since there's been some complaints about the quantity of education-related posts, i present a report (written for my masters class) on "my distant teacher," donald graves... (sorry for the formatting issues--blogger cannot seem to double space and indent my paragraphs the way m.s. word does--weak.)
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Since you are able to read and comprehend the words on this page, you implicitly understand the value of the comprehension skills necessary to be a proficient reader. These skills are a prerequisite for making my words and letters comprehensible. Most teachers understand this and work hard to reinforce reading skills with their students. These skills have become an integral part of reading instruction curricula largely due to the fact that so much research exists in this area of literacy (Graves, 2000). But what about the value of being able to actually write comprehensibly?
Given that one cannot practice comprehension skills without words, and words need authors to write them, it would seem reasonable that researchers would have investigated the development of children’s writing as well as reading. But in the 1970’s, student writing was not considered when researchers studied reading. It was a consciousness of this deficit—this neglect of examining student writing—that was the impetus for Donald H. Graves’ doctoral dissertation on children’s writing in 1971 (Graves, 2000).
As a Distinguished Educator, Graves’ work in the area of children’s writing has spanned more than 30 years (Graves, 2002). After receiving his Doctorate from the University of Buffalo, Graves began his career as a Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of New Hampshire in 1973. Soon thereafter Graves’ expertise was sought in Washington D.C. on planning educational research for the 1980’s (Graves, 2000). This led to his study of children’s writing for the Ford Foundation in 1976—which produced Balance the Basics, Let Them Write (1978)—its purpose was to investigate what type of writing was being encouraged in classrooms: “authentic” (student-generated, student-selected) pieces or “fill-in-the-blank” writing (Graves, 1991).
After receiving a grant from the National Institute of Education for a longitudinal study of children’s writing, Graves, Lucy Calkins, and Susan Sowers spent the next six years documenting the developmental stages of children’s writing. This led to the publishing of Graves’ Writing: Teachers and Children at Work in 1983 and many articles in Language Arts (Graves, 2000).
From 1982 until 1988, Graves worked with Jane Hansen (from the reading department of the University of New Hampshire) studying the relationship between reading and writing. Graves’ “The Reading/Writing Teacher’s Companion series… resulted from this work.” For the next several years, Graves began to study the impact of the writer’s portfolio on evaluation, and published Portfolio Portraits in 1992, the year he retired from the University of New Hampshire (Graves, 2000).
This did not stop his publishing career. Originally intending to simply revise and update Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, Graves produced A Fresh Look at Writing in 1994 as a partial rebuttal to critiques of his earlier work (Graves, 2000). Graves (1995) again addressed questions about the validity, value, and logistics of student-centered writing workshops after being bombarded with questions from teachers following speaking engagements around the country.
In 1996 Graves published his first children’s book Baseball, Snakes and Summer Squash: Poems About Growing Up. He has since published How to Catch a Shark and Other Stories About Teaching and Learning (1998) and Bring Life Into Learning (1999). The latter was a response to teachers—with increasingly impacted time schedules—who focused primarily on plot instead of character, ignoring the humanity in literature. “When people are bypassed the children are bypassed and the emotion of learning is often lost.” Graves wrote (2000). Given that “emotion is the engine of our intellect,” Graves (2002) felt plot should be subordinate to character, since characters drive the plot through their actions (Graves, 1991).
Recently Graves (2002) studied the effects of “No Child Left Behind” (and its requisite standardized testing) on classroom teachers’ instruction. While Graves was quick to commend President Bush for addressing public education in his first term of office, he cautioned that measuring progress through standardized testing did not necessarily produce high achievement in students, and he admonished the administration for mistakenly thinking that “a test is good because it is a test.” In other words, testing (or test prep) was not teaching. Increasingly, though, Federal money is being tied to test scores, and more teachers are spending valuable teaching time focusing on test preparation (Graves, 2002).
Instead, teachers should teach reading and writing skills—life skills that encourage long, deep thinking as opposed to the short, “5-meter sprint” of one-answer-only questions found on most standardized tests (Graves, 2002). Only “Long Thinkers,” (like Einstein, Jefferson, and Darwin) have the capacity needed to sustain thought—a requirement for solving the tough problems of Business and Democracy—a necessity for our country to survive. To wit: the strength of our democracy—and indeed, capitalism—is in its ability to innovate, invent, and/or improve solutions to problems, not in finding the One And Only Answer (Graves, 2002).
According to Graves (2002), standardized testing, “conditioned” students to look for that mythical One and Only Answer—with the misguided belief that that was learning—consigning critical and creative thinking to a secondary status. In an interesting proposal, Graves suggested a role reversal: let those who make the tests, take the tests as well! Some parents did take these tests and found more than one answer to some of the problems. Still they received no credit for their ingenuity.
