The Energizer Bunny Problem

If there is one thing that I have learned about teaching writing through the years, it’s that we cannot assume anything. If we’re talking to students about writing sentences, we cannot assume that they understand that the word “sentence” implies a subject and action working in harmony to formulate a complete thought. When we talk about paragraphs, we cannot assume that children know that topic sentences set the stage for what is to come and that everything that follows should be organized and focused around a central idea.


It is for this reason that when planning mini lessons, I try to look at the components of writing through a child’s eyes and try to figure out what pieces they will need to know in order to best build their understandings of how to compose text. I know that writing volume and pleasure are contingent upon success and so I try to figure out how to make the building blocks of writing tangible and concrete.

This week, I worked with a group of third graders working within a unit of study of compare-contrast essays. My charge was to help these students develop their ideas into well rounded paragraphs. When I looked at a paragraph through a child’s eyes, it occurred to me that paragraphs appear to be ideas stretching down the page so when I began my mini lesson, I talked about how a single sentence leaves readers wanting for more and paragraphs step in to fill the need by providing the details that “stretch” an idea down the page. Knowing that understanding “what” writers do would not be enough, I searched for a way to show students “how.” I settled on telling students that writers accomplish the work of stretching out ideas within paragraphs by asking themselves, “What would my reader want to know next?” and set about the work of composing a paragraph together.

Our paragraph went like this:

Lunch is one of kids’ most favorite times of the day. They love lunch because they can talk to their friends and they don’t have to do school work. With busy mornings, kids get hungry so kids love lunch because they get to eat.

From there, children paired up to write a paragraph about another school day favorite: recess.

As they talked, they wrote, and as I circulated the classroom, I heard them asking one another, “What else would my reader want to know?”

At the end of this guided practice exercise, the classroom teacher and I observed that all of the children had successfully written a detailed paragraph about recess. However, when we looked closer, we noticed something. Take a look. Do you see it too?


In case you’re having trouble reading, Angie and Jake’s paragraph goes like this:

Recess is loved by kids, too because you can run around crazy. They can spread out and play games like tag. There is a lot of things to go like slides, swings, monkeybars, and soccer. You can also play on the blacktop and play games like jump rope, hop scotch, and hula-hoop. Recess is fun for everyone! Kids think recess is cool and fun and awesome. Another thing you can do is go on the spider web. You can play sports like baseball, basketball, tennis, ping-pong, and exercising. Recess if fun!

Perhaps the verb tense and pronoun switches are glaring at you, but we were looking at this from a stretching the paragraph point-of-view and what we saw was a paragraph that kept going and going and going and going…It felt like this paragraph could have or should have ended at the first “Recess is fun for everyone” but in asking “What else would my reader want to know,” these writers marched forward, just like the Energizer Bunny.

So what does this mean? Can we call ourselves effective teachers if in the course of teaching one thing, we create the need to teach another?

When children are learning new skills and strategies, it is not uncommon for them to overgeneralize. What has happened here is not unlike when children first take note of apostrophes and periods: they sometimes appear where they belong but they often turn up where they don’t belong. In this case, children have stretched the details down the page to craft a paragraph, but they’ve stretched it a little too far. Now we get to teach them the next part of a paragraph which will be how to know when enough is enough because after all, when you stretch a rubber band too far, it will break and no longer be functional.

So was this lesson effective? Well, it all comes down to instructional decision making. If tomorrow I decide to return to the teacher’s manual that says that on the day after “how to write a paragraph,” I need to teach “how to write a good beginning,” and do it because the books says so, then yes, I have been ineffective. If, however, I decide to teach that lesson about how to know when to end a paragraph, well, then, that is a different story entirely. Effective instruction is teaching children what they need when they need it.

Literacy Gospel Unhinged

As a literacy coach, I travel from school to school. I don’t have a home base and therefore, often work in classrooms that don’t look even a smidge like what my own classroom used to look like. Sometimes desks are organized in rows and it’s difficult to move about the room. Sometimes there’s no meeting area. Sometimes there’s no easel or markers or paper. Sometimes the classroom library is nothing more than books crammed onto a shelf in the back corner of the room. I work within the parameters I am given and have to think on my feet about how to adjust to mediate my vision for good literacy instruction.


One day, while visiting a second grade classroom, I gathered the students on the carpet and taught a mini lesson. At the end of the lesson, I released the students to read independently. Generally speaking, it is my practice to invite children to find their comfy nook around the room and cozy up with their book, but in this classroom, the desks were butted up against one another in three long rows. It wasn’t clear to me where the students would comfortably and safely go, so on this day, I simply instructed the students to return to their seats and do their independent reading there. It all seemed relatively straightforward until a couple of weeks later when I was having a casual conversation with one of the teachers who observed this lesson. She and I rapped about some of the things she was doing differently and she shared that she had stopped having her students read around the room and had them now reading at their desks. I was surprised when she told me this so I asked her why. “Well, Kim, when I watched you, that’s what you did.”

This particular teacher had nurtured her classroom environment all year and had made sweeping changes. She had a well-stocked, well-organized classroom library and her students had book baggies that they were reading from religiously every day. It surprised me that she did not question me before shifting to a practice that seemed so counterintuitive to the work she had been doing. But I was her expert. She saw me do something and therefore, it was so.

At first, this shocked me but as I thought about it, it occurred to me that I do the same thing. I once heard Dick Allington discuss the “five pillars” of reading instruction: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. When he said this, I took frantic, thorough, copious notes. I memorized them so that I could recite them backwards and forward. And I have repeated his words on countless occasions—in spite of the fact that I had the hardest time explaining the difference between phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in the classroom. Aren’t they kind of one in the same when you’re teaching? I wondered. Dick Allington is one of my experts. He said it, therefore, it was so. I didn’t trust that I would be worthy of questioning the gospel spoken by one held in such high esteem.

When it comes to great literacy instruction, it isn’t enough that Lucy or Dick or Irene said it. Inquiry and reflection help us hone our skill and practice as educators. If we are going to make lasting changes, we cannot heed everything we read and see and hear as the literacy gospel. Change is rooted in understanding and the path to understanding is paved with questions. When you’re confused or uncertain, stop at nothing to find answers to the things that do not make sense.

Teach them Well

Left to their own devices, my boys, aged 10 and 7, would grunt hello in the morning, leave their pants of the floor for me to pick up, and command me to fix them a snack when they were hungry. I find these behaviors rude and appalling and work very hard to correct these obnoxious habits. When they bark orders, I remind them to say please and thank you. In spite of their angry protests, I make them clean up the bits of construction paper they sprayed all over the floor in the great confetti experiment. They are responsible for putting their clothes in the hamper and their dirty dishes in the sink and as a result, people often tell me how polite and pleasant my boys are. I am always flattered and hear myself saying, “yes, they are such good boys,” as if their affability were innate and had nothing to do with me at all.

I recently visited a first grade classroom and modeled a lesson about how to help children recognize words they don’t know in their reading. Following the lesson, the six year olds in this class grabbed their book baggies, found their cozy spot in the classroom, and read for fifteen minutes. There was a quiet buzz in the classroom as children spoke softly into their whisper phones or shared something too good to be missed with a friend sitting near them. The tenor of this independent reading period was focused and productive. When I complemented the teacher on the efficacy of her reading workshop, she smiled and said, “It’s because I have such a good group this year.”

It surprised me to hear her say this. Implied in her comment was the notion that what I saw might not be possible with a different group of students. In the same way that I attribute my own children’s pleasantries to something they were born with, she saw her success as a workshop teacher as dependent upon her students. I quickly reminded her that while it’s always nice to work with a “good group,” our successes as educators are directly linked to what we know about best practice and the daily decisions we make about how to implement this knowledge. While “a good group” might facilitate implementation, what I saw was directly linked to good teaching.

As educators, we need to think hard about educational responsibility. When things go well, it is not just because our students are “smart” or “working really hard.” It’s because we are doing something right as teachers. In the same sense, when things are not going well, it’s not just because children are “difficult” or “come from poor homes” or “distractible.” It’s because we need to do something different to reach those students. While it is easy, and arguably natural, to attribute both positive and negative learning outcomes to children, there is really but one direction to point the finger for the success and failure of our students: at ourselves. What students learn and how well they learn is dictated by the quality of the person delivering the instruction: children’s educations are our responsibility. The more we know, the better we teach. The better we teach, the better they learn.

Better than the Best

In the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Amazon Affiliate Link), Chip and Dan Heath share a story about pro golfer Tiger Woods. As they tell it, eight championships into his career, Tiger Woods decided that his swing needed an overhaul. For the typical lay person or spectator, it’s hard to imagine that Tiger had anything to improve, let alone the swing that had earned him countless trophies and prizes. One might ask, if something is working, why change it?


As a teacher, I think about this question a lot. Do we really need to change things that are working? I think the answer is no, we don’t need to change them. What we need to do, however, is think about them. If we aim to duplicate or amplify our successes, we need to ask why. Why does what we are doing work? And then we need to ask what. What can I do to make this better?

When Tiger Woods set out to improve his swing, I don’t believe that what motivated him was a notion that he was swinging the club wrong or badly—he simply believed that he could do it better. At the top of his game, Tiger positioned himself as a learner. Since then, he has gone on to win over thirty-five more championships and titles. Why? Because he wanted to be better than the best.

From time to time, we all need a little push to rethink our best practices. Today I am asking you to think about what you are doing that works. Why does it work? What can you do to make this better?