Spreading the Word

 As schools with SELI Young Writers clubs begin each new academic year, some are faced with the need to enlist the help of more teachers willing to give of their extracurricular time. The Dankawalie Secondary School club this year welcomed English teacher Mr. Jawara who will be serving as a facilitator along with Mr. Kamara, since Mr. Sesay has left the school.

All organizations but especially schools need effective orientation mechanisms for new staff. New teachers must hit the ground running, and we need them running in the right direction—aligned with the school's (or in this case, club's) set of beliefs and pedagogies. This is particularly important when, as in SELI clubs, the expected outcomes of club attendance depend on following beliefs and pedagogies that differ from traditional rote learning practices.

SELI sees the club facilitators' time spent in the clubs largely as practical training. They become good writing teachers and acquire experience carrying out student-based instruction, which the MBSSE says it supports. For SELI to offer multi-day workshops for new facilitators with follow-up mentoring, which has been our go-to type of orientation, is not always feasible. A major reason is budget constraints, with clubs spread so widely across the country. 

For the very reason that the clubs are examples of student-based instruction, new facilitators learn by simply participating in the meetings. However, this can lead to cutting corners. To prevent that, I am looking into developing an orientation handbook for new club facilitators, or perhaps a recorded video presentation, that I could follow up with periodic in-person or WhatsApp video discussions with each new facilitator. Better yet: how many junior secondary schools, I wonder, would be willing to require all their new staff to participate in an orientation on teaching writing in the classroom?

Partnering for Full Coverage

For the month of August, SELI is again delighted to be partnering with Transformation Education in their annual training to improve Class 1-3 literacy instruction.

SELI is also very glad that Moses M. Gbondo—a very able SELI Young Writers after school club facilitator for nine years now, as well as the acting school principal of Abundant Grace International School in Sussex—willingly agreed to carry out the presentation in my absence.

Our purview is as before: the writing aspect of early literacy. Topics we are covering are a) characteristics of classrooms where writing is taught well in an ESL setting, b) literacy and the brain, c) the writing process, and d) writing genres for classes 1-3. Lots of hands-on, practical work, of course!

Although heritage languages are not part of this training, we at SELI are glad to hear that Sierra Leone language literacy is being brought into schools in classes 1-3 in the near future. These literacy-teaching skills can be used to bring about literacy in children in whatever languages they may speak.

Teachers Who Write

The Sentinel English Language Institute conducts professional development through its Leading Young Writers program, which trains teachers to be Young Writers club facilitators. Half our time together is spent writing in a workshop setting. The teachers enjoy sharing and perfecting their work as much as the students do.

We encourage teachers to continue writing after they return to their schools in our belief that doing so makes them better club facilitators. A few do continue. They share their work in club content conferencing groups and send it to me for teacher editing and/or typing along with the children's. I show them children's books I have published and we talk about ways available to us to publish in Sierra Leone. And how writing is a way of life for people who realize they are writers.

We were all saddened this week to hear of the death of Paul M. Conteh at UMC Heritage High School just outside Kabala in northern Sierra Leone. As one of these teacher/writers, he had been producing regularly since he began the Leading Young Writers program; I had just returned three pieces he had submitted to me. His colleagues, friends and family but especially the students who wrote with him will miss him greatly.

By way of contrast, today I received a text from a young urban police officer who was also for a number of years a Young Writers facilitator in the Northern Province. When I asked him how his new job was going, he replied, "I really thank you for encouraging me to write. It's just a continuation here." What a beautiful testimony to the view that by becoming an active writer one gains access to ongoing worldwide conversations, from anywhere.

Leading Young Writers Workshop 6

This is us, LYW6, all seventeen of us. We have spent the last three days together at SELI in Tengbeh Town, in Freetown, working on what process writing is, and how to use it in after-school SELI Young Writers clubs as well as in writing classes. You see us gathered here just before certificates were awarded.

There are teachers here sent by nine schools included in the Seli River Writing Project—schools located in Joe Town near Waterloo, Goderich, Lunsar, Kabala, Gbenikoro, Yiraia and Dankawalie.

For some, this was a refresher course; for others, it was a training for club facilitators needed to replace teachers who have moved on. And for three schools, it was an initial training to open a new club. It was marvelous having the experienced facilitators present! They shared their knowledge and learned new tricks.

We spent the three days working on writing theory, how to run clubs, English grammar and usage, and the elements of process writing that can be introduced one-by-one into writing classes without much fuss.

Part of each day was conducted like a process writing workshop, so the teachers could experience themselves what they would be asking their students to do. For our mini lessons each day, we used The SELI Wordbook. In the photo, you see a content conferencing group, listening to one person read his personal experience aloud as the others write questions they plan to ask him when he is finished.

Thank you to the SELI donors who made this training workshop possible, and to this wonderful group of teachers and their schools for appreciating the importance of writing!

It was hard for schools to operate smoothly with elections going on in the early part of this year, but we're looking forward to catching up now. Here's one way we're doing that.

We'll have a mixed group, which will be great to work with. We'll be training new facilitators from schools that have never had a club; we'll be refreshing experienced facilitators from schools that have had clubs for several years, during which we've made changes to our approach; we'll be training new facilitators from a school that has had an ongoing club for years; and we'll be retraining facilitators who never were active, from a school whose club has lapsed.

Teacher Editing, Part 2

Teacher editing happens in our ESL Young Writers writing workshops just before students prepare the final draft of their personal experience pieces. It is the last of several interventions we make in the students’ writing process. The first intervention is during rehearsal and the second is when students take their finished first drafts to a content conferencing group.

In content conferencing, authors read their work aloud for peer response. Listeners ask questions to resolve any confusion they sense and help authors realize changes that would make their second drafts more effective and clearer. To put everyone on the same playing field of ideas and organization, no one is allowed to comment about anyone’s English at this stage. There’s a real stigma in Sierra Leone about making mistakes in English, and we don’t tolerate such ridicule in our clubs.

It is the group’s responsibility help authors tell their stories clearly. A facilitator should be present in every content conference to make sure the students are asking “why” and “how” or “I didn’t understand” questions for discussion, rather than flinging out gotchas (What is your father’s name? How many doctors were in the hospital? What time was it?) Once the student discussion has petered out, the facilitator can ask any important questions that the students may not have thought of. The whole interactive process is an extremely important part of the language learning that goes on in the club.

I am coming around to the point made in Part 1, that facilitators feel too much pressure during teacher editing just before the final draft. In trying to edit both storytelling and written devices, they actually pay more attention to mechanical errors such as punctuation and capitalization. Therefore, I think we will move in our Young Writers clubs toward editing grammatical storytelling devices in our content conferences. Facilitators can raise one or two of the following discourse-level language points they hear a need for, and specify the place in the story where they heard this problem(s). The whole group would benefit from a discussion of these factors that affect their oral delivery:

o   Avoid repeating a noun you have recently mentioned—use a pronoun instead.

o   First use indefinite articles (some, a, a lot of) to refer to an unknown object or person; then use a definite article (the) to refer to it.

o   Use sequence-signaling words like later, ago, and before, as well as time expressions like at night and the next morning to make chronology clear.

o   Tell your story in the past tense, primarily.

o   Distinguish the meanings of but, so and and.

o   If you want to use a person’s name in the story, introduce it the first time that person is mentioned and then continue to use the name from then on.

Note that the list contains only discourse-level grammar strategies. They are the glue—the cohesion and coherence—that makes content and organization hang together.  That’s why they belong in a content conference.

Following the content conference, students go on to revision, or writing a second draft that incorporates their changes. Every second draft should go back to the group for a second content conference, to check that the revision happened. Only those Young Writers who have made good strides with revision should move on to self-, peer-, and then an easier teacher editing.

Teacher Editing, Part I

I think teacher editing is the hardest part of ESL writing-workshop facilitating for traditionally-trained teachers to learn. 

Teacher editing in Young Writers clubs centers not on everything the teacher knows, but on the student’s voice. Ideally during teacher editing, students read aloud to the teacher, who helps them listen to themselves. The photo here from REC Primary in Bassa Town, shows what this looks like. I love watching children's growing awareness of their oral pauses and stops and shouts, and the satisfaction they get from punctuating these. Often, I’ll call an author back to a word that she has just corrected as she read aloud without noticing that the written form didn’t match what she said.

Yet what we see more often is students emerging from teacher editing sessions with whole sentences—even whole series of sentences—heavily crossed out and replaced by the teachers’ “improved” versions. This bothers me because I see a frustration in those teachers’ bold stripes drawn across the paper that I don’t feel when I’m doing teacher editing, but it bothers me more because of the effect it has on the students:

• It dampens their spirits—the last thing at-risk students need.
• It stifles their voices. Many of our club members come to us barely literate, but when they are asked to relate their true personal experiences, a voice comes to the fore. One of our most deep-seated instincts is to tell others about something that has happened to us. That instinct must have enhanced early communities’ chances of survival, but we tap into it in our clubs in order to help students connect that narrative voice to writing. It is our job to keep that exposed instinct safe.
• It can lower the quality of the children’s writing. Teacher language generally stomps in with social proprieties and with categories that sweep details under the carpet, both of which distance us from the scenes the children are painting.
• It has no instructional value. You don’t acquire language by copying someone else’s sentences into a final draft. Teacher language carries complex sentences and vocabulary that are not yet part of the students’ proficiency. True, they are sometimes acquired on the writing edge in the club, but they are more the domain of the language arts class.

The point of the writing club is for the students to learn to record their low-intermediate ESL oral voices on paper so well that anyone who reads their work aloud can reiterate their storytelling. That means they must learn to use storytelling devices such as sequence signaling and the appropriate verb tenses; along with written devices such as paragraphing, inverted commas, and exclamation marks. People want to read their experiences because they have so much to say. The literacy and literary skills we are teaching them will be with them for life. They will transfer to any other language in which they become literate. On top of all this, do the students have to talk like teachers, too?

The Best Writing Teachers are Teachers Who Write

Process Writing for Researcher Trainees

SELI gave a presentation on process writing to the Institute for Development's Researcher Trainee program at the British Council on May 14th.

This morning's session was twice as long as the March session we conducted with IfD trainees. We therefore delivered less and interacted more—all good—and with the support of Maryam, the trainer today, our presentation linked into the whole training better.

Everyone was very engaged and they asked a lot of good questions. I very much like nonfiction writing and research, myself. I enjoyed the morning, and I hope they did, too! 

Update on Dankawalie School Library

SELI spent this weekend in Dankawalie, where the Dankawalie Secondary School Library still has many more books to catalog. One of the two librarians, Amara K. Tarawallie, began entering books this time, interacting with me about the decisions that need to be made about each book, such as:

Is this book fiction or nonfiction—folklore or biography?
Is this an "Easy" book or a transitional, middle level book?
Is this the name of the title, or of the series?
Did this author write the original, or this adapted version?
Does this book have an author at all?

Meanwhile, two students were helping another teacher, Ishmael K. Mansaray, to stamp the books and put pockets and cards in them in preparation for entering them. These particular books were donated by Books for Africa.

I also took a peek through the window into the new library building, which was brought to near-completion last year thanks to a grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It is built in the same circular shape as the classrooms in the school. As soon as everyone is satisfied that it is as secure as it needs to be for a library, the collection, furniture, etc. will be moved from its temporary quarters in a classroom into this building.

During June and July of 2013, four university students from the U.S. were in Dankawalie doing community service. One of the students, Ariana Lutterman, elicited library rules from Dankawalie teachers and students, to develop this poster, which we love! Armed with these new rules, the librarians have agreed to resume circulation of the books, which they had suspended at the end of the last school year. The DSS Library thanks you, Ariana!

Stands for a solar array are being erected outside the library, the adult mother-tongue literacy class has been going on since June, and more books are waiting to be catalogued—the DSS Library is showing all the signs of growing into a truly vibrant community/school library. If Dankawalie weren't eight hours of hard riding on very rough roads from Freetown, I would spend a great deal more time there, myself!