Margin Notes

In Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities, Susie Wise explains the importance of belonging:

Belonging helps us to be fully human. It gives us permission to share our talents and express our life force. It enables cooperation, collaboration, and the ability to work across difference. It emboldens our creativity and our problem-solving abilities. When people feel like they belong, they are able to be their best and do their best.

According to Wise, we can all design spaces that help people feel they belong, and she represents this intersection of belonging and design as “belonging + design = new ways of bringing people together, or new ways of people being together.”

Belonging means that we feel accepted and that we can show up as our authentic selves; we also feel that as a member of the community we can raise issues and challenge ideas. In contrast, othering is treating people who belong to a different group or community as inferior.

We can shape belonging and avoid othering by using what Wise calls the levers of design. These levers are tools that help us move toward the goal of creating spaces where people feel safe to participate fully. They help us experiment with new ways of engaging with others.

• Space: cues us to what, how, and who we can be
• Roles: because they are designed as part of systems, they can be redesigned to create belonging
• Events: designing an event is crafting the experience, so belonging must be a through-line
• Rituals: help us focus on personal, interpersonal, and communal meaning-making
• Grouping: to foster belonging, be specific about what you hope to achieve by designing group structures
• Communications: be aware that all communications send explicit and implicit messages about who belongs and who does not
• Clothing: can act as a symbol of belonging
• Food: is sometimes an opportunity for coming together
• Schedules and Rhythms: can play an important role if they are designed to support people and their needs.

No matter what role we play, we can be reflective about whether or not our interactions create belonging or othering. When we become aware of the levers of belonging in our own communities, we can begin to use them with intention. Although this book is not specific to education, there are countless spaces educators can apply these principles to design and redesign spaces within our classrooms and school communities to foster belonging.

If you are familiar with the Teach Living Poets website or the #TeachLivingPoets community on Twitter, you will want to get your hands on this professional resource. If you aren’t already acquainted with the work of Teach Living Poets, be sure to spend some time with it this month!

Lindsay Illich and Melissa Alter Smith have created a professional resource that celebrates the work of contemporary poets and the incredible thinking students will do when we put compelling poetry in their hands and create the conditions for them to grow their understanding about it together. As they write in the introduction:

To quote Kevin Akbar, we are living in “a golden age of poetry” (“The Rumpus”). We hope this book helps us open up the world of contemporary poetry and renews your passion for language and literature, which is so vital to engaged teaching. Indeed, in our own writing and teaching lives, reading and engaging in this world has opened us to a flood of generosity from writers and other educators, invaluable gifts that led us to write this book. We hope it will lead you to your own projects that will be gifts to others.

Teach Living Poets is overflowing with ideas for bringing contemporary poetry (and poets) into the classroom. It features lessons and resources that you can implement right away as well as examples of student responses and written work. I especially appreciate the way the classroom snapshots highlight many teacher voices by incorporating activities shared by contributors to the website. Each chapter includes dozens of recommended poems—so be warned it can be a slow read if you, like me, stop and google every title and poet, but I promise it will be totally worth it.

If you are looking for ways to incorporate contemporary poetry into your reading and writing workshop, I highly recommend adding Teach Living Poets to your professional resource library.

In How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times Roy Peter Clark advises “if you want to write long, begin by writing short.” This really sparked my thinking on short writing mentor texts that can be used in the service of writing both short and long.

According to Clark: “If your goal is to write short and well, you must begin by reading the best short writing you can find. Start by keeping a ‘commonplace book,’ a notebook that contains treasured short passages from your favorite authors next to bits and pieces of your own writing.”

Christopher Johnson, author of Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little, recognizes that short writing reflects its own conventions—the strategies that make very short messages effective, interesting, and memorable. He explains that “if extended prose writing is like a painting or illustration, microstyle is like graphic design. It employs a subset of techniques used in more detailed arts, and because it serves different ends, it involves techniques and conventions of its own.”

Spending time close reading short writing is time well-spent for writers. Reading short writing through this lens reveals what Roy Peter Clark describes as “the most strategic moves practiced by the best writers.” We grow in our craft (both short and long) when we study the writing of others, name the moves we notice, imitate them, and adapt them to make them our own. Samples of short writing can do a lot of heavy lifting as mentor texts. Students can explore several examples in a short period of time and focus on a specific craft move or element. Their noticings can then be applied to their own short writing or incorporated as a component of a longer piece.

Christopher Johnson captures this practice in his mantra: “Pay attention to the language around you in the spirit of appreciation and curiosity.”

Here are some excellent examples of short writing I’ve discovered (or rediscovered) recently that invite writers to reflect on the craft moves that get, in Johnson’s words, “a lot of idea out of a little message.” I’ve captured many examples from these texts in my own writers notebooks to use as micro-mentors.

In Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it’s off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood), Harvard Law School lecturers Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen define feedback in this way:

Feedback includes any information you get about yourself. In the broadest sense, it’s how we learn about ourselves from our experiences and from other people—how we learn from life…so feedback is not just what gets ranked; it’s what gets thanked, commented on, and invited back or dropped. Feedback can be formal or informal, direct or implicit; it can be blunt or baroque, totally obvious or so subtle that you’re not sure what it is. (p. 4)

Although it is directed toward the feedback receiver, Thanks for the Feedback offers a wealth of information for educators to consider when creating the conditions for feedback to be both given and received effectively. Because they define feedback so broadly, and because we are all givers and receivers of feedback in various contexts, Stone and Heen, have written a resource that will help every reader improve their communication.

According to Stone and Heen, there are three kinds of feedback:

1. Appreciation “is fundamentally about relationship and human connection. At a literal level it says, ‘Thanks.’ But appreciation also conveys, ‘I see you,’ ‘I know how hard you’ve been working,’ and ‘You matter to me.’” (p. 31)
2. Coaching “is “aimed at trying to help someone learn, grow or change.” (p. 32)
3. Evaluation “tells you where you stand. It’s an assessment, ranking, or rating…Evaluations are always in some respect comparisons, implicitly or explicitly, against others or against a particular set of standards.” (p. 33)

It is important for both the giver and receiver to be aware of three potential triggers that can block feedback:

1. Truth Triggers “are set off by the substance of the feedback itself—it’s somehow off, unhelpful, or simply untrue.” (p.16)
2. Relationship Triggers “are tripped by the particular person who is giving us the gift of feedback. All feedback is colored by the relationship between giver and receiver, and we can have reactions based on what we believe about the giver…or how we feel treated by the giver.” (p.16)
3. Identity Triggers “are all about us. Whether the feedback is right or wrong, wise or witless, something about it has caused our identity—our sense of who we are—to come undone.” (p.16)

Recognizing our feedback triggers helps us manage our reactions to feedback and approach it with a stance of curiosity. Knowing our tendencies to react to certain feedback in certain ways allows us to engage in feedback conversations as learners, even when we don’t agree with the feedback.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from Thanks for the Feedback for educators to consider when creating optimal conditions for giving and receiving feedback in the classroom:

• It’s essential to align the type of feedback with its purpose and for both the giver and receiver to be aligned on the purpose for feedback.
• Before we can determine whether feedback is right or wrong, we have to understand it.
• Strong reactions to feedback often result in “extreme interpretations” of feedback (for example, a suggestion to change one thing is heard as “change everything”).
• Identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and when feedback contradicts or challenges our identity, it can cause our identity to unravel.
• Even if feedback is accurate, timely, and communicated well, if it involves too many ideas or suggestions for change, it’s unlikely to be received.
• Feedback isn’t only about the quality of its content; the quality of the relationship between giver and receiver is just, if not more, important.

Thanks for the Feedback is not specifically for educators, but many of the ideas are very applicable to feedback in the classroom context. I found the information fascinating because it sheds light on strategies to make any interaction—professional or personal, formal or informal, planned or impromptu—more effective.

As someone who struggles with developing a writing habit, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about a book called The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in your Nonfiction Writing. Honestly, it sounded like work. And I was not expecting to be enthusiastic about reading it. But, because John Warner is also the author of “Why They Can’t Write”, which was a book I really enjoyed, I was willing to give this one a go. And I’m so glad I did!

Warner has written an entertaining and engaging book that is a roadmap for how to write non-fiction well. He developed this book through years of teaching freshman writers, most of whom couldn’t write anything beyond a five-paragraph essay.

If you teach high school ELA, I would highly recommend this book. I can envision it being a great addition to the writer’s workshop. And, at the back of the book, Warner gives you a possible sequence of the activities that you could use as mini-lessons and guided practice over 15 weeks.

As Warner says, “This book is for anyone who wants to improve their writing, which is everyone because everyone is a writer.”

You can find out more about the book here.