The latest round of the Nation’s Report Card tests has revealed some surprises about the quality of student writers. According to the report released by the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the exams, students who regularly use computers as part of their school work are more likely to have strong writing skills than their peers. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the report also shows merely a quarter of the country’s 8th and 12th graders have good writing skills.

In total, 27% of essays in both levels were considered by graders to be well-developed, organized, and showing a strong grasp of proper grammar. Overall, 24% were deemed “proficient” in those categories while 3% were considered “advanced.” Unfortunately, the remainder were found to be lacking in one, two, or all three of these areas.

Some perspective on the data was offered by Mary Crovo, the deputy executive director of NAGB, who pointed out that the essays should be considered “first draft” writing, and that the students’ opportunity to edit was very limited. On the other hand, students who took the test last year enjoyed the advantage of having access to a computer that provided both a spellchecker and a thesaurus — something their peers from previous years did not have. Prior to 2011, the students wrote their essays using a pencil.

Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, some 33 percent of eighth-grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.

Crovo said most students already use such technology as spell-check on a daily basis. Without those tools, she said, “It’s as if years ago we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser.”

For those who thought that access to a spellchecker should result in a markedly better score, Crovo explained that expectation was unreasonable. Test graders focus less on proper spelling and word usage and more on the ability to organize ideas, make an argument and defend a point of view. When it comes to grading, grammar also takes priority over spelling.

Still, students who’ve shown that they had experience using the provided tools – the number of times they hit the backspace key and queried the spell-checker was also tracked and used as an indicator – produced better essays than their peers. Students with scores in the lowest quarter were more likely to come from homes without an access to a computer. Only 87% of those in the bottom quartile had personal computers, compared to 99% of those in the top quartile.

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It is to students’ advantage to become masters of two styles of writing, explains Michael Drennan in The Guardian — one style dense but dry, full of declarative sentences and most useful when writing an exam essay or finishing up a term paper; the other is more fluid, emotional, and expressive, to be used for communicating ideas to others. As an experiment, Drennan had his GCSSE and A-level students focus only on these two types of writing exclusively by taking sample tests when in class and writing blogs when at home.

A month into the experiment, Drennan’s students exceeded both his and their own expectations. The range of topics covered was immense: from local news to current affairs, to the most controversial issues of the day. Students used the blogging format to examine natural and man-made phenomena, analyze experimental data they sourced themselves and by their classmates. They engaged with each other by commenting on each other’s blogs and writing their own responses to posts written by their peers.

Because the students’ writing was always available online, there were no barriers like those imposed by traditionally written material on critiquing and reviewing other people’s work.

This is all massively more powerful, and infinitely easier, than collecting exercise books for monitoring and restricting peer-feedback within the classroom, and a source of far less hassle/conflict than fixed small-scale written homeworks with exact deadlines. Parents can be directed to helpful information, to the evidence of what their child has achieved, and to comparative students’ work from within the same class.

Some teachers are reluctant to make blogging a part of the academic experience because they are afraid that by doing so, they are opening themselves and their schools up to liability in cases when students post defamatory information or engage in internet harassment. But Drennan believes that the rare instances when such things occur is no reason to deprive students of what could be a powerful academic tool. Inappropriate posts are a behavioral problem, Drennan writes, and should be handled in a way a teacher handles a misbehaving student: which is not to punish all for the sins of the few or even just the one.

Use of strong language is moot. A2 sociologists this year persuaded me to allow them to use it in political/satirical posts; tellingly, they did so freely early on, but then it fell away – its casual use disempowers it and makes writing appear lazy. Students came to reflect that they should choose words more carefully. “You don’t hear Polly Toynbee saying ‘What a dick’ in her articles, even though she clearly thinks Cameron is one,” concluded one perceptive wit, to general agreement. Language is a thorny issue, so I share this story without imposition. Child protection issues are minimal. Teach e-safety once, well, and take firm action when needed – but don’t lock kids away from the world. My students were delightedly amazed to discover postgrads in Germany, travellers in South-East Asia and Occupy activists in the US liking, commenting on and following their blogs.

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Figment is a social media website that allows users to share their writing with like-minded peers. It’s tag line ‘write yourself in’ emphasizes the sites focus on community and connection with others.

It was inspired by one of its founders’ childhood dreams of writing. Jacob Lewis went on as an adult to become the managing editor of the The New Yorker, but spent much of his childhood writing Stephen King-esque fiction.

While he had envisioned Figment to be similar to Facebook, he is surprised at how popular it has become as a repository for the writing of its members.

“We really thought at first that it would be more of a social network site,” Lewis said. “But it has been all about project creation. The amount of new content our users produce is amazing.”

Figment connects its aspiring youth writers to professional writers and published authors who conduct online Q&A sessions, live chats and blogs. There is also a ‘Groups’ function that teachers can use to set up online workshops for their students.

Meenoo Rami, a National Board certified English teacher in Philadelphia who hosts the teacher blog #engchat, said Figment is the “perfect platform” for her students.

“It’s important for students to know that their work is viewed by more than just their teacher. For my students, the idea that a larger audience is being exposed to their work is important to them,” Rami said. “This gives them an authentic reason to write.”

While Figment has its success stories, such as Blake Nelson who received a book deal based on the work posted to the site, Lewis is down to earth about it and is keen that the site doesn’t simply become a market for the most talented writers to display their wares and compete for deals.

Lewis said Figment should remain at its heart a place for teens to express themselves.

“Our mission is to not take amateur writers and make them pros,” he said. “We don’t want to set up a hierarchy. We just want these young writers to see how empowering it is to be able to share your ideas.”

Figment was founded by Jacob Lewis and Dana Goodyear in 2010. It has more than 220,000 registered users and a library of more than 350,000 individual pieces encompassing a wide variety of genres, poetry, short stories and novellas. It runs regular competitions for its members.

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Although scantron sheets have been a staple of tests for many years, grading written assignments always required a human with a red pen. This may change with the growing popularity of robo-graders: computer programs that scan student papers and produce a grade. Such technology was first proposed in 1960s, but with the advance in software since then, the idea might soon become a widespread reality.

The need for robo-graders is driven by the fact that teachers are loath to assign too much essay writing because those kinds of projects take a long time to mark. As a result, many high schoolers are graduating without adequate writing and spelling skills to tackle college-level work.

The theory is that teachers would assign more writing if they didn’t have to read it. And the more writing students do, the better at it they’ll become – even if the primary audience for their prose is a string of algorithms.

That sounds logical to Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron. He’s helping to supervise a contest, set up by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, that promises $100,000 in prize money to programmers who write the best automated grading software.

Versions of the robo-graders are already at work marking writing assessment tests in South Dakota, and the written portion of the TOEFL exam, used to gage foreign students’ proficiency in English. It is humans, however, who still read the essay portion of the SAT and ACT tests, and many teachers seem reluctant to turn over this responsibility to a collection of software algorithms.

Thomas Jehn, a writing instructor at Harvard University, finds the idea of robo-graders “horrifying,” and feels that the efforts will actually backfire, because knowing that their writing isn’t being read by a human, would discourage students from using alliterative language and metaphors that make essays so rich.

He argues that the best way to teach good writing is to help students wrestle with ideas; misspellings and syntax errors in early drafts should be ignored in favor of talking through the thesis. “Try to find the idea that’s percolating,” he said. “Then start looking for whether the commas are in the right place.” No computer, he said, can do that.

Even the technology itself, however, isn’t without limitations at present. Software currently on the market can not differentiate between a coherently written essay and a “nonsensical” jumble of clauses that are relevant to the topic, but don’t make any sense together. Furthermore, a computer can’t successfully cope with formats other than straight prose.

“They hate poetry,” said David Williamson, senior research director at the nonprofit Educational Testing Service, which received a patent in late 2010 for an Automatic Essay Scoring System.

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The bill is sponsored by Rep. Kristine Lytton, D-Anacortes, with two Vancouver Democrats, Rep. Tim Probst and Rep. Sharon Wylie having signed on as co-sponsors.

The bill would look to replace statewide writing assessments with tests designed for each individual school district by the 2015-2016 school year, writes Justin Runquist at the Oregonian.

The bill would also look to scrap the state’s requirement that high school students must complete a culminating project before graduation, allowing school districts to choose whether the projects will be required or not.

Lytton believes the bill would give school districts more flexibility in a time of economic difficulties.

“School districts are really struggling,” she said, “and we need to do something.”

Lucinda Young, of the Washington Education Association, has announced that the union would support the bill.

However, Tim Knue, the executive director of the Washington Association for Career and Technical Education, believes that a culminating project is a strong resume-builder for students who will be fighting a much harder battle to stand out in an age where more young people are graduating.

He believes that it should stay as a statewide requirement.

“We fear as we move forward, as we throw the baby out with the bath water in some of these bills to help accommodate schools, we’ll be doing more harm than good,” Knue said.

Lytton has heard recommendations from officials on both sides of the argument, but still believes eliminating the culminating project requirement is the correct thing to do.

The idea of integrating requirements like reading and writing is becoming more prominent across the county. Howard County in Maryland is set to scrap traditional reading classes from their middle school curriculum, saying literacy will be infused with other classes.

Under the new schedule, all Howard County middle schools would have a 50-minute, seven-period schedule, as opposed to current variations on a 45-minute, eight-period day.

Literacy instruction would be infused into other classes and traditional reading classes are scrapped in the new state curriculum, said Clarissa Evans, executive director of school improvement and curricular program.

Under the new plan, middle schools will undergo a massive change in curriculum. “Content-area” teachers, who teach subjects like science, social studies or math, would have lessons several times a week that focus on critical reading and response skills, outlined Evans.

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Back in December 2009, excited 4th graders at Westerly’s State Street School sat down to take a practice science test. Like little sports jocks, the kids approached the task as if it were training for the big game coming in the spring, the statewide science NECAP.

Julia Steiny

In 2008, the whole Westerly district had performed so poorly on that test that teachers actually volunteered their time to form a K-12 Science Task Force focused on redeeming their sullied academic reputation. (See last week’s column about this Task Force.)

Then, insult to injury, in 2009 State Street’s scores tanked again.

The heat was on. State Street had already started implementing the Task Force’s recommendations, including its strong emphasis on teaching writing.

Wait. Writing? That’s English, not science. But more on this in a moment.

Westerly’s students had struggled particularly with the “inquiry” part of the NECAP, where kids to do a hands-on task and draw conclusions from what they see in front of them.

State Street’s Principal Audrey Faubert says, “Science (NECAP) is only given at the 4th grade (and later at 8th and 11th), so K-3 weren’t exposed to the rigors of testing. We decided to give all the kids an inquiry task to complete. And the faculty also took some of the released test items from the RIDE website. Even though they’d been teaching inquiry with the science kits, it was interesting for the teachers to be on the other side of a test.”

But the spotlight’s glare was on those 4th graders.

Faubert smiled sadly, “The room was buzzing. The kids thought they did fantastic.”

Working in pairs, the school’s entire teaching staff scored the kids’ work. The results were enough to induce clinical depression.

But as it turns out, the school’s good efforts hadn’t quite paid off yet. The Task Force was onto a good thing when they decided writing was key to learning science. State Street’s instruction had only just started to take root.

Here’s the problem: Old science was about answers. When a test asks a question like: “How does wind change sand dunes?” somewhere in the science textbook was an answer that the kid was supposed to have memorized.

New science is about thinking and reasoning. The way Faubert puts it is: “The (NECAP) science test is a thinking test, not a knowledge test. Science isn’t about recall any more, but about synthesizing information.” New science poses essential questions, such as the sand dunes example, but now the kids need to derive the answer themselves, by sorting through data. Teachers provide techniques, tools, research methods, and experiences. But like scientists themselves, students must do their own research and figure out what their discoveries mean.

Writing is always the product of thinking. Writing forces a kid to organize her thoughts to be expressive and communicate clearly.

Middle school principal Paula Fusco says, “Prior to the work of the Task Force, we’d left writing up to the English teacher. But whatever the kids did or didn’t know, they weren’t able to communicate their understanding of science.”

To work on that understanding, Fusco says, “We’ve been taking the vocabulary out of NECAP – infer, predict, explain. So the kids aren’t afraid of the words they’re encountering.”

The ability to define “predict” doesn’t help at all if the ability to MAKE a prediction isn’t also a familiar habit. Kids need to demonstrate, by their writing, that they understand what they need to DO when the test asks them to predict, infer or explain.

Similarly, Fusco’s teachers began to work with the kids on “sentence starters” to guide their thinking – However, In conclusion, Whereas, Therefore.

Fortunately, Westerly’s students were in the habit of writing in science journals. But they had used them mainly to record observations. Faubert says, “Every teacher brought in examples of their students’ science journals. Oh, here are the strengths and weaknesses right in our own notebooks. We’d never had the kids prove their thinking in their journals. Think like a scientist, based on what’s in front of you. Prove your thinking. Prove your thinking. We said that so many times.”

At the end of the day, teaching the kids to EXPLAIN their predictions and reasoning was the clearest way to teach them habits of scientific thinking. And those explanations also helped the teachers assess kids’ understanding and misunderstanding.

By February, State Street dared to try another practice test with the 4th graders. Again, the staff scored it together. Ahhh, much better. So much so, Faubert felt more confident about improving on the 49 percent proficiency they’d managed in the prior year’s test.

In fact, when the results were released last Fall, State Street kids hit 80 percent proficiency, 8th highest in the state, out of over 150 schools that take that test. (And Westerly is the 8th lowest-income community in the state.)

Superintendent Roy Seitsinger’s take on the situation is this: “Nobody (meaning veteran educators) signed up for what we’re doing now. Most of the people weren’t trained to bring students through a thinking process. Now the educators’ job is to teach kids how to sift through all that information and to be critical, reflective and make decisions. We have too much information and not nearly enough sorting skills.”

Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

The post Julia Steiny: Learning to Write Teaches Westerly Students Science appeared first on Education News.

First, the elementary and middle-school science scores were fairly disappointing, but the high school full-on bombed. The 11th graders scored a percentage point below the state average, which itself was a pathetic 18 percent proficient.

Julia Steiny

Teachers had worked hard for test-score squat.

Second, the realities of falling enrollment and a strained budget meant the district had to mothball one elementary school at the end of the year. Always upsetting.

The re-shuffling of kids and teachers included adding the 5th grade to the middle school. The district laid off one elementary principal and assigned the others to the remaining schools. For the most part, teachers chose to follow their principal to wherever he or she got assigned.

And 6 superintendents had cycled through the district since 2005.

The system churned.

But even with all that roiling change, the district couldn’t afford to let science fall through the cracks. Remarkably, teacher volunteers from each building, K-12, stepped up to form a Science Task Force — on their own time and dime. Very unusual. They’re to be commended.

Teachers, not just curriculum officials, came out of the isolation of their classrooms and buildings to collaborate on a comprehensive picture of K-12 science instruction.

Once the hurt and defensiveness died down, the Task Force’s view of Westerly’s science program had many clear lessons, one of which was quite surprising.

But first a bit about Westerly. The large, lovely homes overlooking Narraganset Bay belong mainly to “summer people” whose kids go to school in New York, New Jersey, wherever. The monster casinos that moved close by in Connecticut increased the demand for Westerly’s rental housing. In the winter, the summer rental properties are relatively cheap. But that means the schools get and lose highly-mobile students all the time.

And the big manufacturing employers have been closing up shop.

So Westerly’s year-round population has Rhode Island’s 8th lowest median family income of Rhode Island’s 36 school districts – a surprise to me. The poverty rate among students has tripled in the last decade, from 11 to 33 percent.

Westerly officials make no excuses, though. The town wants good schools and is willing to support them. The current Superintendent, Roy Seitsinger, gratefully reports that their teachers union is supportive of reform efforts and wants to be “innovative and creative.”

While the Task Force preceded Seitsinger’s arrival, he was an instant fan of a K-12 approach to the science problem. “Any time you silo an effort to fix a problem, you haven’t trained the new habits of mind you need to keep the problem fixed. The Task Force is now a systematic practice. They are establishing a districtwide culture of data gathering and reflection.”

Well, what did they find?

Naturally, they found a whole laundry list of interrelated issues, including a badly misaligned curriculum with gaping holes.

But by far the biggest issue they found themselves facing was the fact that everything about teaching science has changed rather quickly, and Westerly hadn’t really kept up.

In recent decades, scientific research has exploded with new knowledge. That coupled with the advent of the internet means the subject has long outgrown its status as a body of knowledge, facts and formulae, that a kid could learn and spit back on a test. Instead, students need to learn to think like a scientist – predict, prove, show evidence. Most importantly, they must be able to show they can use their skills proficiently with hands-on tasks and experiments.

For example, consider a released item from the “inquiry” section of the state’s science test, the NECAP, This test question [PDF] question asks kids to perform a an actual task, know how to understand the physical evidence in front of them, draw conclusions and explain them. Very different from just remembering an answer.

Just for the record, Rhode Island’s secondary regulations mandate that high school diplomas must require students to demonstrate their ability to apply knowledge. In addition to exposing students to the subject in general, teachers need to pose essential questions and guide kids through learning the skills and information they’ll need to arrive at a conclusion. This practice of question or “inquiry”-driven instruction is a huge shift for all but the most recently-trained educators.

Fortunately, the kit-based science curriculum that the district had been using K-8, GEMS-net, is deeply inquiry-based. So Westerly had something to build with. But it was going to be ten tons of work to shift instruction from remembering factoids to focusing more on thinking.

Their work paid off big time. Last spring the high school students achieved 44 percent proficiency, while the state average struggled only up to 25 percent. Westerly’s elementary and middle schools are a good 22 and 15 points above state average, respectively.

But wait? What made the big difference? Surprisingly, the Task Force decided that the most effective way to solving the science problem K-12 would be – I love this – teaching the kids to write. Next week, we’ll see how showering the kids with writing instruction was the magic that turned disappointment to triumph.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.

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Julia Steiny

An expert in the art of teaching writing, Horn has taught teachers across the country. She’s now a professor in Rhode Island College’s education department, and today she’s modeling her techniques for 13 teachers looking to enhance their skills.

Soon enough, the kids settle down without being shushed. And when they do, Horn comes to life, using slightly-exaggerated facial expressions and a dramatic voice. She announces with delight, “Eduardo has drawn a picture for his story about going to the Dominican Republic.” Eduardo joins her at the front, nervous about the attention, but excited to tell his story. The kids study Eduardo’s picture, curious to see what it’s about.

All kids have stories. However trivial to us, the stories matter hugely to them. Horn harnesses kids’ interest in their own lives, so their natural drive can carry them through the more tedious challenges of learning the rules of our idiosyncratic language.

When most kindergartners are asked if they can read, they say no. But write? Oh yes! Give them paper and they’ll draw, write letters, numbers, names of people they know, sometimes words. Horn says, “They come to school believing in their ability to put marks on paper to make meaning. So we start there: with what children CAN do. Unfortunately, when people speak of literacy, most of the time they are referring only to reading.”

Research shows that learning to write greatly strengthens reading skills.

But in our test-driven mania, right answers are all that matter. So in the world of writing, grammar and spelling are minefields of potentially-wrong answers. The pleasure of story-telling quickly gets lost.

Squirming a bit, Eduardo tells us his story about his trip to visit his cousins. His version is sketchy and hung up on getting to the airplane. But Horn inquires about details with the enthusiasm of an adolescent dragging juicy gossip out of her friend. Eventually she’s got enough to tell the tale herself, “It was early in the morning, still very dark, when my whole family got in the car and stopped by Dunkin Donuts to get something to eat…” As she talks, Eduardo keeps filling in facts – who’s in the car; what his siblings said; the hassle with checking the suitcases – painting ever more vividly the scene and its players.

Again, with her super-curiosity, Horn asks “Okay but what were you thinking and feeling at the time?”

Obviously excited, Eduardo says, “I was, like, oh my gosh! I can’t believe…”

Pause. Horn, riveted, asks, “Can’t believe what?” Eduardo’s hands fly up in amazement, “I can’t believe I’m leaving on a plane today.”

She addresses the group, “Writers, it is your job to help us think and feel what you were feeling, by how you tell your story.” The kids nod.

Again, Horn holds up Eduardo’s airplane picture. He notes that he should add a moon because it was night. He says he’s very ready to write his story, and looks as if he’s dying to run back to his desk and do it immediately.

Horn marvels, to the children’s delight, at what good stories they have. She often says, “It’s a writers responsibility to…” The onus is on the kids to learn how to communicate clearly and vividly so their audience understands.

So mechanics certainly matter, but already by 4th or 5th grade, many children have started to hate writing. They never got a good feel for their own powers of communication. Many repeat a small, dull repertoire of reliably-right constructions and words they’re sure they can spell.

One of Horn’s techniques is to include a “proofreading” list in each writer’s folder. That list begins with the same 5 rules that all kids must learn, expressed in terms of mastery, like: “I can put a title on my stories.” But each subsequent rule is one that individual writer is ready to learn.

For example, in an earlier “conference” (a student-teacher one-on-one), Eduardo had written another story which began, “Wenieyt My pezz i eyt it with mom.” (When I ate my pizza I ate it with mom). Throughout his work, Eduardo was misspelling “when” and “ate,” leaving no spaces between some words, and not capitalizing “I.” Horn picked out one problem – the “I.” While she worked with other kids, Eduardo corrected all the “I”s in his story and added to his proofreading list: “I can capitalize I.” Henceforth, he’ll be expected to proofread his work with this new rule in mind, along with those already on the list.

Kids can’t possibly be literate if they don’t know the rules. No question. And asking teachers to get all passionate about kids’ stories and feelings can feel like huge risk compared with focusing on getting the mechanics right.

But that risk puts fire in the kid’s belly. So the kid becomes a more invested, independent learner. And the teacher has a more interesting job.

Next week we’ll talk to teachers who’ve been absorbing some of Horn’s techniques.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at GoLocalProv.com . She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com.

The post Help Kids Find a Voice, Then Work on Writing Mechanics appeared first on Education News.

By Pam Allyn

As we ‘grown-ups’ know, childhood can be a challenging place to navigate. When children can write what is going on in their minds, they formulate thoughts they didn’t know they had. A child is able to relive an experience, reflect and gain new insights that might not have been apparent initially. This power of self expression – being able to say exactly what he or she means to say – is an invaluable gift for the child, allowing him or her to make sense of the world and perhaps him- or herself. Not only can the child articulate his or her feelings, he or she has control over his or her own story and how it is told. This is a lifelong coping mechanism that a child can turn to in times of hardship and equally in times of joy.

Pam Allyn

As children become comfortable writing, they can begin to write from the perspective of others. Being able to imagine someone else’s reality and becoming truly invested in his or her feelings builds compassion. The empathy a child has for others lingers long after he or she has read or written a story. It captivates him or her, takes root within and pushes the child to advocate for change, to share with the world what he or she feels.

Even the smallest child can articulate his or her passion with a sign, letter or a call to action. There are countless stories of young children starting campaigns to advocate for social justice who began by sharing a story with friends and classmates. This simple act of reaching out—displaying a longing to connect with others—is a profound gesture and has the power to spill over and touch the rest of the world.

In this way, the child as a writer is offering gifts to the world and also to you, in the form of poems, stories, notes and riddles. Though we are a decade into the new millennium, time machines exist only in works of fiction or the prop department of a film studio. Nevertheless, a consistent writing life captures your child’s mind and personality exactly as he or she is in that moment. Reading one’s own work many years later can stir up memories more animated (and personal) than a photograph, while also offering a how-to lesson on surviving childhood.

Pam Allyn is the Executive Director and founder of LitWorld, a global organization advocating for children’s rights as readers, writers and learners. She is also the Executive Director and founder of LitLife, a national organization dedicated to school improvement. She is the author of the acclaimed and award-winning What To Read When: The Books and Stories To Read With Your Child–And All The Best Times To Read Them (Penguin Avery). Her most recent books are Pam Allyn’s Best Books for Boys: How To Engage Boys in Reading in Ways That Will Change Their Lives (Scholastic) and Your Child’s Writing Life (Penguin Avery).

Pam can be found on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and at her website, PamAllyn.com.

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