PoPCast Episode 11 transcript

Whitney: [00:00:00] Welcome back listeners. We are so excited. I'm Whitney LaRocca. 

Travis: And I'm Travis Leech. 

Whitney: And we are here today to continue our conversation about Patterns of Revision. And I thought that we would focus this episode on the invitation to delete, which is one part of that DRAFT mnemonic that we talked about in the last episode.

Travis: Yes, deleting, deleting, deleting, deleting. First, I want to give you just a little quotable from the guru's mouth himself, Jeff Anderson. He talks about why it's important to think about deleting as one of the tools in our revisors toolbox, or one of the things on our revisors draft board, as we elevate in our book.

So Jeff says, "Getting rid of clutter gives writing its due space. Space for thought. Space for readers to soak in what's important. Space for what matters most. When we clear out the clutter, our best thoughts surface and shine." We're going to talk about what is that clutter that Jeff's referring to.

What did we really key in on in the Delete chapter to be able to highlight for students to really better understand, be able to grapple with, and ultimately be able to use the skill set of deleting in their work as writers. 

Whitney: I think this is so important because students don't usually like to delete. They think that everything in their pieces belongs there.

I mean, they took the time to put it there. So why would I take it out? And when we teach them something specific about what does clutter mean? What does it mean to delete? It's [00:02:00] more about just deleting a word. Often I know at the elementary level, that's what I find students doing when they are setting up to delete is they'll go in to find a word that they can take out.

And so what we want to do with these lessons is really focus more on the specifics of deleting: What does it mean? What does clutter look like? And how can we choose the parts, whether it's a sentence or a chunk of text or words, that are repeated that we can then delete? Um, maybe we rewrite from that or we combine from that, but we want to use these lessons to teach them how to look for repetitive information or extraneous information.

Travis: Whitney, why don't you elevate one of the lessons from the elementary Patterns of Revision resource. Talk to us about what that looks like and how deleting works through the lens of one of your lessons. And then I'll share a middle school example so that we can kind of get an idea of the nuance, the similarities, and maybe some nuanced differences.

Whitney: I love that idea. Okay. The first lesson in grade three in grade four and in grade five, each grade level, the very first delete lesson that we have in Patterns of Revision really focuses on repetitive information. So I thought that I would just use the third grade example, since it's the very first Patterns of Revision lesson. 

So in the third grade lesson, which is 3. 1, um, the focus is on deleting repetitive information. And if we think about the process, remember, we start by setting the context with the read aloud. And so to provide this context, the book that we want to use is Is Daryl's Dream by Daryl DMC McDaniels. I don't know if you're familiar by a little, uh, DMC from back in the [00:04:00] day, but he, uh, was one of my favorite hip hop artists. 

This book is actually about him and about his dream growing up, where he really found himself as a hip hop artist, as a musician and a rapper, in a dream. So this is a picture book I would highly recommend.

Since it's a picture book, third grade teachers, if you have the time, read the book ahead of time. And then during this part of your writing lesson, when you're teaching Patterns of Revision, you can just come back to one section of the book. In the lessons, we're setting the context; we provide context that you can give the students. We tell you, we give you a suggestion of a part for you to read aloud. We also provide a QR code that takes you to Google Books where you would be able to preview the book. You're not going to get the whole book there, but as a teacher, you can go in and see, is this a book I want to have for my classroom? Or do I want to do the same lesson, but with a different book? We, you always have that option because remember this is a process .

With Daryl's dream, what we do is behind the scenes, we have taken a part from that book and it's a, the paragraph on the page where he is inside his dream and he sees himself in the recording studio.

And what we've done to this text is we've manipulated it to set it up for revision. So the focus in this lesson is specifically on repetitive information. So what I've actually done is put in an extra sentence that doesn't belong. And that sentence has repetitive information from other parts of that same paragraph in it.

So the students can visually and auditorily, they can see and they can hear the repetition that's there. We do not tell the students that there is an extra sentence in this paragraph. We just simply read it aloud once they know what the book is about. Once they know how [00:06:00] the book goes, they have the context and the content behind it, we're going to read that part aloud. 

So I'm just going to read aloud that part where, keep in mind, we have put in an extra sentence, but we're not going to tell the students that: "Suddenly, Daryl found himself inside a recording studio. Daryl was in a recording studio with fancy equipment. There were instruments everywhere and there was lots of fancy equipment. The walls were lined with gold records. Daryl looked at one of the awards and saw himself." 

So as you can hear from that, I know it's such a great paragraph, as you can hear from that, there is some repetitive information in there. And the very first thing that we want to do is focus on what is the main idea of this paragraph? What is the author wanting us to understand from this paragraph? 

So we talk about the meaning first, um, and, and really comprehend the paragraph and then think, okay, as we look at each sentence individually, how does each one tie back to this idea? If we were to take a sentence out, would it change the main idea or would it change the meaning or the intent of that paragraph? And we would have those conversations. 

So Travis, before we move on, I'd love to know your middle school example for deleting. 

Travis: Yeah, for sure. So my example that I'm going to highlight for us today is from a book Living Simply, a Teen Guide to Minimalism. This is by the author Sally McGraw. Love the book. And the chapter that we focus on, or the excerpt that we focus on, highlights food waste. Kind of giving students or giving readers some idea of food waste, where it comes from, kind of the process, maybe the why behind it, and then what we can do as readers to minimize some of that food waste.

So we do a very similar process here [00:08:00] where we have some context that we're going to set, we're going to pull a little bit of the text, read an excerpt for students to set the context, but we have done the same thing. We've included in this case another sentence that doesn't belong. And this is an example of extraneous information, information that while it makes sense, while it's written effectively, it may not belong in this specific paragraph. And I'll talk about kind of how we walk or talk through that as we progress. But let me just read it for you. Let me give you a little taste here. 

So, "Americans excel at pitching out food, including massive amounts of tasty consumables that are in no way rotten or inedible. Some restaurants and grocery stores donate unsold food to organizations that feed the hungry. Much food waste begins on the farm. Believing that U. S. consumers don't want misshapen, bruised, or discolored produce, farmers sometimes throw away this produce right after it's harvested, even though it's perfectly safe and nutritious. They may even leave it in the fields to rot."

Whitney: That's setting the context, reading aloud and kind of setting it up to where there is something that can be deleted.

And so we have done that work behind the scenes and we set it up for the students ready to go. And at that point we say, wow, you know, one thing we're going to name that revision strategy. So one thing writers do when they revise is they go back to their writing and they look for, in my case, repetitive information or information that doesn't really belong.

We might say extra information or extraneous information. And that leads then into the modeling part of the lesson. And the modeling part [00:10:00] is teacher led conversations. So we're still going to talk it out. We're going to invite students to have conversations, but that conversation is led by the teacher.

And the modeling of, Ooh, what would happen if we took this sentence out? And so I may pull out a sentence. Um, and, and by the way, these sentences we have on strips, right? So whether we have that, we write them out on sentence strips, or we put them, you know, into a Google slideshow in strips, something where we can physically move them.

Or we just have them on strips that we cut under a document camera. We can then physically move a sentence out of the paragraph. And when we remove it, and then we read the paragraph without it, we can have conversations. And during the modeling, I know that one thing I do is take one out that I know belongs in the paragraph.

But we're modeling, oh, what would happen if we took this out? What would happen to that paragraph? Does it still sound repetitive or does it still have extraneous information in there? What would happen to the meaning of this paragraph? I know in my example, I like to take out the very last sentence that says Darrell looked at one of the awards and saw himself because we talk about the main idea of this paragraph is Darrell is in the recording studio, and that's where he discovers himself as an artist. Well, when we take that sentence out of the paragraph, the paragraph is no longer about self discovery. It's just about him being in a recording studio. We talk about the importance of that sentence and how, why it needs to be there. Then we can have conversations about the other sentences and why they need to be there or why they don't need to be there.

Travis: Yeah, and then on the flip side, thinking about the extraneous information or the extra, the unnecessary information in the middle school example, the sentence [00:12:00] in this paragraph, some restaurants and grocery stores donate unsold food to organizations that feed the hungry, that is unnecessary information within the context of this paragraph. So this paragraph is about where that food waste gets started oftentimes on a farm. And then we see as readers, this process that farmers go through that leads to food waste. So in this case, interesting information, what restaurants, some restaurants do, but not necessary.

So when we can pull that sentence out, that really gives students some clarity of, oh yeah, that really doesn't fit when we put it back in and take other sentences out after, then students still are kind of scratching their head. Like, uh, I still, that's that second sentence. It just still doesn't feel right.

So through that sentence to sentence progression, what's great about this is as we facilitate it in the modeling stage, it not only helps to unlock this process, but it really helps to train students as well for how to do this in a more independent level so that when we move to the next stage, collaborating through conversation, students have already seen and been a part of the experience they understand: Okay, so this is how we're going to do it. We're going to look at a new paragraph. We're going to look sentence by sentence, and we're going to have some discussion around which sentences make sense and which might not and give some reasoning why. So they're going to follow the same protocol that we go through in modeling, but just doing that in a small group or in a partnership.

Whitney: And then from there they go into their own writing and do that same work as we move to the lesson. And this really shows them when they go into their own work, exactly what it is they're looking for. So many times they do have repetitive information or they do have a sentence or a chunk of text that is really [00:14:00] interesting or that is really cool, but it really doesn't belong or it's a random thought.

 Often in narrative writing, especially like around fifth grade, I'll see examples where they start to tell their story and then they have to give the backstory, right? They say, hold up, let me take you back, you know, which is great. That's a great craft move, but is it completely necessary in this part of the story, is it just something they want to insert? We get to have these conversations, is it necessary? And if so, why? Because we do want them to justify it. And if they feel strongly that their backstory needs to be there, then there's a reason for that. But often they just want to plug in extra information, sometimes to make it longer, sometimes because they don't feel they're clear in their writing as it is. And this allows them to really decide, okay, how can I make it more clear? How can I make it more cohesive? 

Travis: Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. At the middle school level, I have so many memories of, you know, when we'd get started with a narrative to begin the year, if that was our first writing piece, students just had this, I don't know if they had practiced this before, if they felt like this was important, they really wanted to be very detailed and descriptive.

If they're going to tell you about a really important day, they really want to spend a lot of time talking about the breakfast they had on that important day. Like, oh, the pancakes, they were so savory and tasty like all the descriptions there. So this is a great way to go in and say, Hey, Does that really connect to this important moment that you're trying to highlight?

Or are you just, is that a necessary addition to really know how warm and fluffy the pancakes were? Or do we really want to get into the heart of our story? 

Whitney: All right, and how great is that that they're using description, but when would you use that description? Where's the most appropriate place for that description?

So at the end of this modeling piece, after we have gotten into where [00:16:00] we feel we have found a sentence that can be deleted, and it would not negatively affect, I guess, the rest of the paragraph, or we do feel like this sentence just does not belong as a class. We come to an agreement on that.

We compare it to the actual text from the author. So we go back into the original text and we share it. And then through that, we have these reflective questions that we can use with our students where a lot of the conversations to these questions, the answers to these questions, come up during the talk it out part of the lesson when we're modeling and we're inviting our students into that conversation.

However, it's a nice place for you as a teacher to go back and say, Oh, we didn't really talk about this. Now's a great time to talk about it. And we come back and say, okay. So example, how does each sentence tie back to the big idea? That's one of the reflective questions. Well, we probably talked about that a lot in the modeling.

But we may not have talked about why we choose to keep the sentences we did. We may have, but we may not have. So the reflective questions allow for continued conversation as we're comparing our choice to that of the authors. And our choice may or may not be the same as the authors. It's important to keep that in mind in the delete.

I feel like there is a better chance that you will have the same, whereas we get into the later lessons: the rearrange, the add, and certainly the combine, that we're going to have a variety from that of the author. So this is a great place to say, okay, well, we may have the same, but we may not. And if we don't, that's okay. But we're going to talk about it. We're gonna talk about the choices we made. 

Travis: Yeah, let's move forward with thinking about those applications when students are trying it out themselves. We have included what we feel like is a really effective chart to [00:18:00] support students and their thinking as they move into more small group or even independent work with applying their learning around deleting repetitive or extraneous or unnecessary information. So this Delete chart, if you are holding a physical copy of the book in your hands, you're going to be able to find it right at the beginning of the Delete chapter.

So there is an introductory page or two and then right after that is the Delete chart. Something that is a full page if you want to take that and put it on the copier and make copies you are welcome to do that or if you want to access this chart digitally you can do so by either hopping into the show notes we'll put a link directly to that chart in the show notes or you can go to our publisher's website that is Routledge, R-O-U-T-L-E-D-G-E, routledge.com.

When you search Patterns of Revision in the home pages search bar, you can click into your specific grade levels, Patterns of Revision, cover image and that'll take you to that page where you're going to have information including support material. Down that support material tab you're going to see a bunch of free graphic organizers and resources to support your work including the Delete chart.

Whitney: I'd love to point out something additional about the Delete chart is online. It is both in English and it's been translated to Spanish. So we are so thankful to Stenhouse and to Taylor and Francis for coming back and creating that chart for our Spanish classrooms, our bilingual classrooms as well.

So that chart, not the lessons in the book, right? But the chart is in both English and Spanish. So when you go to [00:20:00] that site, and you go to Patterns of Revision grade 4, for example, you'll see the information like the ordering information. You'll scroll down to support materials. You'll expand that and you'll see the Delete chart in both English and Spanish. Yeah, on that chart, then it's in color. So you can print it from the book , if you want it in color for your students, if you want to slip it into their online platform, so they have it, they have access to it digitally. It's PDF for you to use as you need. 

And the chart is broken into two parts. One is deleting at the sentence level. The other is deleting at the paragraph level. So, this lesson that we're talking about right now, where we're deleting an entire sentence from a paragraph, that's the work we do at the paragraph level. But then later, when we go to start combining sentences and ideas, and we teach students how to do that, we're going to look more at the word level.

So, Travis, do you want to talk about what that looks like a little bit? 

Travis: Sure. So I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to highlight a lesson again in the seventh grade book that looks at combining and part of the combination, the work that we're going to do with students is around deleting some repetitive information.

So in this example, we're using the text Hello, Universe, from the amazing Erin Entrada Kelly. 

Whitney: I love that one. 

Travis: In this section of the text, we're highlighting how one of the main characters, Virgil he's talking about his pet guinea pig named Gulliver. In this little section, we've got more than three, but I'm going to highlight three sentences that are in this that are really ripe for some deletion work.

" He liked dandelions better than celery sticks. He liked dandelions better than baby carrots. He liked dandelions better than orange [00:22:00] slices." 

 In this case, we use, when we get into the combination, Lessons we use that repetition as an entry point into discussion around how we can more effectively combine these ideas together. In certain cases, repetition like this is purposeful and impactful, which we know as readers, we've, we've seen that repetition where we're like, yeah, that's really hitting home a point for me. But in this case, we want to share this information or the writer might want to share this information in a much more efficient way, removing some of the clutter so the content can shine.

We talk about how we might delete this information by combining the ideas together. And in this case, this is a perfect way to have students think about how we create a list of ideas or items using commas to separate those ideas. So, when we highlight the author's original, the author's original includes these ideas together connected and using commas to separate them.

So this is a way that at the sentence level, when we look at how we might delete words that are repetitive, that's the process that we go through with that. 

Whitney: Love it. So back to our lesson, our example of Darrell's dream and, uh, the, the waste, the, living simply. Thank you. Uh, we can think we've, we've done the modeling.

Then the students are going to do that same type of work in a small group with another part of the text, but same work where they have the strips and they figure out which sentence doesn't belong and why. They have these conversations. We encourage them to try two or three sentences to have different choices, just like we did in the modeling so they can have conversations as they wait.

We can't take [00:24:00] that sentence out. It's needed because we want them to have those conversations as well together. And then we move into the Apply, and that's where they go into their own writing and do the same work. So to set that up, Travis, you had mentioned in the last episode, the idea of using your own piece of writing to show students how to do that.

So as a teacher, you might have a writing notebook. You may have created a piece of writing in your writing notebook specifically for this where you have some repetitive information and you are or an extra random thought to where you have created something to use in a modeling for application if needed with your students where you could say, okay, well, here's my piece of writing. What do you think I would delete? Why would I do that? What are you thinking here? 

Or if you have a class piece of writing, if you've done some shared writing together, if you've created some writing together, you can go back to that in a very authentic way and say, okay, we're going to look at sentence by sentence here. Not only are we looking at a sentence that might be deleted, But we can also look for repetitive words because often in application, when students are going back to their own writing, there might not be an entire sentence that has to go, but there is most likely going to be some extraneous information or some repetitive information that they may choose to take out a chunk and just naturally do some combining or some rewriting of things.

Travis: The last piece of it is sharing our results. So that could be a sharing student to student. This could be a whole class share out. Or we could really think about this as a reflective exercise where students reflect on the process, maybe do some writing or some just casual conversation with a partner around it. Something that I think about that. If you run into this, just so that you are prepared for it, there might be students who go [00:26:00] through this process and make the choice not to delete anything. They might think, hey, everything that I have in this paragraph is great; it's everything I want. 

We just want to prepare you for that eventuality to happen and to be ready for that. So our suggestion is just to have some reflective questions to talk about or think about and maybe do some writing about the choices that you made when you went back to your own writing. Did you choose to delete anything? If so, what did you do? What did you choose to delete? Talk about why and then talk about your piece of writing after deleting. What do you think makes you think it's more effective? 

On the flip side, if you didn't choose to delete anything, talk about why Or write about why everything in your piece was necessary for you to keep, sentence by sentence, why did you decide to keep each of the sentences? How do they help you to share your message most effectively? 

Whitney: And that's really powerful because when students do come up with, well, I don't have anything to delete. Okay. That's great. But be prepared to explain why. So go back and check and think, what are you going to say? Why did you keep each individual sentence?

Why did you keep these words? And when they have this realization that they still have to go back and talk about it, Sometimes they find things in there that really don't belong. So it's a nice way to just know that as a predictable structure of these lessons, you're always going to end with a share and you're sharing about the choices you made and why, whether that's choosing to delete or not, and why you chose to do that.

So it still comes back to the writer. Doing what they think is best for the piece as opposed to what the teacher wants them to do. We do want them to be intentional choice makers and not just, uh, um, what's the word? Like, I don't want to say teacher pleaser, but that's what it is, right? A compliance compliance is the word that I'm thinking of.

So, one of my favorite things in the book is, [00:28:00] I don't know about Patterns of Revision in six through eight, but in grades three through five, it starts around page 18. It's like a four page chart.

Travis: Yes. Connecting the Patterns of Revision to the Patterns of Power. 

Whitney: Yes. And what I love about this chart is so many things. First of all, every lesson in the book is listed in this chart. It's color coded by what type of lesson it is. So the delete is green. So all of the delete lessons are green on this chart. What it has is it's lesson type, but it has a column for goal focus. And that's really what I want to talk about in a minute. Then it has a mentor text title, and then it has any Patterns of Power connections for that lesson. We have a ton of Patterns of Power connections in the combining lessons, and then they're kind of scattered throughout in the other lessons, because in the combining lessons, it's much more about sentence structures, which is completely grammar as well.

 Some of the Patterns of Power, we could make connections to these other lessons as well when we're looking at deleting or rearranging or adding at a paragraph level. It's important if you are using Patterns of Power. You might want to look at the Patterns of Power connections on that chart, too, to see when some of these lessons might correspond or complement what you're doing with Patterns of Power, too.

But what I want to talk about is this goal focus column because I just think it's, when choosing which lesson to do with your students, this goal focus is really going to help you as a teacher. Sometimes we share what kind of text it is. Maybe we are later on rearranging within a narrative or a sequential structure or a main idea detail structure.

In this case for Delete in the grades three through five, we have deleting repetitive information or deleting extraneous information, and sometimes it's within a structure like [00:30:00] a sequential structure or a main idea in detail structure, right? So that goal focus can really help you kind of zoom in a little bit more on the specificity of the lesson itself.

And what do you want to teach your students to look for in their own writing? Thank you. 

Travis: Love that. And in the middle school resource, when you're looking at this chart, the reasoning behind some of the Patterns of Power connections in these first chapters, the chapters that are paragraph level connected, is we wanted to connect student understanding around a specific convention or, or a grammar concept into the discussion as they're going to see the author's original, they're going to notice, Oh, hey, we just looked at that convention.

Now we are seeing it in action, the author using it effectively in their writing. So it just really enhances the conversation and adds another layer to, Oh yeah, we noticed this complex sentence with a when, using when as an opener. We just talked about that, Mr. Leech. How cool is that? We're seeing it now in the text.

To affirm your comment earlier that as we get into the Combine work, we're going to be maybe doing a little bit more direct work in combining to create patterns that maybe we've studied and already done some playing with in our work with Patterns of Power.

So a great example, the comma in a series: the commas in a series of items. We might study that in Patterns of Power and then in some of that combination work in a Patterns of Revision lesson. This can be a direct crossover to what students already know, and it gives them a tool in their writers toolbox now to use, think through how they might want to reorganize or combine this content, and they can do that through a specific pattern that we've studied so far.

Whitney: Another thing to keep in mind is that these lessons can be done with any [00:32:00] text. So we use a variety. I pulled a narrative text. Travis pulled an informational text. We use both of these pieces. We did the same work with it. No matter what your students are writing, if they're writing about reading, for example, they can still put this strategy to use in that piece of text.

So don't think just because you're using a narrative text, they have to be doing narrative writing, right? They can really apply this strategy to any piece of writing, regardless of the text that you're using. So just keep that in mind as well. As we move forward. 

Travis: And a teacher hack in that if you're, if you have any type of worry or anxiety or, or are kind of unsure if this is going to cross over, you can narrow or you can bridge that gap by highlighting in your own writing.

As you get into application, applying our learning, you can put your own writing up, that is the genre that we're looking at or that mode of writing that our students are going to be going back to. And you can highlight how you can take this skill that we've been working on and put it into use effectively in the type of writing that you're elevating from your writer's notebook or from the shared writing that you've done in class to show that the crossover is easy. It's easy to do. It's reasonable. It makes sense. So that students can then feel like, oh, yeah, okay, we got this. 

Whitney: I love that tip. What a great tip to share. One other thing about the chart is, uh, you will be able to see and then you can also see how our lessons really build in complexity as we go deeper into each part of the lessons. Like the Delete lessons, they build in complexity, right? The combined lessons, they build in complexity. And then if you are a teacher who has multiple grade levels, you can also see, or if you support multiple grade levels, if you're a coach or a specialist, you can see how each grade level builds in complexity as well.

Travis: So there it [00:34:00] is. Delete: the chapter on deleting. We really hope that you are taking away a bunch of golden nuggets of wisdom to be able to put into practice in your classroom. We are so excited that you're, that you are still listening in this episode because we appreciate you and we want you to know we are rooting for you as you get into this Uh, what we are assuming is maybe one of the first lessons in the Patterns of Revision series that you're going to be implementing in your classroom.

You're going to love it. Your kids are going to love it and we're so excited for you. 

Whitney: And I'm just going to leave us with a quote again from Jeff. And this is on every display page in Patterns of Revision that we can use as a display, uh, for our students. It's at the bottom of every single one of these, and this is how it goes:

"We study author's choices, not because they're the only answer, but because they are an option. Writers need options." 

Travis: Boom. All right. Later y'all.