had to teach myself grammar so that I could teach it. I was never really explicitly taught. grammar, all of the bits and pieces and all the diagramming, um, as a student.
So I was that, I know it sounds right, or I know it sounds wrong, but I, I don't know what it's called, kind of a person. And I was terrified that a kid would ask me a question and I wouldn't know how to answer it in those first years of teaching. And I looked at so many different resources. , there was something new that I was able to take from each one.
But I continued to be frustrated because there was never one that [00:03:00] kind of tied all the pieces together. And I kind of felt that by the end of each school year, we seem to just be getting ready to then do that transfer piece to where we were manipulating and doing the things with our own writing, and then we were out of time. it just seemed like we never arrived for where we, you know, to where we were supposed to be. I was never a fan of DOL. Um, that was just, I never understood how, okay, we're putting something that's wrong on the board for kids to look at. And, Are we going to get everything?
Maybe, maybe not. And then, you know, fold in to that whether or not you're a language learner or if you have a learning difficulty. It just seemed like it was The ultimate gotcha. And then we were, we would be surprised, when a kid didn't want to share the writing because they were so terrified of being wrong.
So it wasn't until I came across revision decisions was my first introduction to this [00:04:00] dialogical kind of approach to grammar instruction. , And it was only at that point that I felt like I could let, just let go, that I didn't need to know all of the things and the kids needed to be able to articulate like the bits and pieces. I loved especially just seeing those mental chunks. So, when I found Patents of Power, I became aware of that. It was just, it was just like a moment because it was all there. And then the fact that it was TEKS aligned and it really takes you K right the way through 12. It was, it was amazing. So I needed to have it.
Travis: Thank you. Beth, how about you?
Beth: So, I'm guilty of using DOL as well. My first year teaching, I paired that with how I had learned grammar with diagramming sentences.
And I was really surprised that my high school [00:05:00] seniors did not love that diagramming sentences did not do well with DOL and it even made their writing worse. I was shocked that slower and louder and putting bad examples on the board didn't work. So I went on the hunt for better. I found Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined, which is on my shelf right now. I'm looking at it and subsequent others. And it really did change my instruction. My kids' writing benefited. It became more authentic. And so I was excited when I got the opportunity to attend a Patterns of Power professional learning because I was looking for some new tools for my beloved classroom grammar talks. And then also as a campus leader, I wanted some easy to access resources for all the other teachers too.
Travis: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, y'all have experience implementing this. [00:06:00] I'd love to hear some of the highlights of that implementation process. Just maybe initially how that got started. Or if you want to walk us through, I know that there are some listeners who are starting the process or who might be in certain stages. So just hearing your implementation plan, what that looked like would be super beneficial.
Nicola: We started a training in the fall of ‘22, and we attended and we wanted, we knew we wanted to be strategic. We wanted to really approach it through the lens of, you know, getting the materials to teachers, professional learning for teachers and, and the curriculum resources. So. Even though we were balancing the reality of just that post COVID teacher fatigue.
We were also hearing from our campuses and our instructional coaches, there was a need and a want for a more comprehensive approach to grammar and revision instruction, particularly at the high school level. [00:07:00] And so the first thing we did was to get some input from our, especially our campus leaders. We had a meeting and just asked them just to see what they thought was too much, who would go to training, when would be the right time? Because we're also, you know, trying to balance the whole subs shortage thing at the same time, and what would their preferred way for communication be moving forward.
So, a result of that meeting resulted in us creating a focus group. And so we decided to have each campus. They selected 1 person to send just for an initial training, and so we asked for teachers to be sent who were likely to come back to teaching the next year that maybe weren't seeking that next step as an administrator, someone who had a passion for revision and editing, someone who was going to be open and responsive to adjusting their instruction. And so this group, they became our first followers if you [00:08:00] like, and some of these teachers also became involved in our curriculum writing, during that following summer.
And so, our initial curriculum writing started with us just having a look to see where our scope and sequence, what it looked like. And we use the, uh, the suggested or recommended or possible scope and sequence that the Patterns of Power study guide had. And so we kind of put those side by side and we wanted to make sure that.
We didn't have any duplicated lessons because with the Patterns of Power series, you got your middle school grades. We didn't want everybody starting with, like, 4. 1, so we wanted at least from an alignment just to have some sense of alignment. And so for each of the lessons, we developed an instructional deep dive for each of the lessons while they had at least one of the lesson sets for each of our units, because we wanted our teachers to be able to experiment without being [00:09:00] overwhelmed.
Because in the meantime, we were also sending teachers to professional learning during the school, yes, so that was the summer of 23 and so during that summer. Just after that curriculum writing project, we also had our campuses send another two teachers to attend training during the summer. We also made sure that our teachers received a copy of Patterns of Power for them to use campus copies. And we encouraged our administrators on campuses to attend also, and that following fall, we also did a book study. And we also made that book study available for campuses to implement on their campus. That's where that's where we're at.
Travis: Not only highly strategic, but very well organized, really appreciate you putting that into detail. I got to be a part of a few pieces of that process, but to hear it all kind of organized wholly together is amazing.
Nicola: [00:10:00] It's been, it's been good. And I will say this, this past summer, the project that we just finished, , we shifted Using, , the, the lessons sets that we had divided up among the grade levels, the next step was for us to be using our district resources, and so like our mentor texts, so that way the kids, there was a closer relationship between what the kids are reading in the classroom, uh, and following that same sequence, looking at those same skills, but using, uh, a mentor text that's included in the curriculum as opposed to the one that was in the, the lesson set.
Travis: Yeah. So engaging too, for students to see, you know, in the content that they're interacting with in class. Now we're going to study it a little bit deeper. Yeah. Specific conventions, brilliant moves. Love it. So, Beth, how about you? You implemented this process in your classroom. Love to know kind of your initial thoughts as you got started with it as you were [00:11:00] living in that space of facilitating grammar instruction.
Beth: Well, it just makes best sense. It's best practice. It's research based. It reminds me of what's going on in my personal life right now. I've got two little kiddos and they're taking swimming lessons this week and I've noticed that the process that their swim instructors use is really similar to the Patterns of Power process.
I watched Miss Ella show my three year old daughter a kicking technique and she asked her “What do you notice?” They had a quick discussion. Then the rest of the preschool kiddos tried out the move. Then they got to see the instructor do a different type of kick and they contrasted that effectiveness with the original. And then they practiced that original one again, and they celebrated, they high fived their results.
And I saw [00:12:00] some of the little three year olds, they needed some extra help. They needed a countdown, like, “We're gonna kick in one, two, three, go!” And some of them needed a little bit more of a challenge, so maybe they were gonna move their hands in the swimming moves as well. And it really reminded me, watching that process, that that's what we do in the classroom.
That's what we do with these grammar classroom structures of invitations. And the kids, whether they're like my three year old daughter or seventh grade students or 17 year olds, they learn best when they're shown effective examples, when they talk about it, when they engage in discussions, analyzing what they're seeing, when they get to try it, and then when they get to celebrate those results.
So my implementation with it just really mirrored what's good about teaching and what's good about learning in any area of life. [00:13:00]
Travis: Yes. So cool to make that crossover. What a great shout out to the swim instructor. Like, I feel like I'd be up in the, yeah, I'd be in the stands like, yeah, you go, you teach them how to, how to get that kick going.
I love it. It's so good. Okay. So you have experience in the process. I think with any new learning that we do, there are some things that really stand out as highlights and it's quite possible as well that within that first year of learning, maybe there's some challenges that kind of showed themselves.
I'd love for you to be able to speak to either side of that. If you want to talk about any highlights of this process so far, or any challenges that you feel like that you faced, um, if you want to elevate either of those. I know that I would love to hear about them as well as I'm sure listeners as well, just to affirm maybe some of their work or pump them up thinking about getting started with this.[00:14:00]
Nicola: Gosh. All right. Well, there's so many things that I don't know. I have a whole list of things that I love about Patterns of Power.
Travis: Well, why don't you just hit us with it?
Nicola: The biggest thing just for me looking at it was just that sequence for it to be extending through high school, and what's available and how students continue to interact with the revision and editing strategies. And just the need for explicit instruction, but then for it to be morphing more, you know, because of the great specific standard teaching pieces, it can’t end in 10th grade. And so then, you know, by 11th and 12th grade, we know all of the things.
So I love that there are opportunities, especially for the high school kids, that there's a way for it to be connected into just responding and [00:15:00] really just looking at language, not so much on like that individual part necessarily, but just how it connects to meaning. And it's still relevant. There's so many opportunities for kids to be looking back at their own work. The fact that the students are using their own writing to revise from the get go, it just lifts up that transfer of learning. It's just authentic. It's not reading some random sentence that you put together correctly that you're never going to come back to again.
And just that the focus is, intentional dialogue. The explicit, intentional, well thought out questioning; that's both to the teacher to the student, and then also for the student to the student though. That’s huge: just for us to have an intent and purpose when we're having our conversations.
So those are some of my big wins.
Travis: Yeah, thank you for sharing those.
Beth: And I agree [00:16:00] with you completely. It's the discussion for me that gets me the most excited. I've had tons of lightbulb “aha” moments, celebrations, and student writing growth. But it's those daily conversations that really make it so fun. I remember this last spring, I had seventh grade students in a heated discussion.
They were debating the best version of a sentence about a Megalodon shark. They were talking about whether the construction with a semicolon or with just short choppy sentences best emphasized the shark's strength. And so they went back and forth and back and forth and they really cared about it.
And then they decided, I'm putting that in quotes, I was “facilitating,” but they felt like they decided to go back into their writing and then test out the semicolon versus the short choppy sentences with their own topics. And so it goes [00:17:00] back to what you were saying, Nicola, about it being authentic then.
And so it was in that moment that I kind of took a step back mentally and thought, this is the most amazing thing. I've got kids who are caring about author moves and wanting to try them out in their own writing, and they're having academic conversations, and they're having fun! So they were engaged with the revising process and it wasn't this boring worksheet.
It wasn't, it didn't feel like work on my part either. So yeah, I walked away from that afternoon giddy. It was a good day.
Travis: Isn't it crazy? Yeah, like to flip the script on, especially grammar, which, you know, coming from our lens as learners, like that was not always the case that grammar was the, was a fun, enjoyable lens to look through learning with,
Beth: Right? It has a negative, negative connotation, a bad reputation for a lot of students, but [00:18:00] it really can be fun.
Nicola: Well, it's like the shift has gone from right or wrong to what's best. And when you're looking for an opinion, or as soon as you go, as soon as you go to opinion and we're trying to persuade, it's on! You're going to have some debate because we have strong opinions. It just opens it up more for conversation. It does make it more fun.
Beth: And rigorous in the process
Nicola: for sure.
Travis: So, you have been in this work for a little bit. I think there might be some listeners who are just starting out.If you wanted to highlight, or maybe affirm that this part of the process is getting comfortable with the process and getting people on board with the process. If you want to talk about maybe some things that could go back in time 2 years . Is there anything that you might give some advice on for people getting started on a campus [00:19:00] in a district, something like that?
Nicola: I think the biggest piece would just be to be transparent, getting input, seeking guidance from your campus leadership and involving them in the process is huge. I so appreciated and valued their lens as instructional leaders on their campus because they know their teachers best. The other thing that I would say is, as a leader, either as that campus leader or the district leader moving forward and figuring out what your plan is going to be, don't skip the first 3 chapters.
Don't skip those first pieces and then jump straight into the lesson sets because those details are huge in developing the talking points and providing pieces really to highlight in the planning that are so helpful. Some of the digital pieces that we picked up to make [00:20:00] available for our teachers, we really dug into those first 3 chapters to lift those pieces out for our teachers. So that piece is important as well.
And then, I guess just the third thing is you've got to give yourself grace. When it becomes your focus, then it can appear bigger and we have to remember, um, to meet our teachers where they are and that it takes time. I don't know who did the research, but it, or if it's just an adage, or if it's an educational myth, but you hear that it's, five years from initiation to institutionalization, and that's without any change that's going in between. So, as we're building the learning for our teachers, it's messy. There might be some teachers that have got a lot of experience, but it's a different way of approaching it and that's risky.
Then we've got other teachers that it's just new and they're having [00:21:00] to learn the things like. Learn grammar like I did all those years ago, and so that's a different kind of risky So just going to meet our teachers where they are be intentional engage your campus people and and really Look for the people to get in your first group get them in the room Being intentional with those first followers if you like I think is is really important.
Travis: Yeah, Nicola All great points. I appreciate you bringing those points up, Beth. I don't know if you want to add to that just advice for teachers. Let's say they're starting this in a district or they just pick the resource up. Maybe they hear something about it. Maybe they stumble across PoPCast and they're intrigued.
What advice might you give? You have some experience with this. As far as, affirming they're starting and maybe supporting them along the [00:22:00] way.
Beth: I love what Nicola said about being transparent, being vulnerable, but also having grace for yourself and for others. I would echo those sentiments. I would reassure any new-to-the-program person that it's easy. It's easier than you think it will be. You don't have to be a grammar guru yourself. You don't have to have the perfect classroom. It doesn't even need to be the perfect time of the school year. It could be the middle of the school year.
It's sound research based. It's there to support you so you can feel okay to just dig in and get messy and have fun with it and make mistakes and learn and grow for them. Just like you hope that your students will. For experienced folks, a lot of that same advice stands. I would tell them to lean in to those naturally [00:23:00] differentiated academic conversations that are bound to happen about the author's craft.
Um, and to make sure that you continue to celebrate when your students use those authors' moves in their own writing. Those daily 10 minutes are a tool that can help transform your classroom into a vibrant community of writers and thinkers. I would also say, don't be afraid to use those structures, but.
Pick different sentences that work for you from what you're reading from even things that your own students have written themselves. They love to see their work published and analyzed by others. But same advice, dig in, get messy, have fun.
Travis: Also great nuggets of wisdom there. I love it. I'm going to finish by asking you because I want to know, I want to bask in that joy with you. So what's something that is bringing you joy in your life right now? I'd love to hear it.
Beth: We just got [00:24:00] back from a family road trip. We made some memories. We are fresh off of that trip to Missouri because my first grader read about a Titanic museum. In Branson that is actually shaped like the boat and he got busy planning. He pulled out the maps and his pencils and he got busy. So we went to learn. And of course, we paid our respects and it was so fun to watch him in front of the ship's bow saying hard to starboard and he's already talking about what we're going to do in 2025. So who knows where we're going and what stories I'll have to tell. But yeah, Titanic with the 1st grader brought me some joy.
Travis: How exciting. I love that. I feel like I've been to Branson before and I had no idea that that place was there. I'm sure I drove past it even. It was like, Oh, cool. [00:25:00] That's so cool.
Nicola: You know what? Um, all my kids are home. I've got adult kids coming back. It's interesting, fun and messy. I'm just at the point where I, I kind of determined who's home by what shoes are lying around. And I'm never sure. It's always a surprise to see what leftovers are going to be in the fridge. But I do know that they'll always be like one bite left because, you know, if you ate it all, then you'd have to take care of the Tupperware, but I'm not, we're not empty nesters yet. This time's going to go fast, so just got to enjoy it while it's here. I’m meeting my adult kids where they are.
Travis: Thank you. As an adult kid. I appreciate that. Thank you. Oh, I'm, I'm basking in that joy with you. I appreciate it. [00:26:00] Oh, Beth and Nicola, it has been such a pleasure learning from you today. Such a great conversation. I appreciate you both so much, and I look forward to talking again soon.
Nicola: Thank you so much. That's been fun. Thanks, Travis.
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