Rumors of Mark Leyner’s Disappearance Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
For acolytes of Mark Leyner, the 1990s were a time of abundance. No matter when new readers had joined the
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Credit: Katie Schneider Gumiran and Rosa Gaia for Conway Elementary An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told me last week that while they are a bright spot in improving reading for the last three years, they still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. “Our biggest pain point is writing. Our gaps start in ELA, but we see them in science and social studies too.” This district isn’t alone; schools throughout California are struggling to improve writing across the curriculum. What might we do differently? In their new book, Learning Together , Elham Kazemi and colleagues suggest school leaders work with teachers to analyze student writing more regularly. Reviewing a set of informational essays, or an extended project in biology, could be the center of more grade-level planning meetings or districtwide professional learning days. The pioneer in this approach has been Ron Berger, one of the co-founders of EL Education, a national non-profit that partners with K-12 educators to transform their schools. Berger has been a mainstay of High Tech High’s Deeper Learning conferences in San Diego and has taught more than 300 workshops around the country, all of them closely examining examples of student work. In Leaders of Their Own Learning , the instructional guide he co-authored, Berger tells the story of coaching a high school physics teacher who says, “The students’ lab reports are terribly written and it’s driving me crazy.” Ron asks if she’s ever shown her students a model of a good lab report and she replies that she has not. When given the chance to closely study an exemplary lab report, her students are surprised at the vocabulary and level of precision in it. A number laughed at how low their own standards had been. “For all the correcting we do, directions we give, and rubrics we create about what good work looks like,” writes Berger, “students are often unclear about what they are aiming for until they actually see and analyze strong models.” Ron Berger used to lug around a giant black bag of student essays, labs, and video presentations to discuss […]
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For acolytes of Mark Leyner, the 1990s were a time of abundance. No matter when new readers had joined the
I found literary surrealism as a young teenager by way of Anaïs Nin. I’d become obsessed, fascinated with her Cities
