In this Information Age, it is easy to be overwhelmed by data, words and images. What can we teachers do to help our students better comprehend, analyze, and criticize the flood of information at their fingertips?
 
The twenty-first challenges us to change our practice to meet our students’ identified needs; we must do more than lament the ineffectiveness of past practices to meet modern needs. In my hybrid teaching role, I’ve heard teachers from all contents express concern that their students can’t interpret data from graphs, can’t read maps, can’t make inferences from images.
 
It’s critical for teachers to unite across content areas to teach visual literacy, because if you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably noticed that the Internet is not organized by department. Infographics are everywhere online, and these media cross and blend a perfect opportunity for cross-curricular instruction, as they intertwine beautifully the visual, the textual and the numerical.
 
Sometimes in our departmentalized secondary schools, especially in the era of high-stakes testing, it can be easy to become hyper-focused on our content areas in isolation. But how often are we planning for the ways words, numbers and images intersect to make meaning in our modern world?
 
The best packaged information comes to us with all content areas in concert, helping us make meaning in a way that appeals to all our senses, our logic, and surprises and delights us.

Infographics are a powerful blend of design, data, writing and analysis that can illuminate truth or mask it, depending on how they are used. Thus they are fertile ground for sowing the seeds of critical analysis and higher order thinking for all students.
 
To teach critical analysis, consider this graphing lesson on misleading graphs can support reading and writing argument in ELA, interpreting graphs in science or social studies, while simultaneously reinforcing basic graphing skills in math and extending students thinking toward analysis and application.                                                      
http://passyworldofmathematics.com/misleading-graphs/       
 
We know from research and experience that instruction is most powerful and effective when it is cross-curricularly planned. Themed units can be natural for elementary school teachers who plan all contents, but they may be more challenging for teachers in departmentalized secondary schools.                       
 
While high school teachers may have to stretch themselves a little farther, for middle school teachers who work on teams, it is possible to have a conversation with colleagues about what skills and topics they are currently teaching. Pairing related graphs and charts with informational or literary texts can add depth to instruction and provide an opportunity to teach annotation, critical analysis, making inferences and citing evidence to support claims.
 
Students can learn about the economy, geographic and visual design from these maps that show each country’s most valuable exports by color in social studies. Social studies teachers could support ELA curriculum by having students write claims about the maps, and support these claims with evidence. ELA teachers can in turn support social studies, science and math teachers by choosing informational texts that include graphs and charts, and requiring students to annotate those as well as the article.
 
For teachers at all levels, allowing students to create their own infographic can enrich and inspire your instruction, while fostering skills of the twenty-first century. One free, web-based program that allows students to save their work is Piktochart. This program also provides free templates and examples that can help students get started.
 
Tracy Hare, a middle school art teacher from Minnesota, writes a great step-by-step guide for how to support your students as they create infographics on The Art of Education blog. Check it out for great ideas and potential pitfalls. At left is one of her student-created infographics that show her students’ passions and attention to design elements.
 
As we look to prepare our students for careers that haven’t been invented yet, the best we can do is to help them be critical analyzers of all information that comes their way and to empower them to tell their stories and make their arguments in ways that will be heard in the twenty-first century.
 
Whether your students read or write them, infographics have the potential to empower.

​Good writing—the writing we look at as models, for example, The Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail—is predicated on a great pressing need: the need to separate, the need to elegize, the need to explain.  The only writing that will ever be valuable to a student will be that which comes from her own need to communicate, to commiserate, to illuminate. It’s writing that comes from an immediate, pressing purpose.
Our basic need to express the anger, loneliness, torment, bewilderment or joy will produce the best writing. Being assigned a topic, assigned a form, assigned an audience, and assigned a rubric undercuts the very human element that gives all writing its vibrancy. 
Ta-Nehisi Coates in his newest book, Between the World and Me, says about his academic experience, “I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them in all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interest” (pg. 48).
Good writing starts with a writer’s own interest, which is grounded in her life, her mind, her observations about the world.  Writing that originates in the mind of a teacher is, at best, an exercise, or more likely, as Coates says, “a jail.”  If teachers want better writing from their students, they must give students permission to declare their own curiosities and time to pursue them. 
In rhetoric, this pressing need is called exigence, which is defined as the circumstances that necessitate communication. Writing without exigence is futile, dry, and exhausting to produce and to read.   It’s like asking kids to ride stationary bikes across America.  They figure out the minute they get on the bike, they’re not going anywhere fast.  They may build up great leg muscles and endurance, but they learn nothing about navigating an actual journey or anticipating perils. Plus the scenery never changes.
Our job as teachers is to help students recognize their own exigencies, to shape them into topics, help them expose their hearts and examine with utter seriousness the considerations of their mind.  Writing about what you know is always good advice, but, more importantly, writing about what you care about is essential.  Never discount the theories, hunches, spites, paranoias, or conundrums of the student writer. For some reason, these cares are important. These untold stories, Maya Angelou said, were an agony to carry around, were begging to be communicated.
In 1986, I enrolled in a theatre class at the University of Kentucky taught by Charlie Oates, who now teaches at the University of California-San Diego.  At the beginning of the class, Oates sent several Marc Chagall prints (I and The Village, Over the Town, and The Promenade were the ones I remember, although there may have been more) to elementary schools in eastern Kentucky and asked teachers to use the paintings with their classes as inspiration for writing a story.   After students wrote their stories, their teachers sent them to our class. We read through the pieces and chose several to produce.  Before the end of the semester, we traveled to these schools and performed the short sketches, a program called Chagallplay, and at the end of the performances, the authors of the original stories came forward and were recognized.  
I was only 19 and had never taught writing at this point, but I recognized something very powerful as we read through the selections. Many students had written lovely stories clearly drawn from the narratives in Chagall's work, but we also discovered the most powerful ones often had little or nothing to do with what was represented on the canvas.  One student wrote a long story, based in title only of The Promenade, about a dysfunctional domestic situation where the father was an alcoholic, the mother was abandoning the marriage, and the children were all scared at night. In every group of papers, four or five kids went rogue from the assignment and wrote from some exigence to which only they were privy. Someone suggested perhaps those kids saw in Chagall’s work something we couldn’t, but I feel like there might have been another urgency at play:  those kids wrote what needed to be written regardless of the prompt. Chagallplay was just the opportunity, just the key to unlock something inside them that demanded expression.   
A good writing prompt can do this, but letting students choose their own writing projects is really where exigence begins.  Ask students what they believe in, what their future holds, what dreams they want to pursue; writing projects will emerge. When students begin to understand they can write about anything they want, they will naturally choose the topics about which they care the most, about which there is circumstance demanding communication. Writing that springs from a situation so powerful it compels a student to speak certainly will prefigure voice, tone, and purpose.  

There is no way around it.  Grading student writing takes time, but there are lots of ideas out there that can make it easier. While I don't always put them into practice, I am now scratching my head as to why I haven’t. When I do, my life gets better.

Student Created Rubrics
Student created rubrics have become a popular concept thanks to Kentucky's writing program review (Writing: Formative and Summative Assessment, demonstrator 1, indicator A) and the TPGES, which is based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching (Component 1f - Designing Student Assessment).  I decided try this idea out soon after TPGES came out, and I was amazed by the results.

I prepared a rubric for a literary letter I was about to assign to see if students would develop a similar one. I also wrote a model literary letter for my favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird.  I put students in groups and asked them what made this good writing.  At first, students only focused on conventions, but I asked them to dig deeper, and they did! After creating an anchor chart based on my classes' suggestions, I was amazed to find their rubric matched mine.

The only difference was their language was more student- friendly.  Because they were invested in the creation of the rubric, my students used it more during peer conferences, gave more specific feedback to their partners, and the papers were better.

To read more about self-created rubrics, check out my dear friend Liz Prather's blog post on the CTQ website.

Rubric Highlighting
I have done this more often this year, especially after finding the Kentucky Writing Project's 16 point argument rubric. It allowed me to hone in on specific areas.  Teachers don't have to grade each indicator.  They can focus on one section at a time which speeds up grading. The specific indicators allowed me to focus on each area more easily than any other rubric I have ever used.

A note of caution: Never tell students what you are focusing on.  If you do, they will only work on those areas.

List of Common Errors
I can't seem to help myself when grading.  I still mark every obvious sentence fragment or spelling error.  Those errors often keep me from appreciating a students' thinking and really mess up the paper.  Instead of becoming that teacher who makes a paper bleed purple, try this trick I learned but have yet to put into practice. Maybe writing about it today will convince me to start next year!

Create a master list of errors you can't seem to ignore when grading, and assign each error a number.  Then go to the resource you use to teach these skills.  For example, my classroom still has a perfectly usable set of Language Network grammar/composition books.  When a student gets a number, they have to hit the books.  Here is a sample list:

1 - Sentence Fragments: Page 115; Test: Page 125
2- Run-on Sentence: Page 116; Test: Page 126

Add chunks of time during class when students work on these skills so you are available to clarify. By doing this, lessons in grammar/mechanics will be based on students' individual needs as writers.

I think the reason I have never gotten this off the ground is I forget to create this during the summer.  Maybe, this year, I will remember.

Stagger Due Dates
If you don't need to have all classes turn the assignment in at once, don't.  Thirty papers looks less intimidating than 150.

Roll the Dice
Have students write more than one example of a specific type of writing.  If you have to do open response, have students answer three different questions.  Then have a student roll a die until a one, two, or three comes up.

The number that comes up is the number you grade.  You can even do a different roll for every class.  As a result, students work hard on all three responses while you only have to grade one.  If you have a struggling writer, tell them to focus on only one.

I love this because students get the writing practice they need, but I don't have to grade it all.  It definitely eases the workload!

Grade Aloud
I got this idea from Brandie Trent, a fabulous English teacher and colleague of mine, when I participated in the Morehead Writing Project as a returning fellow a couple of years ago.  It works well if students are struggling with a specific part of the writing.  Have every student read that specific section of his or her paper out loud.  Then give it a grade.  I tried this with introductions, and while I still had to grade for conventions later, I could easily assess the effectiveness of the hook, context, and thesis statement.  The great thing about this was I saw students improving their introductions before I called their names, which I did randomly. Did they steal a few ideas? Yes.  Did it improve their introductions?  Yes.  I entered the grades into the gradebook, students practiced their revision skills, and they taught each other how to improve introductions.

I feel inspired after writing this blog post.  Hopefully, this will be my new normal next year. If it is, I may have just found the extra time needed to make regular exercise part of my daily routine.  Now, that is something to celebrate!