A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades
Paperback, 304 pages
Published Aug. 7, 2017 by Wiley-Interscience, Jossey-Bass.
Presentation style as a memoir is less effective than it could be. Too much personal reflection and not enough facts and presentation. Either this topic is not quite book-length, or it has been dealt with superficially.
I didn't actually read most of this book, so please take this review with a grain of salt. I skimmed through a copy of my colleague's.
I'm an avid supporter of these methods and Hochman's approach to writing instruction, so my review doesn't reflect my belief in the efficacy of these methods. I wish every teacher were well-versed and trained in these methods, and I'm glad that Hochman finally put out something more readable and applicable than the handbook that has traditionally been handed out at her trainings.
There's useful material here, such as the suggestions for implementation for each writing strategy, and the recommended pacing by grade. And there's passages that really do a nice job of articulating why this approach is needed. But if you've otherwise been exposed to the methods via a training before, there's not too much more that will be added to your repetoire through …
I didn't actually read most of this book, so please take this review with a grain of salt. I skimmed through a copy of my colleague's.
I'm an avid supporter of these methods and Hochman's approach to writing instruction, so my review doesn't reflect my belief in the efficacy of these methods. I wish every teacher were well-versed and trained in these methods, and I'm glad that Hochman finally put out something more readable and applicable than the handbook that has traditionally been handed out at her trainings.
There's useful material here, such as the suggestions for implementation for each writing strategy, and the recommended pacing by grade. And there's passages that really do a nice job of articulating why this approach is needed. But if you've otherwise been exposed to the methods via a training before, there's not too much more that will be added to your repetoire through the book. And if you haven't been trained yet, then hopefully this book will whet your appetite for it, because it is worth it.
There's one flaw to Hochman's approach to disseminating her approach to writing, and that is that she seems to have an inordinate amount of hope that a teacher will take her methods and apply them to his or her own classroom curriculum. But the reality is that even a teacher who is deeply committed to these methods will rarely find the time and commitment to do so to the extent it takes to make it effective. It's a big ask for a teacher to do this work on their own.
It really takes a school committed to doing this, with the time and capacity to invest in instilling it into their classrooms and curriculum. Or, it takes a curriculum developer to embed into a curriculum so teachers can then apply it. I was hoping maybe this book would provide more cohesive models in this sense, or suggestions for how a team or school could approach this, rather than the random samples from different content areas to demonstrate each method.
Until teachers can see what this would look like within the lessons they actually teach across a unit of study, across a school year's worth of curriculum, I'm afraid it's just not going to stick. But in the meantime, I'm certainly happy that Hochman is spreading her message and I'm hoping that more people out there who actually work with curriculum will put in the effort to create sentence activities that can be used by others. If you do, share! Developing a great sentence kernel for an activity like sentence expansion or because/but/so is much harder to do well than it looks.
