AudioCast: Tony Stead on Teaching Non-Fiction Writing

Above: Tony Stead (Email: tonystead@bigpond.com).

Tony Stead is an Australian educator who has taught in elementary schools and lectured at the University of Melbourne. He is the past president of the Melbourne Chapter of the Australian Reading Association and the author of many publications. His latest include Is That a Fact?: Teaching Nonfiction Writing and the video series Time For Nonfiction. which highlights his recent work with several teachers at the Manhattan New School.

What a fantastic opportunity! I'm now sitting here with a copy of both of Tony's books, and I'll be reading one of them this weekend.

The book you are about to read [Is That a Fact?] is destined to be the first, middle, and maybe even the last word on nonfiction writing for young, young children. It is certainly a text that you will return to over and over again as you do with a beloved cookbook.
Source: Tomie dePaola, Foreword of Is That a Fact? by Tony Stead

Over eighty- five percent of the reading and writing we do as adults is nonfiction, yet most of the reading and writing in K–3 classrooms is fiction or personal narrative. In Is That a Fact? Teaching Nonfiction Writing K-3, Tony Stead shows you how to open the door to the rich world of nonfiction writing that goes beyond "what I did" narratives and animal reports. And he convincingly demonstrates the importance of introducing nonfiction writing in the primary grades.

This morning--thanks to Jeanne Cantu (SAISD's Senior Coordinator for Reading/ELA) invitation for my team and I to come listen--I had the chance to listen to Australian Tony Stead share his thoughts about Teaching Non-Fiction. I also had the opportunity to chat with Roger Rosen, President of the Rosen Publishing Group. I took notes on everything they had to say. Rather than quote them here, I'm just going to share some of the high points. You can read the transcript of my notes online via the Share More! Wiki.

There are several options for listening, but you can get the full length podcast or listen to 2 separate parts.

Interview with Roger Rosen (6 megs)

Listen to Tony Stead's Presentation (22.6 megs)

Both Roger and Tony with a short intro from Miguel (24 megs)

Key Take-Aways:

1. We need to thrill our learners to be readers and writers.
2. To be successful in life, what kind of writing will help children in their life? If you're like me, you're writing persuasive writing.
3. In K-2 classrooms, 95% of writing experiences were with personal narrative and story
4. By 6th grade, children will have spent 84% of writer's workshop composing personal narratives, stories, and writing from prompts.
5. Kids wrote a brochure and dedicated it to everyone who is scared of bats. For the us, the use of technology to get online and find out about stuff. With every book, there's a web site. Kids went to batconservation.com. Bats Conservation said, "If you send us the information and produce it and send it to all 1000 of our members." Those kids were screaming with absolute joy. All day, all they want to do is write persuasive brochures. Our kids sit in those classrooms and do what they're told. They write and read without every understanding why.
6. How did you overcome barriers? Principals want people to teach to the test. How do you get them to take a leap of faith? Response: It was just one school to start with. Let's see what happens and then finding out you won't fail. Pilot the program. That's how the leap of faith happened. Denton ISD tracked the State test. We started with the interested group.
7. 73% of students read nonfiction at least 3 Reading Recovery levels below that of their fiction.
8. 15% of students read nonfiction 3 grade levels below their fiction.
9. By third grade, only 7% of students struggled with decoding nonfiction at their grade level. We teach decoding, how to get through text, but we spend little time helping them understand what the text is actually saying. ESL children can easily learn to decode but because it's a 2nd language, they don't have understanding of which words to use for concept. They can read at 28 level of Reading Recovery, but comprehension level of 4.
10. Students who were competent readers of nonfiction were also competent in reading fiction, but not vice versa.
11. Boys slow their reading down because they want to make meaning of non-fiction. They do what every child should do--they fight to read.
12. Children can read 3-4 levels above what they're benchmarked on topics they're interested in.
13. The way the TEKS are written, they are a big turn-off. They're not written in story format. Response: Tony qualified it by saying, "It's non-fiction that's not written in an non-engaging manner. If we go back to the old non-fiction--librarians hate me because I want to weed out from the 1950s to 1960s from science and social studies because it's out of date, non-engaging; need new fresh resources in there.
14. 96% of all read-alouds were with shared fiction. Kids aren't even hearing the language of non-fiction content until third grade.
15. This is about rethinking a strategy that teachers in the U.S. have been using for the last 10 year. This strategy is KWL. KWL Problem - I believe it's only effective for kids who already bring good background knowledge to the table. When you ask them what they know, that's all dependent on content understandings.
16. RAN Strategy...It's ok to approximate content knowledge. You don't have to be true.
17. A university lecturer came to visit me and I've been using the RAN at the university level. "This is the fabric for how we all think. Day 1, I asked my students...write an essay about how they think children learn to read. Over 6 weeks, they had to--in yellow--confirm what they knew, highlight in blue any misconceptions, write down any wonderings and at the end of the semester, they had to write down a new essay and share their wonderings and misconceptions and new facts.
18. When you ask about misconceptions in Science...I can live with a misconception about Pluto. But in Social Studies, biases and prejudices come up and I can't live with that.
19. We have to help kids take risks.

My Reflections

There are many connections between blogging and non-fiction writing. Aside from a publishing perspective, it's clear that students need to be reading current texts. Reading yesterday's information isn't going to cut it. Not only that, they also have to be engaged by visually appealing content. While much of that might very well be a book, it's obvious that mountains of non-fiction writing is already taking place online with blogs. Consider Mark Ahlness--a Seattle, WA teacher whose 3rd grade students are blogging AND using blogs as their source material for Sustained Silent Reading (SSR). Our students CAN produce non-fiction, and hear (via podcasts) and learn the language of non-fiction.

What do you think?

In writing, you are always composing, always working to make it better. Donald Graves writes (as cited in Atwell's In the Middle):

We'll spend a lifetime crafting our teaching in order to allow children to be the authors of their own texts.

This reminds me of Bolman and Deal's quote about the leader's responsibility, as written in Leading with Soul:

Leader's responsibility is to create conditions that promote authorship.

It's also that idea of CONSTANTLY writing, composing, and with the Read/Write web, publishing. These are powerful ideas for me, and the Read/Write Web tools that are available make it possible. When else could I have had access to panoply of resources? If I want to teach blogging, videos abound. If I want to teach podcasting, videos about how to do that and how to prepare educational podcasts by students (Bob Sprankle's Room 208 vodcast is precious) and/or teachers (e.g. Dorothy Burt's enhanced podcast at TeacherTube.com) are available. They are exactly what's needed.

In a world full of non-fiction, it's clear that personal voice adds a sense of depth (Is That a Fact? by Tony Stead) to writing. Tony cites Donald Graves in his book, Is that a fact? as saying:

Unfortunately, little nonfiction, beyond personal narrative, is practiced in classrooms. Children are content to tell their own stories, but the notion that someone can write about an idea and thereby affect the lives and thinking of others is rarely discussed.

For me, blogs provide the avenue to do this. It's such an obvious connection, I want to jump up and down in front of folks and share it with them. Tony offers the concept of baskets, including Title of Basket and Type of Non-Fiction that goes with that. He mentions that most of the non-fiction/fiction books in one classroom library--over 3000--were not appropriate. Here's what he writes:

3,000 books is a lot of material for one classroom. . .Margo [the teacher] told me that when she sorted her books she found that only 20 percent of them were nonfiction, and most of these were descriptive books about animals, only one aspect of nonfiction. What was more surprising was that of the relatively new nonfiction books she had, about 80 percent were at reading levels way above where the majority of her children were reading...Margo needed not only to purchase more nonfiction material but also to ensure that the texts chosen were matched to the needs and abilities of her children.

When I read Tony Stead's writing on types of non-fiction, I'm immediately drawn to the idea that, wouldn't it be great to classify student-generated writing in blogs by non-fiction areas? And, since audio is such a big part of oral comprehension for children reading non-fiction, wouldn't podcasts fit right in?

Eric Langhorst does a neat job of this with his Speaking of History Studycasts...

"One of the most effective uses of podcasts for my students was the creation of StudyCasts," Langhorst told Education World. "I began recording an audio review to help my students prepare for upcoming unit tests. With my portable MP3 player, I record an overview of the important material. I then transfer the audio, which lasts about 20 minutes, to my computer, and then upload the MP3 file to our classroom Web site. Students then are able to listen to the study review at home on their computers or download it to their personal MP3 players; they can review for the test anywhere."
Source: EducationWorld

While this is neat stuff, what about having students write the nonfiction and record their own podcasts for posting? Would that work? I know that book publishers are cringing, but there are so many writing non-fiction out here in the blogosphere, posting podcasts, it seems a "no-brainer" to harness that. But how to do it? Tags for non-fiction help, but we might have to use a standard. Why not use Tony's?

Contact info

• Roger Rosen's Email: rogerrosen@prodigy.net
• Tony Stead's Email: tonystead@bigpond.com