Interview with Jennifer Stone

In 2001 Jennifer Stone took a group of Seventh Graders, and walked them through the writing process by having them build their own websites. Today, Dr. Stone is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

I caught up with Dr. Stone to ask her what she and the students learned about writing, how she went about teaching them, and what she would do today. This is a 28 minute interview and well worth listening to. Some of the highlights are listed below.

Why have students build websites to learn writing?

All writing uses some technology; teaching writing is really about using that technology to get a point across to an audience.

Creating a website has a lot of elements to enthuse students about writing: a topic they care about, in a media they like to use, with the ability to have their work published and viewed by others. The lessons they learn will carry over into their other writing and thinking activities.

In our world, the traditional word processed writing is not the only writing we have to do to be active members of our culture. Creating a website set the additional point across that your writing style has to change depending on the media: you need to write differently if you are writing a narrative, a website, a children's book, a blog, or texting your friends.

What did the students learn?

The students learned the general process of writing:

• how to model by looking at other websites and analyze how the website delivers its message,

• how to plan out what they want to say,

• how to think about how others will perceive what they have written,

• how to take criticism and edit, and

• how to think about the presentation.

Can you outline a lesson plan for teachers to teach writing by having students build websites?

1. Look at existing websites: analyze what their message is, what they do to get their message across, what works, and what could be better.

2. Construct a model for what a good website looks like, and how the students accomplish that as writers.

3. Teach how to use the tools, whatever tools the students will be using in building their websites: how do you set up the tool, format text, use a picture, link to other pages, and create a table.

4. Talk about using the tool and design considerations, getting into issues of writing as design, and discussing the whole process.

5. Allocate enough time for the actual production of the website: time for planning, time for research, time for drafting, time for feedback (perhaps having students, families, and friends review the sites), and time for drafting, and time for going public.

What tools would you recommend?

At the time, 2001, the students used FrontPage, but today, DreamWeaver has the advantage that it allows for full expression on a website and on the individual pages. The chief disadvantage is its learning curve. If a teacher is facile with Word and PowerPoint, she can learn enough of Dreamweaver to be able to create a good looking site in a one-day class.

There are also easier tools that still allow the students to change things like the background, fonts, color-scheme, and add pictures and media. Some free examples are

Tool	Description	Address
PBWiki	This is a site that hosts classroom wikis, students can collaborate on a website	http://pbwiki.com/academic.wiki
Blogspot	Free site owned by Google that allows individuals to create blogs and blog-style websites.	http://www.blogger.com/home
Edublogs	Free site that is dedicated to hosting educational blogs	http://edublogs.org/

The above summarizes some of the points in the interview. Listen to the entire interview by clicking the Audio Interview Podcast button below.

Mrs. O'Neill is a secondary school teacher from the UK who is teaching in Minnesota. She also maintains the always interesting Mrs O'Neill's Blog.

It starts quite well. There's a sticky moment for my Minnesotan students when they realize we are not talking about those Vikings. However, they grudgingly admit they liked the short film on Anglo-Saxon Britain. They are fascinated by just how different old English is from modern English. 'Bad' spelling is always comforting. We actually have a couple of brief discussions on why we use punctuation and Beowulf's author(s) didn't. The students are willing to talk about alliteration and what it actually does in a poem. They have written a couple of their own kennings and some rather clever riddles.

Question: You punch my face and expect to hear a friend's reply. What am I?

Answer: A cell phone.

And now we come to the actual text. We look at several translations, not just the one in our book, and we choose the translation we, as a class, like best. We're off. We race through to Hrothgar's building of Heorot. We are suitably repulsed by Grendel's gory 'take out'. We can't wait for Beowulf to dispose of him. We love it when Beowulf vanquishes Grendel with nothing but the power of his hands. We can almost hear Grendel's claws cracking like walnuts.

The battle with Grendel's mother is a little more challenging. His mother? We descend with Beowulf into the murky lake and dutifully dissect the fight. Attention is waning, however, and students are starting to ask when we will 'finish off Beowulf'? The malcontents are grumbling amongst themselves. Beowulf it seems has become a bit 'boring'—an unwelcome alliteration.

And now comes the English teacher's dilemma. Do I wrap it up now, whilst they are still – apart from the usual suspects, who would be bored by Armageddon - thinking fondly of Beowulf? Or do I push on regardless, to the end of the text, anxious to make sure they 'know the poem'?

Every now and then when I am struggling with this sort of problem. I hear the voice of a wise and wonderful teacher, my last department head. "You have to ask yourself," she says, "what is in this for the kids? What exactly are you hoping they will learn from this? What is your learning objective?"

The answer comes easily. At this point in the study I want them to be making connections with the text, seeing its relevance for themselves. It's time for me to stop trying to entertain them, and have them entertain me.

I set a new assignment. 'Take the basic plot of Beowulf's fight with Grendel's mother and put it into a modern setting. We discuss a few scenarios. A small storeowner about to be put out of business by a large chain, a policeman who discovers that the killer he has put behind bars has an even more evil boss. I put the students in groups to help out the less imaginative. Each group may use the same basic plot, but each member must submit their own version of it.

The results are profoundly heartening. The students choose their own form—a page torn from a novel, a key scene in a movie, or a dramatic monologue. New talents are discovered. A few students opt to script and film a scene on their own time. Another student writes a film script that shows a deeper awareness of the themes of Beowulf than I had grasped myself. He has me cross referencing the text with his script, in delight.

Hardly any students remember their class mantra: 'How long does it have to be?'

And I re-learn something. Don't underestimate your students. Don't be afraid to change direction. Keep asking yourself: What do I want these students to learn, now?

One of these days I am actually going to put that into practice before I get into "the murky lake".

More commentary by Mrs. O'Neill:

In Minnesota, I teach 9th Grade to 12th Grade. It's a small school.

This lesson involved teaching Beowulf to a British Lit class, which is mainly aimed at juniors

who are not taking AP classes.

My school teaches it during the Junior - but I can see it being taught at any high school stage.

I think the idea of placing a scene in a modern context is applicable at most grades, to one degree or another.

In the UK I taught 12 -18 year-olds - our high schools have six grades rather than four. Most high school teachers would have students from each year group.

I have used the idea of transferring the plot to a modern setting to good effect with all of these age groups. The most difficult class I ever had - thoroughly disaffected 15 year olds- began to be enthused about Macbeth when I got them to try portraying him as a soldier suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. (a pretty serious case :)

Obviously you must take care not to 'dumb down' the material. I insist on having them read the original text. They need to know its context. However, they also need 'a way in'. Great literature isn't bound by time... but we are, I suppose.

Teachers sometimes receive stories from their students which drive them to distraction. They may go something like this:

Once upon a time I met a monster so I punched it on the nose and then I chopped its head off with my machete and then I machine gunned it with my Uzi and then I went home for my tea but it was all a dream. The end.

Why does this story fail? There are so many reasons. It starts with a clichéd opening. It is chronologically organized by the connective and then, which dispenses with the need for sentence breaks. It relies on action for plot development and ends with another cliché. This kind of storytelling is increasingly common because of the way society is developing in the industrialized countries. Children view a lot of television programs, which are visual or constructed as a sequence of simple events. Many computer games follow this simple pattern. This reinforces many other features of modern life that can get in the way of good creative writing:

• The pace of modern life means there are fewer opportunities for extended, discursive talk (many households don't have an evening meal together where adults and children swap their stories).

• Electronic media increasingly challenge reading as a recreational activity.

• Schools are forced to adopt ever more prescriptive tracking and testing regimes.

Encouraging good writing

To write well, students have to recognize that a story is not simply a matter of narrating events. It is a sensory interaction with human experience. The writer who wants to make the reader feel engaged in the narrative asks these questions: what do you see; what do you hear; what do you feel physically and emotionally? This is where metaphor, simile, description, telling dialogue, and internal monologue come into play. They reconfigure human experience in the reader's consciousness. In the words of Stephen King, "Description starts in the head of the writer and ends up in the head of the reader."

Teaching good writing

So how do we teach this?

I scaffold the writing process, breaking it into bite-sized ten to fifteen minute sections, modelling sample sentence structures and brainstorming potential vocabulary. This provides a pathway into the activity and allows the young writer to feel secure. It is equally important not to over-model. Once my students are focused on writing a particular section, I step back and allow them to explore. If they do not have the chance to play with language and try new things, they become almost