Five years ago I was introduced to Frank Serafini's work at the Wisconsin Reading Research Symposium through his latest publication, Reading the Visual. This text was exactly what I needed at the time to jumpstart the design of my multiliteracies unit (now Digital Writes) as it helped me to think about how reading the visual in picturebooks could be an entry into author's craft for digital writing. Since then, my students have explored texts using his framework alongside a similarly focused framework provided by Dawnene Hassett. Recently, I found myself wondering how I might adapt this workshop experience to attend to relevant instructional practices beyond teaching author's craft. Why it took me this long to make the connection...no idea. But, I am so excited about the workshop redesign I cannot wait to put it into action!

After reading this chapter on "Studying Writers' Office Work," it is clear that I have not given enough attention to the importance of topic selection in the writing process. Ray makes an important distinction between how experienced and inexperienced writers select topics  highlighting how experienced writers realize that the writing is what makes the reading engaging, not the topic.

This passage helped me to see blindspots in my own writing instruction. In the past, I've focused my efforts on teaching the writing process to redefine what it means to engage in active and ongoing revision, as many of my students still struggle to differentiate revision from editing. But in doing so, I think it's pretty clear I've been shortchanging what it means to actively engage in prewriting. With limited time to delve deep into writing instruction, I also find myself wondering if this perspective could be addressed more strategically within a student writing project as opposed to a separate topic within understanding the writing process?

​In particular, Ray's writing has shifted my perspective for drafting digital texts within my larger-scale multiliteracies book response project. While I position topic selection as based on a writer's individual purpose (emerging from their reading(s), knowledge of technologies, experience with genres, personal interests, etc), I have not been as intentional about (a) how to help them discover that purpose; (b) how to develop that purpose prior to beginning the drafting process; (c) or how to transfer this experience to the classroom for their own students. Moving forward, I can envision how a more intentional entrance into these projects could greatly enhance the outcomes and the likelihood of impacting future practice.

Inspiration from Wondrous Words by Katie Wood Ray.

​One of the culminating activities of our Coaching Practicum course is the creation of a one-page document to articulate central Coaching Belief Statements. In the past, this assignment has taken a traditional, text-based format. As we hoped for this document to serve an authentic purpose at participant sites, we wondered if a visual representation might better support these aims. Using a variety of different technology tools, our students created visually-appealing belief statement representations that pushed them to clearly and succinctly communicate their vision for coaching. But for every gain this format offered, we had to weigh corresponding losses.

This past week I had the chance to participate in the PBS For the Love of Lit webinar on NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. A few takeaways:

• Offering students the prospect of writing their own novels might seem daunting. But many teachers (and kiddos) attested to the power of the challenge in supporting students to claim their roles as not just writers--but authors. 

As I thought about what types of practices would be most meaningful for my preservice teachers to explore through authentic engagement at their practicum sites, conferring with student writers was at the top of my list. 

Traditional Course Activity
In previous courses, we would model the process of conferring with writers by using writing samples from students. This helped us to practice the skill of identifying higher order needs and asking guiding questions to elicit reflection on the part of writers. We were able to develop potential strategies and address challenges that arose in the process. However, this experience was always limited because it was missing the most important ingredient--actual students! ​

The wide-ranging and ever-expanding presence of technology tools entering our classrooms brings a multitude of potential opportunities for innovative new projects. Multimodal composition comes to life through student created digital stories, podcasts, websites, and large-scale projects that include all of the above. In many ways, digital projects pose the same challenges to traditional forms of assessment as familiar examples of low-tech projects. Similar to project-based learning, digital projects raise questions about contribution and collaboration, the process of documenting problem solving, and determining exactly what constitutes evidence of craft.

Teachers will also likely encounter the age-old composition struggle of balancing process and product, to weigh creativity and originality alongside the standards of conventions. However, I would argue that the challenge of assessment is even more pronounced for digital stories because of the added complexities of working with technology tools–a task that is often new for both teachers and students alike. Prior experience and exposure can play heavily on a student’s ability to successfully produce a high quality digital project, though even the most tech-savvy can fall victim to the unlucky technical glitch or misstep that can cause serious setbacks to the progress of the project.

How do you account for these considerations in your grading rubric? And, what characteristics or skills does your rubric actually even assess? These are always tough questions, only made harder with digital projects. We recently explored these questions in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s ELA methods course I taught last year to preservice elementary teachers. While inevitably each teacher will come to his/her own interpretation of what assessment looks like, the following references might provide helpful starting points to begin the conversation. By no means an exhaustive list, these are practitioner-friendly tools to help us all inquire into what matters and why in crafting assessments of digital projects.

National Writing Project, Digital Is, Multimodal Assessment Tool
The starting point really began for us when we came across the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site that houses the NWP Multimodal Assessment Project. One of the most interesting features of this project is how the process is documented–helping new and veteran teachers alike dive into the complexities related to crafting a multimodal assessment rubric. This was particularly enlightening for my preservice teachers, as it noted the limitations of using the widely accepted 6+1 Traits rubric for these new types of digital projects. The latest project draft presented highlights five elements of multimodal composition that teachers might use to guide and formulate assessment tools: context, artifact, substance, process management and technical skills, and habits of mind.

Troy Hicks, Crafting Digital Writing & Assessing Digital Writing
The straightforward examples and discussions of the digital writing process in Hick’s book were helpful and practical for our classroom discussion and application. While providing examples and analysis of teacher-created projects, Hicks draws attention to the intentionality of the process as a whole: teacher intentionality in designing the assignment, student intentionality throughout the production process, and the degree to which assessment is intentionally authentic in nature. Intentionality is highlighted through his application of author’s craft to digital writing using MMAPS (p. 20-21): mode, media, audience, purpose, situation for the writer, and situation of the writing (for a deeper discussion of this very helpful heuristic see the Digital Writing Workshop pp. 56-59). These characteristics are equally useful for designing an assessment that is responsive and attentive to the goals of the project. In addition, students were particularly drawn to the discussion of “Habits of Mind” which mirrored many of the less quantifiable but highly valued goals in their perspective: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, metacognition (p. 26).

His follow-up book, Assessing Digital Writing, goes one step further to provide a collaborative protocol for looking closely at student writing. While not providing any easy answers, the perspectives offered highlight the ways in which craft is similar and different in digital contexts and how this impacts the assessment process.

Formative Tools
Once the purpose and goals for a project are clearly established and a rubric has been created (or co-created with students), the role of formative assessment and feedback is just as much if not more so important when implementing digital projects. These projects can often feel “fuzzy” and uncertain as you move forward the first few times. I have often found that keeping the limits “open” and encouraging my students to take risks requires me to have less control and clarity over how I envision the final product. For me this choice feels empowering for my students, however, they don’t always interpret the responsibility of the unknown in the same way. Instead, many students have encountered anxiety and confusion over not quite understanding “what” exactly they were producing (even as I reassuringly supported them in embracing the freedom of the opportunity).

Later on, I often found this anxiety becoming my own as I struggled to assess the work of: the student who produced the bare minimum and used no feedback to make improvements; the student who had ambitious ideas but failed to pull it together; the student who crashed her computer and lost everything to start anew the night before and submit something less than her best but the best she could manage. Of course these examples are no different from the assessment challenges of traditional writing assignments; they only become much more widespread and amplified when new technology tools are added to the mix. The addition of carefully designed formative and informal assessments, however, aided in my analysis of the project and student work, helping to validate the meaningfulness of the assignment through the insights and skills students were developing-even when their final pieces were not necessarily successful in terms of traditional rubric categories.
​
Some strategies I’ve employed include:

• Design journals: having students write about, discuss, and document decisions and ongoing work related to their projects. These are especially helpful to understand why students made particular decisions, which can later be compared to post-product assessments of how well these decisions actually worked in contributing to the overall project goals.
• Storyboards/outlines: these documents help to organize student ideas and also call attention to the various demands of the mode and media that students should attend to. For example, even before students have found the right music to set to a scene in their podcast, it is helpful to see that they have considered the mood of a segment of narration in terms of the music they plan to use. For assessment purposes, they allow you to quickly confer with students and determine who is ready to begin working with the technology tools, and who might benefit from extended conferencing to work through the concept.
• Digital Writing conferences: Similar to traditional writing conferences, these informal checks are essential to understanding how students are progressing through the project, determining what “trouble areas” might be arising that would benefit from mini-lessons, and helping students to receive workshop feedback prior to publishing their final drafts. An added element to balance is the type of feedback being requested and given: related to the technology or the project concept. Oftentimes, students can get hung up on technical questions related to using the tool, overlooking perhaps more important questions related to the project goals. Addressing both needs, through informal or informal conferences, can help the production process to stay focused.

Taken together, these formative measures can provide great insight to use alongside final products in assessing what exactly students have learned or are able to do as a result of working through the process of digital construction.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the fabulous Dawnene Hassett to teach a version of the multiliteracies unit I designed previously for my Teaching ELA course. This unit—as scary and overwhelming as it originally felt—has turned out to be one of the most impactful instructional designs I’ve undertaken. Its legs have carried it to professional conferences (WEMTA and WCTE), a professional learning day at a local school district, and as various workshops in other university courses on campus. The basic gist of the project is to engage preservice teachers with multimodal composition by posing open-ended opportunities for them to design digital projects in response to choice reading.

The original version includes the design of four projects (a traditional essay, infographic, podcast, and digital story) which expose teachers to the varied nature of the writing process within each of those contexts. We use the work of Troy Hicks (Crafting Digital Writing and Assessing Digital Writing) to guide how we attend to author’s craft, elements of multimodality, and the intentionality of our design choices. While students often begin from a place of frustration and confusion, because it turns out they are NOT digital natives afterall, they ultimately find themselves impressed and excited by their final products. And the “stickiness” of the experience has been vital to encouraging transfer to practice, something that can be especially challenging with digital projects.

This time around I decided to follow-up on a recent inclination to think more strategically about how to write about writing. While this piece is usually something I have addressed only through conversation, I’ve begun to think that articulating these perspectives is an essential piece of synthesizing the varied knowledge and practices informing each individual’s writing process and as a culminating reflection that ties the experience together in a way that may aid in transferring the process to practice. Afterall, while I jump for joy to see student teachers even attempting these types of digital projects at their sites, I am more interested in the ways they scaffold and bring awareness to the thinking that goes into the production process.
​
Enter the Author’s Statement. Borrowed from the popular usage of artist statements, I envisioned this as a complementary reflection that would illuminate the experience of production and intentionality behind each writer’s design(s). For our first venture, I’ve limited the prompt to the following:

• Attending to Author’s Craft: Use the handout from Troy Hicks (excerpts from his book, Digital Writing Workshop) that highlights different elements of author’s craft you might have highlighted in designing your project. This is not exhaustive– you won’t consider ALL of the elements. Just focus on those that seemed most meaningful to your writing process.
• Elements of Multimodality: Here you might be thinking more about how you have made intentional choices related to  visual (print, image, movement, etc.) and auditory (music, narration, sound effects, etc.) elements. The relationship between these elements will vary based on the medium in which you created your project. They will also depend on the overall goals and direction you had for your project.
• Navigating the Process: Finally, you might also consider the choices you made to troubleshoot or problem solve within the digital spaces you worked. How did these choices impact your final design– either by enhancing or limiting your design process?

Dawnene has suggested that students post their statements to their final Weebly pages, and I cannot wait to see what they have to say! Their final projects will be posted to our Digital Salon which houses a variety of mentor texts (all created by preservice teachers) that might serve as springboards for digital writing projects in any number of future classrooms.

“Design” is a word I’ve found myself using more and more these days. My previous title as an instructional designer; thinking about intentional lesson design; positing the writing process for multimodal composition as a design process. It’s almost as if the word just snuck into my vocabulary, encompassing teachers and writers as designers of any given trade. Perhaps, this is how design thinking came to me then—not as a revolutionary approach meant to unlock creative potential but as a self-aware process of ideation. I guess I would have defined it as a more intentional and responsive engagement with the acts of the writing process or lesson planning. Digging a little deeper, I found this inclination to not be entirely false. But the process of design thinking has been developed into a much more cohesive framework than the general disposition I originally had in mind.

As I reached out to learn more, in particular through Stanford’s dschool website, I was struck by how similar this process seemed to the lesson workshop model I was developing and attempting to articulate with my Teachology students. The convergence of ideas originally led me to think of what would become our Peer Mentorship model as design thinking in action. For my recent presentation during the 4T Digital Writing Conference (Design Thinking: Digital Writing in the Classroom), I was able to better clarify how peer mentorship serves as a collaborative process focused on integrating technology into instruction by means of a design thinking approach to planning. That’s a mouthful. Here’s an excerpt of how I explained this in a recent blog post I shared on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is website:

Design thinking encompasses the following steps (as outlined in the Stanford dschool resource), and here is how I connect the steps to the stages of our mentorship model:

• Empathize: Step 1 emphasizes knowing your students (and contexts) in order to identify interests and needs.
• Define: In Step 2, you use knowledge gleaned through empathizing in order to identify a problem (concern, limitation, etc.) that might be addressed through strategic design choices. Here, we choose a “shift” that will help us to focus our process of design.
• Ideate: Next, in Step 3 participants engage in open brainstorming to generate potential solutions and opportunities. It is important to think about active student engagement and the corresponding verbs that describe student experience. This will help to develop a picture of what the writing project might look like in a broad sense, as opposed to constraining possibilities to a particular tool too quickly (which limits the outcomes).
• Prototype: Finally, in Step 4 participants explore particular solutions through design. This often involves engaging with a few technologies before selecting the best fit for designing the actual project. In addition, we encourage the creation of mentor texts to serve both as exemplar and important learning experience for the teacher him/herself. This insider perspective is really crucial for successfully scaffolding digital writing projects.
• Test: The writing project is then brought to the classroom, and the teacher continues to reflect and adjust in response to student needs.

I’m not sure how novel any of this really is— design thinking or peer mentorship. But how we can use it to structure professional learning around very real and pressing goals for teacher education might provide new perspectives that are worth a closer look.
For more information on Teachology’s peer mentorship model, you can visit our website to access videos and resources.

It seems I have been writing non-stop for the past year or so, but not as much of that writing has ended up on this blog. My MCEA students have all graduated and mostly accepted beginning teacher jobs; Teachology has moved on to it’s third student cohort group; prelims have been successfully completed; and I have moved on to a full time position as outreach specialist. The most interesting shift for me has been one of perspective along the professional trajectory of educators: from working with preservice teachers to instructional coaches. Lately, my brain has been consumed with ideas for how student-centered coaching might be adapted and adopted in ways that support preservice teacher supervision and coaching around digital learning. In both of these contexts, I’ve been considering the missing piece of effectiveness as measured through student evidence. Perhaps my favorite part of Diane Sweeney’s work on student-centered coaching might be repositioning “data” as evidence of student thinking and skills through authentic engagement in literacy activities. Yet, I continue to struggle with how to discuss and interpret such evidence: 1) within digital contexts and 2) within student teaching contexts.

Interpreting Student Evidence in Digital Contexts
This often leads to the question of assessing digital texts, for example, something I continue to explore and feel confounded by. Last fall, I was excited to get my hands on a new book by Troy Hicks and the National Writing Project, Assessing Digital Writing: Protocols for Looking Closely, that tackles this question by emphasizing collaborative protocols for looking closely at writing. Drawing on habits of mind and broad considerations for digital writing, the book eventually makes the argument that maybe digital texts should not be evaluated through the same methods and approaches as traditional texts, because they do, in fact, do something different. Using these resources and samples of some of our own student work, I worked with my (then) student Gracie Binder to lead a session on Assessing Digital Writing at our fall Teachology conference and again in the spring at WEMTA.

Our experience elicited really good discussion over the complexities of looking at student writing in digital contexts–particularly as we consider what ‘evidence’ is ‘evidence of.’ How do we distinguish strategic moves? Or awareness of those strategic moves? Or is it enough that students can make those moves without consciously articulating the why? Or is the why the crucial piece of critical dispositions that we are supporting students to identify, interrogate, and flexibly adapt across contexts? I think I left more confused than our attendees. The biggest takeaway seems to be that none of this work is easy. There is no exact conversion or method. We are constantly in the process of questioning, exploring, and revising as we make our way.
And yet, perhaps there is something more freeing here in the opportunity to chart this territory with our students that feels more authentic or responsive than simply turning to 6-Traits Rubrics. Which also brings me back around to reconsidering how we might re-approach traditional writing beyond the rubric as well.

This past week in my Language & Literacy in Elementary Content Areas course we discussed the multiple forms that text can take. We discussed different genres of digital text, from podcasting to digital book covers and graphic representations, and the potential for not only engaging students but providing opportunities for them to see, understand, and respond in new ways–beyond the linear formatting of printed text. Referencing Troy Hick’s new book Crafting Digital Writing, we used the MAPS approach to consider the features of craft present in a variety of digital and multimodal projects. We then put our discussion into practice as students crafted their own comics as a form of reading response.

The Process
Typically, we begin our class with a freewrite journal entry to focus thinking and allow time to reflect upon and synthesize important ideas from our readings. To fully embrace the topic at hand, I decided to use BitStrips for Schools as an alternative form of opening reflection. It was easy and free to create a class and student accounts, and using the tool required no formal explanation of how to get started. Rotating and answering individual questions was enough explanation, as students used their peers to troubleshoot many of the early questions around navigation.
For the activity, I wrote a series of reflection questions based on our readings (just as I usually do for written responses). Then, I asked students to respond in the form a of a BitStrip comic, for which they were only given 20 minutes to create. 

The Prompt
In response to the article Hicks, T., & Turner, K. H. (2013). No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait. English Journal, 6, 58–65.
The authors begin by highlighting some common woes around teaching for digital literacies–or really the lack thereof. Did any of these common practices resonate with you or bring back “fond” memories of your own experiences?

• Counting Slides
• Use a Blog without Blogging
• Criticizing Digitalk
• Asking only questions that can be answered by a search engine
• Using “Cool” Technology to Deliver a Planned Lesson

Have you experienced learning in settings where digital literacies were supported beyond these limited means? Do you have ideas of how you will teach for intentional and meaningful digital literacies in your content area? Or do you question how you are supposed to “know” how to do this when you may never have experienced successful learning in this area yourself?

Reactions
Overall, students were very engaged and had fun during this activity. A few students were unable to use BitStrips on their tablets and instead drew comics on paper. The biggest challenge seemed to be the way students were forced to rethink their thinking. Whereas during a typical freewrite students are encouraged to write about whatever “pops into their heads,” constructing a graphic representation required greater focus and clarity of the idea to be represented. Students mentioned the need to pare down their thoughts to the most essential level–then consider what that would look like both in regards to mixing image and words and the limitations represented by the tool (ie: which background pictures were available, how much space they had, etc). While maybe not the most conducive format for brainstorming, we could see how this would be useful for demonstrating relationships between characters or concepts, creative storytelling, explaining content understandings, or even as vocabulary activities. The one thing students did need more of was time–20 minutes was not nearly enough and not everyone was able to finish. But now that we’ve spent time both reading and constructing graphic stories, it definitely has broadened the range of what constitutes constructing meaning in the classroom.