 
The Problem of Grammar: 
 
A Teacher’s Journey 
 
 
 
 
By 
Sarah Hahn 
 
 
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements 
 
for the Degree of 
 
Master of Arts 
 
in the 
 
English 
 
Program 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY 
 
May 2011 
 
 
 
Signature and Release 
 
 
The Problem of Grammar: 
A Teacher’s Journey 
 
Sarah Hahn 
 
 
I hereby release this thesis to the public. I understand that this thesis will be made 
available from the OhioLINK ETD Center and the Maag Library Circulation Desk for public 
access. I also authorize the University or other individuals to make copies of this thesis 
as needed for scholarly research.
 
 
Signature:   
 Sarah Hahn, Student              Date 
 
 
 
 
Approvals:   
 Dr. Jeffrey Buchanan, Thesis Advisor            Date 
 
 
 
 
 
 Dr. Patricia Hauschildt, Committee Member           Date 
 
 
 
 
 
 Dr. Steven Brown, Committee Member                         Date 
 
 
 
 
 
    Peter J. Kasvinsky, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research      Date
i]]  
 
Abstract 
 Over the years, many teachers have abandoned teaching grammar due to its 
inability to improve student writing. However, students are still being held responsible 
for the knowledge on state tests as well as in college. The problem of how to address 
the growing problem of grammar instruction in a more efficient and effective manner 
has been addressed by experts in the field, Constance Weaver, Jeff Anderson, and Harry 
Noden, who have been touting the benefits of in-context grammar instruction for years. 
In-context grammar instruction means to use student reading and writing to teach the 
conventions of grammar. This study investigates the effects of using this method of 
grammar instruction an inner-city charter school for 7
th
 through 12
th
 grade children with 
ADD, ADHD, and Asperger’s Syndrome. 
 This study used primarily qualitative data to show that students were more 
motivated to write and their attitude toward the act of writing was improved by this 
manner of instruction over the course of a year. In conclusion, while students showed 
minimal improvement in regards to mechanics, their content showed great 
improvement and students were more willing to attempt the process of writing, 
specifically drafting and revision.  More research needs to be done with this method of 
grammar instruction, especially taught by teachers experienced with in-context 
grammar and over a longer period of time, to provide a more definitive answer about its 
effectiveness in teaching grammar. 
i�  
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
CHAPTER 1: THE PROBLEM OF GRAMMAR 1 
CHAPTER 2 : A TEACHER’S JOURNEY 5 
My Call to Action 5 
Supernatural Aid 8 
Crossing the First Threshold 21 
The Belly of the Whale 23 
The Road of Trials 33 
Old Habits as Temptress 72 
The Rest of the Journey 74 
CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS ALONG THE WAY 76 
Student Feeling Toward Writing 76 
Reading Workshop 79 
Motivations for Writing 81 
Change in Quality of Student Writing (Content, Structure, Conventions) 83 
Frustrations to the Process of Research and In-Context Teaching Method 98 
CONCLUSION: THE CHANGING WAY WE TALK ABOUT GRAMMAR 102 
 
  �  
 
APPENDIX A: STUDENT HANDOUTS 107 
Personal Spelling List 107 
Procedures for Independent Word Study 108 
Root Word Reference Sheet 109 
Weekly Root Word Study Worksheet 110 
Word Sort Instructions Handout 111 
APPENDIX B: DATA ANALYSIS 112 
Data Analysis: Procrastination of Grammar Instruction 112 
Data Analysis: Student Grammar Readiness 115 
Data Analysis: Student Eagerness for Approval from the Teacher 119 
APPENDIX C: HUMAN SUBJECTS RESEARCH APPROVAL 121 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 122 
 
 
1 
CHAPTER 1: THE PROBLEM OF GRAMMAR 
In August of 2008, I took the first teaching job that was offered to me: the sole 
English teacher in a small, inner-city, middle and secondary charter school filled with 
ADHD and Asperger’s Syndrome students. I was terrified. I was getting the students that 
couldn’t make it in the nearby city school. I knew I wasn’t prepared, but I didn’t realize 
exactly how unprepared I was until I saw the first pieces of writing. I spent about a 
month working on drafting fractured fairytales with my 7
th
 graders. They liked the unit, 
especially the parts where I read to them or we watched short movies based on original 
fairytales. They were engaged in the process and left my class talking about what they 
had seen and heard. I was excited to see what they would write when given the 
opportunity. After spending about a week talking about plot and teaching the students 
to use a storyline graphic organizer, I asked them to begin writing. The ideas that they 
had placed on their graphic organizers were wonderfully creative. The finished product 
was so awkward that I had a hard time reading even the legible ones. Subjects and verbs 
were disagreeing all over the place and sometimes they were missing completely! 
Adjectives and adverbs appeared in strange places if they appeared at all, and the 
spelling and handwriting were frequently so bad that I spent hours trying to decipher 
one-paragraph essays for 15 students. I immediately decided that they were in need of 
grammar instruction. I spent some time planning an all-intensive traditional drill-and-kill 
direct grammar and mechanics instruction, only to have the students still question what 
a noun was after nine weeks. Failure. During an 11
th
 and 12
th
 grade writing portfolio 
2 
project, I tried teaching grammar and mechanics as I saw the students making mistakes. 
I taught comma usage, dialogue rules and lessons on adjectives. Again, failure. They did 
not do well on state tests, only 30% of them passing the reading and writing portions. 
During my second year of teaching, I tried nothing, attempting the current favored 
method: if-they-read-and-write-enough-they-will-absorb-the-rules. FAILURE. While the 
content was slightly improved, the writing was still awful in regards to mechanics. Not 
only was it difficult to read, but the content was rarely worth fighting for through the 
jungle of sloppy hand-writing. 
My difficulty didn’t rear its ugly head in an unavoidable manner until test prep 
week arrived in March of my second year. Not only did I have a class of 10
th
 graders who 
were depending on me to help them pass the Reading and Writing Ohio Graduation 
Tests, but this was the first year that we had enough 10
th
 graders to qualify for state 
tracking. I had strategies. I taught them about understanding what was being asked and 
then answering completely. I talked about outlines and paragraph formatting, mostly 
stuff we’d covered already, but I told them, no rule breaking this time around. The 
OGT’s don’t like rule breakers. Then I got to the grammar and mechanics portion of the 
writing test. I tried to explain about commas: introductory phrases, appositives, series 
(that one they always get) and nonrestrictive clauses. Only I used identifiers like 
introduction words, renaming words, and unnecessary information. Half nodding and 
half looking forlorn, the kids watched me and waited for the light to dawn. So did I, 
fruitlessly. None of them understood in an authoritative way, not in a way that they 
3 
could point out these things with any consistency. I had hit a brick wall and I saw no way 
around, under or over it. 
Nothing stuck and though for some the writing got a little more creative over 
time, it crashed before it took off, riddled with grammatical error, the kind that detracts 
from meaning and readability. The fact that my students were poor writers, both in 
content and grammar, was my fault. Worse, it was my responsibility to fix it, and I didn’t 
know how. After the test prep fiasco, I just gave up. 
I remember the grammar and mechanics instruction I had as a student: sentence 
diagramming and correct-all grammar exercises out of a book. Based on my own writing 
success, I had always assumed that these activities were effective, until recently, when I 
remembered that I was a fairly proficient writer before the 8
th
 grade. My students are 
not me, though. They come from a background very different from mine. I alternated 
between a small country school and a middle-sized upper-middle class suburban school. 
They go to a poorly-funded city school with no textbooks, in a dangerous neighborhood 
where homeless people frequently wander. I grew up with both parents in a middle 
class neighborhood and many of my students live with grandparents. Some even live in 
institutions or in foster homes. I never wanted for anything. Many of my students wear 
the same clothes day after day, and some only get solid meals while at school. I never 
suffered a day in my life with any sort of learning or behavior issue. All of my students 
have ADD, ADHD or Asperger’s Syndrome. The difference is astronomical. I had an 
easier time becoming a writer than they will. I had advantages. 
4 
I also want things for my students. Besides wanting them to pass standardized 
tests (which reflects well on me, helps me keep my job and helps my school stay open), I 
want them to be able to make it if they choose to go to college. I want them to have an 
outlet for all of the horror that goes on in their lives, from the everyday teenage drama 
that can seem life-altering, to the truly terrible reality that some of them have to live in. 
Lastly, and most importantly, I want my students to become critical thinkers, which I 
believe goes hand in hand with being a writer: observation, reflection, drafting or 
composing, revision or ownership of self, self-editing, and publishing or self-
actualization. I want to prepare them to live life after high school. 
Even after my obvious failures, I blamed grammar for all of its abstract concepts 
that made no sense in the world of my students. I blamed the difficulty of my specific 
student population. I brushed it off. I had every confidence that teaching writing would 
be my strong point. My inability to successfully instruct them in writing effectively, 
especially in grammar, was the dirty little secret that I shoved so deeply into my 
subconscious that I forgot it was there. These were the embarrassing limits of my 
teaching world. 
5 
CHAPTER 2 : A TEACHER’S JOURNEY 
My Call to Action 
I was teaching in a world where my lack of knowledge and experience was 
leading to my own complacency and complete acceptance of the notion that grammar 
instruction was useless. It was the way it was, and there was no way to fix it. I worried 
about other things. I was still interested in teaching writing effectively and focused on 
Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle. I tried to use the cycle to teach the aspects of story 
writing to my students. I was still trying to be a great writing teacher. But in the midst of 
teaching my students about a hero’s call to adventure, the crossing of the first threshold 
and the return journey, my very own call to action appeared to keep me from avoiding 
the problem of grammar for what may have been the rest of my teaching career. It 
swept me out of my complacent approach to grammar instruction and gave me focus. 
The impetus of my journey for effective grammar instruction came during a 
graduate class, “The Teaching of Writing.” Everyone had been assigned a different topic 
from our textbook and was expected to present to the class. My topic? Grammar 
instruction.  
Grammar was the topic that I didn’t want to talk about in a professional manner, 
because I had no right answer. I had already given up. I assumed everyone else had, too. 
The possibility that they were better than me and I was just an embarrassment of an 
English teacher was also a factor. But now, I had to come up with something about 
6 
teaching it. I didn’t know what to focus on. I struggled for weeks to come up with 
something that sounded intelligent. I was still trying to avoid facing my problem. I was 
trying to cover it up so that no one, including myself, would see. I was in a class of other 
English teachers and graduate assistants, not a good place to embarrass myself with the 
truth of my biggest inability as a teacher. 
After a few half-hearted attempts at a serious, scholarly presentation, I 
contemplated the outcome of laying all of my cards on the table. It would be an 
embarrassment, to be sure, but perhaps I could appeal to a roomful of professionals, 
most of whom I had come to respect, for help. I weighed this option against the 
probable chance of appearing a pitiful fake through a presentation on successful 
grammar instruction and set my mind to the task. I began with handing out one of my 
student’s pieces of writing. I asked my peers to pretend that it was a submitted 
assignment for one of their own classes. I asked them to grade for grammar. There was 
an extended period of silence while red pens flicked over pages and my peers struggled 
through the content. After about five minutes, I stopped them and presented the 
following story: 
As a ninth grader, one of my students (we’ll call him Nathan
1
) handed this in, a 
made-for-comic-book short story, GothPig. I spent 
a whole year gaining enough trust to get him to 
just write for me. The product: a modernistic 
Joseph Campbell-esque adventure story about a 
                                                      
1
 Note: All students are referenced by a pseudonym to protect student identities. 
Figure 1: Nathan's Gothpig Illustration 
7 
pierced, black-clad, porcine superhero with his best friend/side kick, Sergeant RedFace. I 
was amazed. Nathan had never written anything so creative. The storyline was 
wonderful and the action was dramatic. The characters were franchise worthy. The 
grammar was awful. It was almost unreadable. I had to have him read it out loud to me 
just so that I could actually grasp the nuances of the story. 
I continued to explain my understanding of my student. If I marked all over his 
paper, I was going to undo a good majority of the trust-building I had done over the 
course of the year. Nathan would see his slaughtered paper as a confirmation of all that 
he suspected was true: he was a terrible writer. He wouldn’t try anymore, and he 
wouldn’t improve. I asked for suggestions. 
The silence astounded me. A tentative hand went up in the back. “I always 
choose one or two frequent errors to mark.” 
 I sighed. “Which ones would you choose in this case?” Silence. Nathan had 
sentence level errors like subject-verb disagreement, his spelling was atrocious, and 
never mind about more refined techniques, like dialogue or comma usage. 
I tried a different approach. “How do you approach grammar instruction in your 
classrooms?” A debate began. It was intense and even got loud at one point. Some were 
proponents of direct drill-and-kill instruction, out of a text and onto paper. Some taught 
a mini-lesson here and there, according to their text books. A few others, like me, had 
reached the defeatist point of hopeless faith in the osmosis strategy: if they saw it 
enough, they would magically get it. Complacency. 
8 
Afterward, I was amazed by how well the discussion had gone, but what had an 
impact on me was the silence. It was the silence in our teaching stories. It was the thing 
we were afraid to talk about, the thing we had no answer for. It was exactly the thing 
we should be talking about. It was my call to action. The following semester, I signed up 
for a grammar class. 
Supernatural Aid 
 I began the grammar class with hopes that it would address how to teach 
grammar. It did not. I learned a lot about the fine intricacies of grammar, but I learned 
nothing about how to teach it. When the time came for the required end-of-semester 
paper, I took advantage of the professor’s open-minded stance on final projects and 
decided to research my new obsession. My paper topic was teaching grammar 
effectively in a secondary classroom. 
After searching for various ideas about teaching grammar effectively, I came up 
with a few articles that touched on different ways to teach grammar. I found some very 
surface level information, to start. I looked at a lot of articles that other teachers wrote 
about teaching grammar and I began to see the history of the problem laid out before 
me. I also began to see an inkling of a solution.  
Grammar instruction dates back to the Middle Ages when it was taught as one of 
three important subjects alongside rhetoric and logic. According to one source,  
“grammar was viewed as the gateway to sacred as well as secular knowledge; 
conscious knowledge of grammar was thought to be a pre-requisite for 
9 
understanding theology and philosophy as well as literature” (Weaver and Bush 
18).  
Later, during the Industrial Revolution, grammar was also viewed as a method for class 
elevation. There were a few books published during the 18
th
 century intended to help 
lower classes increase their manners and income. Because this philosophy on grammar 
pervaded western culture for hundreds of years, grammar was taught as a separate 
subject, even now, though it has all appearances of being taught in a Language Arts 
classroom (Weaver and Bush 18-19). This is the basis for the direct instruction that 
many of us have had during grade school. However, for countless years, the grammar 
instruction pendulum had been swinging between two extremes: traditional direct 
instruction, isolated from writing, and no instruction at all. But which was the better 
option, or was either the better option? In decades past, although not too far past, 
teachers had taught traditional grammar, divorced from writing and reading. It 
consisted of worksheets, grammar textbooks, diagramming sentences and short 
excerpts whose purpose was to point out a single aspect of grammar. I remembered it, 
being a product of that methodology myself. The thing was, after all of this practice, 
multiple studies had shown that student writing hadn’t improved (Weaver and Bush 14-
15). Every English teacher I knew, at least the honest ones, recognized grammar as a 
problem of some sort. Why couldn’t students transfer their very proper and advanced 
grammar training to the page? Perhaps it was a lack of developmental readiness or just 
plain stubbornness. It didn’t matter. The point was that students weren’t able to 
demonstrate the practical application of the grammar that they had learned, which 
10 
implied that they hadn’t learned it to the point of mastery. After a few studies 
appeared, (the first, Research in Written Composition, appearing in 1963) backing up 
what was already obvious in the classroom, many teachers decided to remove the 
instruction of grammar because, in most cases, student writing showed no 
improvement and, in a few cases, their teaching showed a negative effect on writing 
(Braddock). So, what was a modern day teacher of writing with a classroom full of 
struggling and failing writers to do? 
Almost anyone who went to school in the 90’s or earlier knows what traditional 
grammar instruction looks like. Everyone had a grammar workbook, full to bursting with 
exercises and rules and definitions. The teacher diagrammed compound and complex 
sentences on the board and it was like a logic puzzle, where one would try to figure out 
where each word went, enjoyable for some but, like most puzzles, confounding for 
others. Grammar is a very abstract sort of concept and it is difficult for students, 
especially young ones, to grasp it with any clarity. The vocabulary is strange to them. In 
an article from English Journal, Amy Martinson, a substitute teacher and graduate 
student at Northern Arizona University, explained the problem: “students are put off by 
the vocabulary of grammar because it is a ‘metalanguage,’ a language we use to talk 
about language” (124). The succession of definitions and rules would seem meaningless 
and pointless to a struggling student and through personal experience, I understood 
that my struggling students wouldn’t retain anything they found meaningless and 
pointless.  
11 
Coincidentally, at that time, my school was finally able to purchase textbooks for 
our students and so I referenced the new grammar books that accompanied the texts. 
Even today, in a newly published grammar textbook, Writing and Grammar, published 
by Prentice Hall in conjunction with their 11
th
 grade literature series, most of the 
exercises were disconnected from anything related to the literature within the series. 
The examples and excerpts were even further removed from everyday student writing.  
In a unit about infinitives, Writing and Grammar briefly referred to Henry David 
Thoreau’s Walden, a selection within the sister text, and then continued with an 
exercise made of sentences like the following: “The goal of the National Park Service is 
to conserve natural scenery and wildlife” (310). This was not a sentence that today’s 
student would care about beyond completion of the assignment. No wonder this 
practice didn’t show positive results. This sentence was a one-time exercise that would 
not necessarily be repeated in any meaningful way. Prentice Hall, however, made some 
changes, partially embracing the relatively new idea (at least new to me) of teaching 
grammar in the context of student reading and writing. At the end of each section in the 
grammar text, there were “Find it in Your Reading” and “Find it in Your Writing” 
exercises which required the student to look back to previous personal reading or 
writing. 
Many of my early articles referenced three common sources: Constance Weaver, 
Jeff Anderson and Harry Noden. Unfortunately, bookstores and libraries didn’t carry 
many of their works. According to the professionals who made decisions about the 
inventories at these institutions, grammar instruction was not important enough for 
12 
these resources to be readily available for teachers. Or perhaps it was simply that we 
had all given up on the subject. I resorted to Amazon.com®. I quickly ordered Jeff 
Anderson’s and Vicki Spandel’s Mechanically Inclined and Constance Weaver’s and 
Jonathan Bush’s Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing. On my school teacher’s 
budget, Noden would have to wait for a later date. 
Constance Weaver, an expert in the field of teaching grammar, touted the 
benefits of teaching grammar in-context. Jeff Anderson, another teacher and author, 
explained context as meaning (Mechanically 11). I liked this. It implied that we should be 
teaching grammar that meant something, grammar that had a purpose and an effect, 
grammar that made student writing peel itself up off of the page and dance with life. 
Weaver and Bush said that teachers should “empower students to draw on those 
aspects of grammar that will enrich and enhance their writing” (3). Weaver encouraged 
teachers to focus on teaching grammar through student writing and reading in a 
positive, practical and productive manner. What did that mean? In a practical format, it 
meant looking at student writing, teaching a grammar mini-lesson, and then teaching 
the same concept in conjunction with the editing process applied to student writing. It 
meant allowing grammar lessons to be inspired by student need and paying attention to 
student writing enough to know what that need was. Grammar is, simply put, a study of 
language and, while that in itself was an adequate and interesting reason to study it, it is 
not an adequate reason for the adolescent mind to remember it. The human mind 
remembers best through association, and grammar has few associations outside of 
literature and writing, so why would we teach it outside of those contexts? 
13 
What I discovered throughout my initial research was this: Grammar is most 
effective when taught in the context of authentic reading and writing, and in a 
repetitive, recursive and positive manner. It wasn’t an answer to the question of what is 
a teacher to do, but the beginning of a lot more questions. 
My new expert sources explained grammar to me in a new way. Weaver said 
that grammar could be used to enrich and enhance writing when viewed as a variety of 
options, options for “adding detail, structure, voice/style, and fluency” (Weaver and 
Bush 7). Anderson stated that he used “powerful literature and student writing to teach 
the rules of language.” He went on to say that grammar and mechanics are “inherently 
linked to [writer’s] craft, and by making this link, we alter students’ perceptions of what 
mechanics and grammar do” (Anderson and Spandel 10). I began to see grammar in a 
whole new light. Instead of a rigid set of societal rules for writing, grammar became a 
tool for possibility: molding language into images, stories, emotions and memories. It 
was a way to add to writing, an embellishment meant to sprinkle writing with life, or 
maybe a tool to translate life more accurately into writing. My focus was originally to 
improve student writing, and maybe student attitude toward writing as well. I had 
gotten sidetracked in my single-minded quest for effective grammar instruction. Now, 
my primary reason for interest in grammar instruction took root in the soil of what 
effective grammar instruction could do for my students as writers, and it blossomed. 
In one of these early articles that referenced many other authors, I discovered a 
quote by Harry Noden, author of Image Grammar, which I particularly liked:  
14 
I teach grammar because it is the doorway to the human soul. Its intricacies 
trigger our laughter, our tears, our dreams. Grammar is the secret muse of all 
expression, the portrait painter of life’s emotions It allows us to feel the touch of 
a lover's hand on a bridge in Madison County and hear the cracking voice of the 
oldest living confederate widow. It gives poets the syntax to paint brainteasers 
that will delight readers for centuries and helps truck drivers with the "gift of 
blarney" to spin captivating tales for their buddies over a morning cup of coffee. 
Nothing in life is more essential, more sensitive, more intrinsic to the human 
soul. When students come to share this vision, grammar bridges the world of 
living to the world of writing, reading, and speaking. How could we not teach 
grammar (Benjamin 19)? 
Noden appeared throughout both Weaver’s and Anderson’s work. He also focused on 
teaching grammar in-context, but his ideas equated grammar with art, each grammar 
tool a brushstroke in the palette of the writer. He used the most action-packed, verb-
intense sentences to show his students the power of good writing. Grammar was a tool 
belt of possibilities for writers. 
Weaver and Bush went on to say that teachers need to help students, to give 
“conscious attention to grammatical options [. T]heir placement and variation in their 
use will naturally enhance a writer’s sentence sense or what is sometimes called 
‘sentence fluency’” (4). The key word is options. Up until then, I didn’t look at grammar 
as a playbook of options. It was a set of rules. While children require rules, they do not 
inspire creativity or even a willingness to work. While they sometimes give a sense of 
15 
comfort, they also inspire fear, embarrassment, and in a spunky child, a sense of 
rebellion. Martinson says, 
There is a psychology at work here and at the base of it is a child’s fear of 
breaking a rule and receiving a reprimand. In a student’s mind, grammar is a 
win/lose game: If you follow the rules, you win, and if you break the rules, [you 
lose] (Martinsen 124). 
While some thrive on rule breaking, and the best writers do, most of us are fearful of 
breaking any rule that could have consequences attached to it. When it comes to 
grammar, those consequences usually look like a battlefield of red all over a poor and 
beleaguered paper. Anderson remarked that “marking every error is about as much 
good as yelling down a hole” (Mechanically 9). In fact, one of Weaver’s twelve principles 
about the teaching of grammar was that teachers do little good and often a great deal 
of harm by marking all over student papers. She even mentioned an analogy equating 
English teachers to the God from Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 
God!” (37). I’ve done it. I even tried using different colored pens to avoid the stigma of 
the “red pen.” The devastation and very obvious determination to cease trying were the 
same. I felt like an evil and vengeful god. Looking at grammar as a set of rules to be 
followed was the wrong attitude for the teacher and not at all inspirational for the 
student. 
 Grammar should be viewed as a “doorway” into the creative brain of the 
student. Grammar is strongly related to rhetoric, or “convincing an audience to 
do/believe something and engaging them deeply through the use of language and a 
16 
distinctive voice” (Weaver and Bush 3). The rhetoric wouldn’t only affect the reader. 
Grammar could be a way of encouraging students to take more ownership of their own 
writing. When provided with the correct tools, students would be able to see 
themselves in their writing. It would be emboldening for students for whom writing was 
a strange and intimidating thing. If they could write and find themselves there, it would 
no longer be strange and intimidating. Weaver gave an excellent example of enhancing 
a student’s I Am poem through the use of grammar. She began with a metaphor and 
then taught the student to use participial phrases and switch word order, therefore 
increasing detail. Throughout this process, she also improved the student’s confidence 
in his writing ability. (Weaver and Bush 58-62). I began to see the impact of a shift in 
teacher attitude toward grammar. When the teacher saw grammar in such a positive 
and empowering light, students would, too. 
 In addition to the ugly connotation of traditional grammar, some of its tenets 
were ineffective. As previously mentioned, it seemed that a long list of grammar 
vocabulary was not only unnecessary, but harmful, burying kids under a mountain of 
meaningless mess. The experts seemed to concur: minimal grammar vocabulary should 
be used to maximum effect. 
How much Traditional Grammar vocabulary is enough? Weaver defined the basic 
parts of speech and sentences in Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing, as necessary 
for a discussion between teacher and writer about writing improvement. I took all of 
this information and, paired with my own experience as a teacher of inner-city, multi-
level students, decided that the following concepts were important: 
17 
1. Vocabulary and knowledge for all of the parts of speech and what they do. 
2. Vocabulary and knowledge for parts of a sentence and what they do. This is 
necessary to promote the ability and willingness to manipulate sentences and 
sentence parts for stylistic and rhetorical effect. (I agree with Weaver in that 
fewer terms here are better and that “adverbial” and “adjective phrase” will be 
more effective for students than the list of modifiers that can fall under these 
categories.) 
3. Lastly, basic punctuation, including various endpoints, comma and apostrophe 
usage, quotation mark usage, the dash and hyphen and colons and semicolons. 
According my new ideology, now, all I needed was some juicy literature to use as 
models for these concepts. 
 According to Weaver and Bush, “[s]ophisticated grammar is fostered in literacy-
rich and language-rich environments” (27). That meant starting with some luscious and 
sleepless-night-inspiring literature, which does not always translate into the classics or 
even board-approved reading lists. The stories would have to be at the interest and 
instructional level of the students, as well as rich in beautiful language. In another 
source I consulted, one of the few actually available at the bookstore, titled Getting 
Grammar: 150 New Ways to Teach an Old Subject, the authors frequently suggested 
grammar through literacy, with a focus on read-alouds and student selected literature 
(Topping). Many of my students struggle to access texts that are rich with language, but 
this didn’t have to be a barrier. Books on tape or CD or reading aloud are possible 
18 
methods for overcoming this difficulty. Regardless, I had a small and not so happy 
epiphany: comprehension would be an obstacle for my beginning writers. 
Further into my research, I learned that students and teachers should talk about 
what writers do that is effective and why it is effective. The classroom would become a 
thesis panel, critiquing published work, but for the purpose of instruction and simple 
appreciation of beautiful verbal art. It would work like an art appreciation class, 
critiquing technique and stylistic choices, but putting us all right up there, on level with 
the professionals. 
This was one of the most concrete ways that I had ever seen reading and writing 
tied together. I had been told they should be taught hand-in-hand, but no one ever 
explained what that meant. Anderson supported the Writer’s Workshop as an effective 
tool for teaching and applying grammatical options, and, after a little experimentation 
of my own, I began to agree. Anderson started with the Writer’s Notebook, a pleasing 
moniker and one that inspires students to think of themselves as writers, an important 
attitude adjustment. Anderson supported this idea with the thought that  
writers of any age need a safe place to spill themselves onto the page. […] This is 
the repository, the organizer, the placeholder, the idea catcher, the canvas to 
experiment and create on, the place to be wrong and to be wrong boldly. 
(Mechanically 29). 
He included a writing section as the primary part of the notebook but also included a 
mechanics section, a section for striking words and phrases, a “Gems” section (for 
sentences or paragraphs that work) and a section on writing ideas (which incidentally 
19 
meets an Ohio Content Standard) (Mechanically 30-42). To Anderson’s concept of the 
writer’s notebook, I would add Weaver’s Editing Checklist, which is updated by students 
and teacher together after certain grammar concepts are taught or noticed as a specific 
issue within a student’s writing. With all of these ideas, I wondered how to actually 
teach the grammar, especially since I was trying to avoid the stigma of the dreaded 
Traditional Grammar. 
 My new gurus and just about every other expert that I consulted on the topic 
agreed that grammar lessons should be driven by the student. Instead of marking all 
over a student’s page, the teacher should choose one or two key error patterns and 
teach a mini-lesson on those, followed by a re-teaching during the revision and editing 
process. Such instruction would involve examples which should stem from student 
writing or reading. This sounded like a lot of work but if lessons were student driven, 
then some student somewhere had to have made the mistake and such specified 
instruction might actually address the problem effectively. This could, of course, lead to 
those sore feelings I was concerned about with Nathan, but I would offer praise as well. 
Successful grammatical experiments would be offered as examples for other students, 
drawing positive attention to student writers and showcasing strong writing for others. 
These mini-lessons could look like anything from lectures to classroom games, hundreds 
of which were listed all over the internet and in multiple books. Sometimes the lessons 
could include the whole class while other times it might be only one or a few students. 
 This led to a very important part of Weaver’s twelve principles as well as a major 
concern for many teachers: differentiated instruction. Weaver and Bush said that 
20 
“[g]rammar instruction should build on students’ developmental readiness” (31). 
Students in any one given classroom would not be at the same level. This meant that a 
teacher needed to be flexible and willing to meet in groups or individually to be most 
effective. Since I worked in a school that required such strategies, these theories were 
more practical for me than I originally thought. If writer’s workshop was being used, 
other students could be busy with their own work, enabling me to teach specialized 
mini-lessons. 
 The last consideration of this practical look at teaching grammar in-context was 
grading. How would my students be graded if I didn’t mark up their paper? The 
grammar-in-context gurus shouted for writing portfolios, which are wonderful, but still 
need graded, eventually. In addition to other considerations like organization, and 
adherence to and completion of the prompt, most rubrics for writing assignments 
tended to allot ten to fifteen percent of the total score for grammar and other 
conventions. So, how did that ten to fifteen percent get graded? Holistically. Were there 
only a few mistakes that didn’t detract from the coherence of the paper? Then, full 
points. Were there more mistakes, noticeable but not problematic for the reader? Take 
off a third of the grammar points. Were the mistakes very noticeable, detracting 
attention from the main idea of the paper? Another third. Was a translator needed in 
order to understand what the writer was trying to say? Zero points awarded. This was 
not an intimidating red-scrawled paper. The teacher could put a few kindly jotted notes 
about repeated mistakes and write off the rest as a one- or two-time error. This would 
ostensibly result in the student being corrected, their self-confidence intact, and the 
21 
student-teacher relationship would not be beaten to a pulp. A good day for any English 
teacher. 
While I was aware that many people were aware of all of the information I 
found, I was not aware and the research, though very time consuming (people write an 
awful lot about writing), became pedagogy-changing for me. I had already implemented 
a few of the ideas into my classroom and couldn’t wait until the next year to implement 
even more. I began to understand how it all might work, and I began to understand 
what “in-context” meant. I had found my muses. 
Crossing the First Threshold 
Summer came, and along with it ample time to research. I read through multiple 
works voraciously. I started with Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle, searching for a way to 
implement in-context instruction into my classroom. She was mentioned in much of my 
early research and I had also heard about her throughout my undergraduate studies. I 
also reviewed a few works of Tom Romano and Ralph Fletcher. I read through my 
sources and made notes in a notebook. I listed lessons that I thought I would need to 
teach in order to move toward effective grammar instruction. I also reviewed the 
various methods from the sources and compared their methodologies so that I could 
pinpoint similarities and differences and be sure to test them within the classroom. 
Reading and writing workshop seemed a viable option, especially since 
differentiation was pretty much the only path that might lead in a forward direction for 
my particular classroom. I spent hours poring through Atwell’s book, taking copious 
22 
notes and making lists of much needed supplies. The imaginary classroom that I kept in 
my mind began to look like a different place. 
This research went much like all of the previous text-based research I had 
conducted throughout my academic career. I learned a lot of surface level knowledge 
here, nothing very personal. I discovered what I thought to be a very logical and 
student-based manner of teaching writing. I made connections between the texts and 
began to get a bigger and more detailed view of the concept of in-context grammar 
instruction. I began to visualize how this would look in my classroom. I also ran to the 
store and spent a lot of money on resources I hadn’t previously thought to use: scissors, 
stationary, glue sticks, folders, markers and pens of different colors, highlighters, etc. I 
began to plan for instruction under this new concept. It was very time-consuming and 
very expensive. 
In addition to my plan to implement in-context grammar instruction in my 
classroom as a way of improving student writing overall, the need to choose a Master’s 
thesis topic became pressing. In the previous spring, I had heard about an educational 
research class that would begin in the summer semester and carry through the fall 
semester, focusing on research within the classroom. The topic was negotiable and 
effective grammar instruction was a solid choice. I signed up, hoping that I would be 
able to form a thesis out of the research that I did within my own classroom. The idea of 
grammar instruction as a pathway to inspired writing had already overtaken my 
professional life. Why not make something lasting out of it? I had taken the first 
23 
irrevocable step onto the difficult and less traveled path of the teacher-researcher. 
There was no going back. 
The Belly of the Whale 
I had some adjustments to make, especially in regards to the idea of research. 
Before I began to understand what teacher research truly was, I thought of research as 
the heavy dullness of an almost deep sleep, at least in the front of my mind where I 
considered it. Research was what I thought scientists did and not teachers. Teachers 
learned and taught. We learned what and how we had to teach and, maybe if we were 
good teachers, we learned a little extra for ourselves. Without a doubt, I viewed my life 
as a teacher as having a lifelong learning requirement and I thought all teachers should 
feel the same but I never thought about any of the things that I did as research. But the 
more I thought about it, the more I considered the excitement I felt when I got a new 
idea about teaching, when a new unit sprung into being in my head and I had to use 
books, the internet or other sources to plan. Of course, the energy of the idea fizzled out 
about half way through and I was left trudging my way through the rest of the unit that I 
didn’t plan as well as the beginning. The problem was that I never began soon enough. I 
began planning as soon as it occurred to me that my present unit was about to end. 
Without fail, I was suddenly implementing a half-cocked plan of action and once I got 
into it, it was difficult to muster the energy to finish researching and planning with any 
passion. So, in a way, research, in regards to teaching, was a way in which I frequently 
24 
disappointed myself and a spotlight on one of my biggest character flaws: my struggle to 
finish anything as strongly as I began it. 
 For the past two years, my school had been involved in a program focused on 
differentiating learning through the Ohio State Academic Standards. Last year, we 
focused more on pre-assessments and how we could design instruction based on those 
pre-assessments, given weeks in advance, of course (which I never managed). So pre-
assessments had become a sort of research. They were not as easy as they seemed. 
Trying to test a few topics at multiple levels without overtaxing the student or myself 
was a daunting task. My educational research experience, at that time, consisted mostly 
of the art of constructing effective multi-level pre-assessment. 
 Research, for me, had come to mean boredom, learning, struggle and work and 
work and work. I had gone through six years of undergraduate studies, two years of 
teaching and two years of graduate studies worth of research papers. Needless to say, 
when I heard about the premise of the educational research class, I was at first 
intimidated by the amount of work sure to follow, but I was willing to try it. After 
teaching another year and struggling to figure out my classroom in a deep and 
comprehensive way, it started to sound like a great idea. I was especially excited to see 
students who few people expected much from become great at reading or writing 
because I had managed to create or adopt some useful theories and put them into 
practice. 
 I began to learn about teacher researching, a new concept for me, through 
articles assigned in class and discussions during class. A particular article, “Addressing 
25 
the Problem of Elsewhereness: A Case for Action Research in Schools” by Garth Boomer, 
made me think of research in a whole new way. My favorite thing about the Boomer 
article was the concept of research as a teaching method. I knew that English teachers 
were notorious for their research papers and that science teachers had science fairs, 
which involved some amount of research but I didn’t think we used research as a format 
for lessons often enough. 
 My classroom was student driven in many ways. I asked questions like, what can 
they handle? What will they get into? I asked myself those questions all the time and I 
frequently acted on the answers, but a true student driven classroom went beyond 
these things and got the students interested in how they learned. I thought it would be 
interesting to give a struggling reader a few pages from Kylene Beers’ book. I wondered 
what would happen. It might be a great way to get kids involved in their own learning, 
to get them to own it, as Boomer liked to say. While I appreciated the tidbits I gathered 
from my readings, overall, the discussions we had in class affected me more, with the 
exception of research as a teaching method courtesy of Boomer.  
I quickly learned and assimilated a new way of thinking about my classroom. Not 
only was I going to change my entire curriculum, but also my style of instruction. And 
not only was I going to change, I was going to observe the changes and their results, and 
I was going to change again, as needed, and observe those results. As a fledgling 
teacher-researcher, I knew that I would never view myself as an effective teacher again 
if I ever stopped observing and changing in the attempt to better my teaching. My brain 
was overwhelmed by the amount of work that stretched out before me. In my own 
26 
typical fashion, I shrugged my shoulders at the inevitability of it all and started on the 
first small steps. 
As summer continued and I learned about teacher research, I continued my 
personal research as well. One of my classmates from the teacher research class 
mentioned that a local educational service center sponsored quite a few summer 
seminars on various topics of interest to local teachers. In fact, she told me, in a few 
weeks, they would be sponsoring a seminar on the very topic of teaching grammar in-
context. Four of us, all English teachers from the class, attended the seminar titled “The 
Craft of Grammar: Integrated Instruction in Writer’s Workshop.” It was run by Terry 
Murcko, a local veteran high school English teacher who had recently been introduced 
to Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined. He was familiar with Harry Noden and 
referenced him as well. It was auspicious, almost as if fate had set me on this path. I got 
to see what in-context instruction might look like. He modeled Anderson’s lessons and 
sprinkled the two-day seminar with a little Noden for perspective. I saw a practical 
application of what I wanted to do and, amazingly, I thought it might work! I was pretty 
sure before but I didn’t know what it was going to look like or how well it would work 
across the grade levels. At the workshop, I witnessed a bunch of teachers use it and like 
it. I was excited, not so much for the improved outlook on my research project but for 
the improved outlook on my students’ writing. I saw improved grammar usage in their 
futures as well as improved creativity and, if I was lucky, an increased love for writing. 
Writing in Miss Hahn’s class in the next year might just be fun, an exciting thought. 
27 
 I still had a few questions about how I would implement it. How often should I 
ask them to write? Every day? This would have been ideal but I didn’t want to set them 
up for failure due to burn-out. Also, how much work was this going to make for me, 
seeing as I had to differentiate at three different levels within a given class? I worried. I 
decided that I would begin my own writer’s notebook for three reasons. 
1. I would write every day to see how awful it would be. 
2. I would have something to show my students as an example, an inspiration, a 
realization that I am in the boat with them. 
3. I would have a truer picture of what a writer’s notebook should look like and 
hopefully have less struggle of my own, independent of theirs. 
I also felt the need to be more selective of the literature we read in my classes. I wanted 
some stuff with powerful language in it. Great mentor texts. I knew that I would use 
things that I was reading and hopefully things that they were reading but I thought it 
would be useful to have go-to texts that we were reading or had already read as a class. 
I was finding new uses for literature in my class and this was what I had believed all 
along: reading and writing as mirrored images of each other, twins, one projective and 
one receptive. And now I had a practical and fun way to show this to my students. 
Excitement was mounting and suddenly summer didn’t seem long enough for 
planning but too long for my anticipation. I still wanted to cement some great methods 
of teaching grammar. I ordered Noden’s Image Grammar and another book called The 
Chortling Bard, which used Shakespeare as a mentor text for grammar instruction. I 
wanted to look more into grammar as rhetoric for my older students and I wanted to 
28 
get sentence strips, which I previously thought were too elementary, and butcher paper 
and markers and find places in my room to treasure my students’ artful language. I was 
excited about my work and I WAS NOT AFRAID TO ADMIT IT!! I was ready to enjoy 
learning to teach writing well! 
I began to understand how these in-context lessons might affect student writing 
as well as student attitude toward writing. My attitude was changed and my excitement 
tangible. The lessons in Weaver’s, Anderson’s and Noden’s books were beautifully 
crafted and fun. They made writing seem like the magic that I had always thought it was, 
and what kid, no matter their age, doesn’t like magic? My thesis began to take shape in 
my mind. 
I began to wonder if student writing would actually improve, particularly 
grammar and mechanics, if I used grammar as a key to open the door of writing into a 
world where my stunted students would be inspired and able to let flow the creativity I 
saw within them.  After having crossed that threshold into Atwell’s, Anderson’s, and 
Weaver’s domain, I almost needed to try it: teaching grammar in-context. Utilizing the 
writer's notebook and workshop, as put forth by Atwell, Anderson, Ralph Fletcher, and 
Katie Wood Ray, to name a few, seemed to be the most practical approach and a great 
framework to give guidance during the coming madness. 
I then had to consider: What exactly was I looking for? I needed to define for 
myself what constituted grammar and mechanics. It seemed that different professionals 
had different ideas about what was encompassed in such topics. I decided to consult 
29 
one of my new muses. Anderson provided a nice definition that I found I could agree 
with and understand: 
Grammar includes all the principles that guide the structure of sentences and 
paragraphs: syntax–the flow of language; usage—how we use words in different 
situations; and rules—predetermined boundaries and patterns that govern 
language in a particular society. Mechanics, on the other hand, are ways we 
punctuate whatever we are trying to say in our writing: punctuation, 
capitalization, paragraphing, formatting. (Mechanically 5) 
These structures and rules and punctuation were all tools that I wanted to provide to 
my students to help them improve their writing. But what would signify improvement? 
The most obvious and quantitative way to track improvement would be a diminishment 
in student errors. But I also wanted to see my students making stylistic choices. This 
reflected back on both the grammar and mechanics definitions that Anderson gave. 
Weaver and Bush said, “Style […] often refers to specific choices a writer makes to 
create voice” (239). Voice is the attitude a writer takes within their writing. As English 
teachers, we talk about mood and tone within the literature we read. But we rarely 
teach our students how to successfully accomplish these things within their own writing. 
As a reader, style is called mood and tone. As a writer, it is called voice. Voice, it seems, 
is inexorably linked to grammar employed as a rhetorical tool. It’s tough to teach 
because it is such an ephemeral and individualistic concept. According to Rhetorical 
Grammar by Martha Kolln, “Style is […] used in connection with variations in sentence 
structure, with structural and punctuation choices that writer[s] can use to [their] 
30 
advantage” (183). If students are making stylistic choices, those choices should be 
evident within their writing and also during the writing process. Such stylistic choices by 
students would demonstrate that they had enough knowledge of grammatical 
constructs to play with language. 
After figuring out just what it was that I wanted to accomplish, it became 
important to fine tune my methodology: in-context. Just what did in-context look like? 
An ever-shifting pedagogical approach for students and teachers fashioned of student 
need, student-loved literature, and teacher and student writing. It is well-crafted 
sentences from much-loved stories to show writing as the art and skill that it is. It is a 
student who wants to make his writing wonderful, discovering an error that he cares to 
correct. It is a teacher who sees a pattern of errors in her students and molds the 
learning of a rule into a game or activity suited for her students and then sets them to 
the task of de-burring that mistake from their writing, to form a more polished product. 
In-context instruction is taking the very stuff of specific student minds and molding it 
into grammar lessons that come from them and speak their language, meet their needs 
and take root in their writing. I had a few ideas about what categories I wanted to focus 
on and formulated a few questions in addition to my main question to further structure 
my research: 
 
 
a. How will it affect student feeling toward writing? 
b. What other motivations might be involved? 
Research Question: 
How will literacy-rich, in-context grammar instruction affect student writing? 
31 
c. What format/structure of lesson works best? 
d. How will the quality of student writing, including content, structure and 
conventions change? 
e. What frustrates the process? 
In order to ensure that I was focusing appropriately on each category, I further defined 
them for myself as such: 
A. Student Feeling Toward Writing 
I think that the way a student feels about writing will make him or her inclined to 
write more or less. The more a student likes to write, the more they will write. 
This is important for many reasons:  
1. Students need to have fodder for grammar lessons. 
2. Students need to care about their writing in order to care about 
improving it grammatically. 
3. This research will require a lot of writing, which could discourage 
students from enjoying the class and its content over the course of 
this research. It could adversely affect any results. 
I need to monitor the students’ general feeling about writing over the course of 
this study to see how it effects and is affected by grammar instruction. 
B. Motivations for Writing 
Motivation for writing is important to this study because I need to get students 
writing, and if I can discover what will inspire them to write, I can use that to 
32 
help them along. I want to monitor student motivations as I continue along and 
then try to re-create those motivations as best I can in the classroom. 
C. Lesson Format/Structure and Effect on Learning 
Part of this study is to discover what sort of in-context lessons will have the best 
effect on the students’ writing. I will try different formats over the course of the 
study and mark what effect it seems to have on learning, behavior and writing. 
Formats will include lessons before writing occurs, lessons during the writing 
process, based on student need, and lessons taught after writing, that allows 
students to go back into their writing and make corrections. Also, some lessons 
will be based in literature and others will be based on student writing. 
D. Change in Quality of Student Writing (Content, Structure, Conventions) 
I hope to see a change in student writing over the course of the study. I am too 
realistic to think that it will be positive across the board, but I want a good look 
at each of these areas. It would not be much use if I managed to improve 
conventions and mechanics but ruined the content of the writing. All of these 
areas are important parts of writing and should be monitored and controlled as 
much as possible. 
E. Frustrations to the Process of Research 
Frustrations are to be avoided, but they need to be monitored so that I can 
analyze the best way to avoid or address them. There are always frustrations to 
the learning process in any classroom. By being aware and searching them out, I 
hope to minimize them before they cause serious issue. 
33 
At this point, I was an entirely different person. I understood that teachers were 
supposed to reflect on their professional practices. And I had. I thought about what I 
would do again and what had failed miserably. I thought about how to improve lessons 
and how to get around obstacles to my teaching. I was definitely a thinker. But I became 
a more purposeful thinker. I planned with intention and I knew that what I planned 
would require close observation and the willingness to make changes, and more 
importantly, the willingness to admit that I was a far from perfect teacher. I needed to 
maintain my focus throughout until the end of my study to see where it would lead. 
Because I was deliberately planning, observing and recording, I had more reason to pay 
attention. I was going to dig out the dirty little secrets I had shoved down into my 
subconscious and give voice to that silence in my teaching stories, and to the silence 
that descended when I asked for suggestions for dealing with a budding and fragile 
student writer. 
The Road of Trials 
 At this stage in my journey, I only had to implement all of these great ideas into 
my classroom. I was prepared. I had packed my teacher adventuring bag with loads of 
research, discussion with other professionals, past experience, and a huge ration of 
optimism. I stood on the beginning of what looked to be a smooth and winding road 
with beautiful vistas, frequent rest areas and plenty of possibility for success just over 
the hill. What I didn’t see was the nearly impassable canyon just on the other side of 
that hill, between me and the promise land. 
34 
 I needed structure and tools not only to assist my students and me in teaching 
and learning but also to assist me in gathering data for my research. I followed the 
guidelines set out for me in my educational research class, trusting in the wisdom and 
knowledge of those who had tried this type of thing before. I used my professor’s 
recommendations for tracking and gathering data, and implemented a few of my own 
ideas, specific to my study. 
Reading and Writing Survey 
 During the first week of classes, I gave my students a reading and writing survey 
based on Nancie Atwell’s suggestions from In the Middle. I gave it over the course of 
two separate days. One day was the reading survey and another day was the writing 
survey. These surveys were intended to gage the initial feelings of students on the 
topics of reading and writing. I wanted a baseline for my study, to enable me to judge 
later on if there had been a change. 
 I wanted to know if my students considered themselves writers. I wanted to 
know what kinds of writing they liked to do, how often they wrote, and what inspired 
them to write. I asked them what good writing was. They did not have the vocabulary or 
experience to answer. They were shocked when I asked them if they were writers. Most 
of them thought a writer was someone that published books. Most of them hadn’t 
written all summer, and if they were honest about anything, it was that they didn’t like 
any kind of writing. Poetry was the second most popular genre for student writing 
35 
preference. The most popular answer for writing inspiration was “because the teacher 
tells me to.” 
 The reading survey was a little better. Many students admitted to having a 
number of books in their house and even more admitted to reading during the summer. 
Some of these students later admitted to lying on the survey about the amount that 
they read, in order to make a better impression on me. There were also quite a few 
students who readily admitted that they did not read at all. Many couldn’t verbalize 
how they chose books to read, and I got one word answers for how they felt about 
reading in general. 
 The survey was not as useful as I had hoped it would be. I didn’t end up using it. I 
knew there was a risk of students answering the survey with the intention of making a 
good impression, but I thought that I could minimize that by telling them that it didn’t 
matter what they put on it because I was merely trying to gage what they felt and 
wouldn’t judge them based on it. The best information that I got from it were the 
questions asked and explanations needed in order for them to even complete it. From 
this reaction, I began to understand the current student attitude toward writing and 
reading. It was disdain, ignorance, disinterest and maybe even a little hate. One of my 
main interests was student attitude toward writing. I needed to turn this negative 
attitude around. 
36 
My Teacher’s Journal 
I began the school year with a teacher’s journal. Since much of my research was 
qualitative, I needed as many ways to document what was going on in my classroom as 
possible. As soon as the first class period on the first day was over, I began writing down 
ideas in a notebook. I kept one side for straight facts about what was going on in the 
classroom and one side for my observations and feelings about what was going on. I 
kept up the writing for about two weeks before it got tedious to try and write 
everything down. After that, I switched to typing my journals into my laptop, which I left 
on my desk during the day. I tried to be sure to make an entry after each class that I 
taught, to keep the observations fresh in my mind. I used codes for each student and 
tried to reference events that seemed important as well as what sort of activity we did 
that day. 
The typed journal seemed to flow a little better, but I also quit separating my 
observations from my feelings. It was easier to get more out. Then, disaster struck. After 
two weeks of journaling on my laptop and saving it to a flash drive, my flash drive was 
stolen out of my classroom. Unfortunately, I hadn’t backed up anything that was on it 
and so I was out of two weeks of journaling. Luckily, after that, I had no more mishaps, 
at least of that variety. 
I did, however, find it difficult to journal every day. Things kept coming up; I had 
other things I had to do. I didn’t have the time I needed when I needed it. Sometimes, I 
journaled at the end of the day or at home. The entries that I entered right away were 
much more detailed and more enjoyable when I went to reread them later. Some of the 
37 
entries were dismally short. It also felt as if I didn’t get the great data that I should have 
been getting, as if I were missing details that might be important later. Instead, for some 
days, I only had a very brief summary of what occurred in class that day, with a few 
notes if anything outside of the ordinary happened. I didn’t jot down as many student 
comments as I wanted to. 
I started out excited about the journaling process and determined to do it well. 
My expectations in this area were too high and I was disappointed in myself. However, 
over time, I began to see a much deeper purpose than I had originally. I had initially 
thought to look over my activities and thoughts at a later date so as not to make the 
same mistakes. Instead, I found patterns in my thinking that enabled me to make 
corrections in the midst of the process that I may not have otherwise thought to make. 
The journal allowed me a bird’s eye view of my classroom that I wouldn’t otherwise 
have had, both because it gave me more detailed information over a greater period of 
time than my memory would have, and because I was forced to think more reflectively 
about what was going on in order to write about it every day. 
The Writer’s Notebook (The Dreaded Binder) 
 After the first week or so of school, I wanted to get into the routines that I hoped 
to establish throughout the school year. I began with the writer’s notebook. Anderson 
and Spandel devoted almost an entire chapter to preparing and using a writer’s 
notebook. I took their ideas and altered them to fit my needs before I tried them out on 
38 
the students. I should have just followed their suggestions and then made changes after 
we got started. I got myself into a list of troubles. 
Anderson suggested purchasing composition notebooks for each student 
(Anderson and Spandel 29). Instead, my hyper organized brain, seeing the need for 
more structure than a single notebook could provide, decided that one-inch binders 
with section dividers would be a better idea. I worried that my students, notorious for 
disorganization, irresponsibility, and destruction, would not fare well with only a flimsy 
notebook to hold the fodder for their precious writing and my precious study. I decided 
that binders were sturdier, could hold more, and were more flexible than a notebook. 
What a mistake! 
We spent weeks trying to tame the wild binders! First it was making sure that 
each student had one. I had to battle our dragon of a secretary, guarding her hoard of 
office and school supplies, and sneak some binders from the book closet. I handed them 
to students slyly in the hallways or in the morning, before school. I had to avoid causing 
embarrassment to those who were too poor to afford one, or whose parents refused to 
purchase them. I also had to avoid getting caught by the secretary with the stolen 
goods. Once the majority of my students were in the possession of a binder, I then had 
to address the issue of where to store them. Sixty binders (some were not one-inch, but 
four) take up a lot of room. The students didn’t have lockers and even if they had, I 
wouldn’t let them take the binders out of the classroom. I wouldn’t see the majority of 
them ever again! I also had to figure out how to create dividers within the binder for 
each of the sections. I decided on woefully flimsy construction paper and hole-punch 
39 
protectors. They still fell out, ripped or mysteriously disappeared. By the second week of 
September, my teacher journal consistently reflected the chaos and frustration caused 
by the binders: 
9/13/10: “Asked them to mark their binders. Chaos.” 
9/14/10: “Binders, chaos again.” 
9/15/10: “Got through binders with only seven minutes to spare.” 
I eventually stored them in milk crates at the front of my classroom and had a student 
immediately pass them out on days when we needed them. This cut down on some of 
the chaos, but there were so many other problems that this one kind of fell into the 
background. 
Reading Workshop 
 There was one major change in my classroom that not only took the students 
time to get used to and implement, but took up almost one whole class period a week: 
independent reading. Atwell and Weaver both strongly supported the idea that 
exposure to good literature was key to creating better writers. While I would definitely 
use a plethora of awesome literary examples during my teaching, it wouldn’t be enough. 
They had to be reading on their own. I decided to use the model of the reading 
workshop described by Atwell in In the Middle. Not wanting to cause apoplexy in the 
student body, I asked them to read fifty pages a week, including one-half hour of silent 
reading time on Fridays. I was giving up almost an entire period to silent reading! It hurt. 
I was going to offer credit for the time spent by way of a conference, during silent 
40 
reading, wherein I could talk to the students about what they were reading, keep a 
finger on interests and effort, and generally get to know my students better. I didn’t 
have enough time to begin with, but I knew that this was important, especially for my 
reluctant and struggling readers. I brought a majority of my own young adult novels in 
to create a classroom library and instituted a Scholastic program to allow students as 
much diversity in their reading as possible. Our school had a library, but it was woefully 
insufficient for a school of learning diverse teens. I pilfered what I could and started 
buying when I had the funds. I spent a lot of time helping students find books that I 
hoped would suck them into what I jokingly referred to as “the dark side” of book 
lovers. The difficulty was compounded by students who were at the maturity level of a 
teenager, but at the reading level of a primary student. They were often embarrassed to 
be seen with a “kid book.” Graphic novels were suddenly all the rage and we couldn’t 
keep them on the shelves. I talked certain struggling students into reading even 
Shakespeare through the venue of graphic novels. 
While the time was certainly an issue, this was one of the most worthwhile 
activities that I implemented. On September 10
th
, the day that I explained reading 
workshop and introduced the students to their new library, my journal entry reflected 
the excitement that the students felt about reading workshop. I wrote “They were really 
excited to read, and after they picked out their books and filled out the class log and 
personal log, they all started reading on their own.” I had the same class later in the day 
for a social skills lesson and they repeatedly asked if they could use the time to read 
instead! I was shocked. Who knew? My kids were suddenly excited about reading! It 
41 
wasn’t long before I had other teachers complaining to me about kids reading during 
their classes. I know I shouldn’t have, but I laughed. I was giddy with this small piece of 
success. Of course, not all of the students invested fully in this aspect of class, but it was 
certainly a majority, and many of those who weren’t fully invested, were at least 
reading, whereas before, they only read when we were reading a piece of literature in 
class. However much I may have struggled with reading workshop, it was nothing 
compared to the struggles the students and I had with writing workshop. 
Writing Workshop 
Writing workshop, once somewhat understood, consisted of a variety of 
activities available to students. The activities consisted of: 
1. Freewriting 
2. Revisiting/revising/editing old pieces of writing 
3. Peer conferencing after filling out a form 
4. Publishing 
5. Reading/researching within a genre 
6. Teacher initiated conferences at least once a week 
This was a struggle for them, and for me. The students were trying to figure out what to 
do with all of the freedom. They were not used to being given time to make choices and 
do as they pleased. They were making choices but the consequences were rarely what 
they planned on. They chose to talk but not conference. When they did choose to 
conference, they didn’t ask for specific help from their peers. Revision time was 
practically non-existent. Editing only happened when they were conferencing with a 
42 
teacher. It took a lot of behavior management from our teaching staff in the room to get 
this to run smoothly enough to consider it useful. 
A Week in the Life 
After I got through the initial set up of the classroom and attempted to cement 
some rituals into place, I began with a very definite plan for a schedule: 
Monday: Grammar or genre lesson introduction or reinforcement including 
notes and activity and about 10 minutes to attempt the concept 
then share 
Tuesday: 20 minutes for word study activities including teacher 
conferencing with students to monitor activities and 15-20 
minutes of writing workshop while teacher conferences 
individually with students with optional 5 minutes of sharing time 
at the end of the period 
Wednesday: Literary selection connected to genre or grammatical convention 
and occasionally time for writing workshop 
Thursday: 20 minutes for word study activities including teacher 
conferencing with students to monitor activities and 15-20 
minutes of writing workshop while teacher conferences 
individually with students with optional 5 minutes of sharing time 
at the end of the period 
43 
Friday: Teacher reads a selection and introduces or reinforces a 
comprehension strategy, then independent reading time while 
teacher conferences with students on their reading 
 It was difficult to maintain this schedule all of the time. Besides the normal 
distractions of the school day, my students frequently take twice as long to perform a 
task as a normal student and so sometimes we got a day or two behind. However, with 
the exception of Friday independent reading time, which was a constant as long as we 
had school on Friday, we maintained this pattern as best we could. I eventually made a 
few changes, which I mention below. 
Word Studies 
Before I even began, I knew that spelling was a huge problem across all of my 
classes, and the problem was so diverse in each class that I needed something flexible 
yet easily managed. Since part of my intent was to reduce grammatical errors, I needed 
to address this issue and in a way that met my “in-context” criteria. Atwell included 
detailed instructions on weekly independent word studies (196-201). I decided to 
implement her idea, as is, into my classroom. We started with 20 minutes each on 
Tuesdays and Thursdays to choose words, find definitions, antonyms and synonyms, and 
draft original sentences utilizing the words. . I adapted her procedures in order to be 
sure they were as clear as possible for my students. I provided each student with a 
Personal Spelling List, adapted from Atwell (501), and within their writer’s notebooks, 
they kept a vocabulary or cool word section, based on Anderson’s and Spandel’s 
44 
“Author’s Word and Phrase Palette”(39). They were also given a handout to explain how 
word studies were to operate. (See Appendix A for these handouts.) 
 This went well, at first. Assisted by the teachers in the room, each student came 
up with an initial list of words to add to their Personal Spelling List and vocabulary 
section of their writer’s notebook. For the students who struggled with reading and 
writing, we focused on Atwell’s suggestion for “Personal Survival Words,” including 
words like parents’ and grandparents’ names, street names, towns, months, teacher’s 
names, etc. For more advanced students, we included Atwell’s “Demon” words, or 
words most people tend to misspell, like a lot, separate, unnecessary, beautiful and 
definitely. After this initial assistance, though, students were expected to add to their 
own lists with words they were unsure of while they were writing or words that the 
teacher marked as misspelled during editing conferences. This is where the system 
began to fall apart. 
Between the reading workshop, word studies, grammar lessons and other daily 
goings-on, we didn’t have much time for writing and editing. The students didn’t add 
much to their word lists. The result was that the weekly word study was reduced to 
ridiculousness. Words like fudge, nightjar, cougar and dumb began to appear on the 
word lists of the students who were advanced spellers, and words like the, and, who 
and where appeared on lists of less advanced spellers. When I noticed this trend while 
grading the weekly spelling tests, I conferenced with each class, re-emphasized the 
purpose and importance of the word studies and tried again. When students got stuck 
and couldn’t come up with any words, they had teacher assistance. We still had a 
45 
number of students who never asked for help but used words I had no doubt they 
already knew how to spell. I thought a more systematic and structured approach might 
be more appropriate. 
While perusing my options at the bookstore, I came across a program that 
looked like it might be a good fit. It was titled Small-Group Reading Instruction: A 
Differentiated Teaching Model for Beginning and Struggling Readers, by Beverly Tyner. It 
featured a list of roots that could be used to focus spelling instruction. I created 
worksheets for the students that had about 20 roots on it. The students were asked to 
choose one root per week and find five words that featured that root. They would then 
be expected to look up the words in the dictionary, find the definition and create a 
sentence correctly using the new word. I even created a tree graphic organizer for them 
to use each week. (See Appendix A for both of these handouts.) This seemed to make 
the activity more controlled and purposeful, but I lost some of my “in-context” 
requirement. Because of the lack of direct correlation to student reading and writing, it 
wasn’t overly effective in decreasing spelling errors. 
Eventually, time took its toll and we had other things we had to focus on, like 
actual drafting and reading literature and OGT test preparations. Word studies were the 
first thing to go. They were very time consuming and I didn’t see much decrease in 
spelling error throughout student writing. I actually got so frustrated with the amount of 
time and lack of progress that I conferenced with my oldest class on it and we 
attempted to come up with a solution together. I wrote a memo on it in order to think 
46 
about it more reflectively. With a little hindsight, I can see the value in such activities, 
but I needed to find a more streamlined and efficient manner of accomplishing them. 
I did maintain the word studies in my 8
th
 grade class, where my most atrocious 
spellers existed. But once again, I shifted the focus. I found yet another program to 
adopt. The book titled Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and 
Spelling Instruction by a panel of authors focused on word sorts and offered a pre-
assessment that showed exactly where a student had issues. I gave each of my 8
th
 
graders the pre-assessment and grouped them according to the results. I then provided 
them with flash cards each week focusing on their problem areas. I also gave them new 
word study notebooks with instructions pasted directly on the front of each. (See 
Appendix A for the instructions.) Some examples of the problem areas were long vowel 
patterns, diphthongs, assimilated prefixes and complex consonants. There was 
something for everyone and the physicality of the word sorts, cutting, sorting, and 
copying, seemed to engage them on a whole new level. We spent quite a few weeks 
trying to get it right and we are still fine-tuning. One of the requirements of this 
particular word study is that the students observe and notice the spelling rules on their 
own. It may not be entirely in the context of their writing, but it addresses their 
particular problems with frequently used words and it encourages them to be 
responsible for their own learning (Bear.) I have no definitive results for this approach as 
of yet. 
47 
Grammar Lessons in the Classroom 
I spent a lot of time analyzing the formatting of the lessons put forth by 
Anderson, Weaver and Noden. I outlined each author’s general lesson format and 
compared the benefits and risks of each. Below are my general outlines for each author 
and my notes on each based upon my teacher journal observations. 
Method 1: Weaver 
1. Show students a model of the concept, either teacher-created or from literature, 
focusing on the grammatical rules being used. 
2. Create a model together as a class, or create a model in front of the class. 
3. Have students create their own models in small groups or pairs and share. 
4. Have students compose models individually and share. 
5. Ask the students to apply the concept in their own writing. 
6. Provide an editing checklist for the concept, if applicable. 
7. Allow time for teacher or peer feedback. 
8. Teach a mini-lesson or allow an editing or revision conference on the concept at 
a later date. 
9. Re-teach to all or specific students, if needed. 
(Weaver, The Grammar Plan Book 23) 
Notes on the Weaver Method (10
th
grade class)  
Notes from my teacher journal dated November 9
th
, 2010: 
48 
I let them decide whether they wanted a whole group instruction or small group. 
They chose whole group and so we did compound sentence instruction using 
Green Mile. […] We covered simple sentences, which they seemed to have down. 
We talked about using compound sentences in our own language. One student 
said, “I can maintain, but I am having a nervous breakdown.” We used this 
sentence throughout. It worked well. I posted the sentences from Green Mile 
and we talked about how they were compound sentences. We looked at the 
student’s sentence and talked about which FANBOYS we could use with it. We 
defined the FANBOYS. Four students were most verbal. I worry that some of the 
quieter kids didn’t get it. We’ll see tomorrow. 
This followed on November 10
th
, 2010: 
I briefly re-covered the concept of a compound sentence and then I asked them 
to draft anything they wanted, using at least one compound sentence. This went 
a lot better than in my 8
th
 grade class. I think I need to have them create new 
before I have them fix the old. Maybe this means that students need to create 
before they can fix. […] After drafting, I asked them to find examples of 
compound sentences in their old writing and make corrections as necessary. 
Only about 5 out of 18 students got to finding and correcting compound 
sentences in their previous writing. 
I didn’t get to steps 8 or 9, but the method seems to work relatively well with 10
th
 grade 
students. Sixty percent of the students had no errors in their compound sentences. 
49 
Another 25% missed the comma and the remaining 15% had sentence structure errors. 
It is yet to be seen whether or not the understanding of this rule lasts.  
Method 2: Noden 
1. Provide students with inspiration via a piece of literature, art, movie, visual aid, 
etc., that uses the concept and will inspire students to write using the concept 
without being prompted or instructed on the concept. 
2. Ask students what they noticed about the piece, what did they like, not like, etc. 
If the inspiration is a written piece, write any favored sentences on something 
that can be left posted in the room. (This step can occasionally be skipped.) 
3. Give students a formatted template in which to practice the concept. 
4. Give students time to free write. 
5. Get student writing noticed. Ask for volunteers to read their writing and then ask 
the class what they noticed or liked (only positive comments here!), or have 
students switch with a partner and then ask students to volunteer their partners’ 
best sentences.    (Noden, Image Grammar) 
Notes on Noden’s Method (11
th
and 12
th
grade class) 
Notes from my teacher journal on November 11
th
, 2010: 
We watched An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I couldn’t display the text at the 
same time because I couldn’t get the movie to burn onto a DVD. The movie kept 
freezing and I had to skip parts of it sometimes, but the kids were amazingly into 
it. We didn’t get to talk about the brushstrokes and tomorrow is silent reading. I 
50 
may have to re-introduce it on Tuesday. Three students kept making comments 
about the way the movie was filmed, the reasons they chose to slow things 
down or film in different ways. 
Notes from November 17
th
, 2010: 
Today we tried Noden’s found poems. I used words from An Occurrence at Owl 
Creek Bridge and they seemed to like it, generally. One student’s was rather 
abstract and I noticed his tendency to leave out letters or words in his haste. I 
helped a particularly low student directly at first, reading each word to him. Then 
he went off on his own with a few selected words. He did fairly well creating. I 
had to come help him edit afterward. […] An Asperger’s student once again 
astounded me. He got a little stuck at first because he thought he could only use 
the words provided. He did a great job writing about an assassin. He even used 
elements of poetry like incomplete sentences and such, ON PURPOSE! Another 
student wrote about a mustached assassin, with a particular focus on the 
mustache. Very funny. Two more students talked the whole time but they both 
made comments about how fun it was and how much they liked it. Even my 
most reluctant writer got something down. 
Noden’s method inspired great writing and excitement from the students, but it did not 
encourage usage of conventions like commas, periods, or even capitalization. It did 
encourage the students to appreciate imagery and beautiful language. It also taught 
about how tone can be deciphered through word choice. Word choice is a step on the 
road to making stylistic choices, the very technique that I wanted to see my students 
51 
using. Noden focuses on five basic tools or brushstrokes: participles, absolutes, 
appositives, adjectives out of order, and action verbs. This found poem exercise was the 
equivalent of teaching a painter how to mix paints before giving him instruction on how 
to move the brush. It certainly improved student morale in regards to writing. 
Method 3: Anderson 
1. Perform an activity using the concept in small groups or pairs. 
2. Provide examples and ask how these examples meet the definition or test. 
3. Define the concept as a class based on examples from literature. (2 and 3 are 
interchangeable, depending on the difficulty of and student familiarity with the 
concept.) 
4. Explain the concept and/or a test for the concept 
5. Create or show a visual scaffold that can be posted in the room. 
6. Ask students to attempt the concept. 
7. Perform a follow-up activity at a later date with students working independently 
that uses or creates a new visual examples scaffold, to be placed in the room. 
(Anderson, Everyday Editing & Mechanically Inclined) 
Notes on Anderson’s Method (8
th
grade class) 
Notes from my teacher journal dated, November 17
th
, 2010: 
Today we did a Capitalization Search. I had the students search through their 
own books for instances of capitalization. They had to write three examples on 
sticky notes and then group together to form categories. We then met back 
52 
together as a class and wrote each category, one at a time, on the board. They 
stickied their notes under the appropriate category. They were pretty into this 
but my co-teacher got them a little rowdied up and I couldn’t talk over them so 
toward the end I had to have them go back to their seats. The speech therapist 
was also in today and she assisted four of the students. She was great to have at 
that table. […] No obvious comments but this seemed to go well. There isn’t a 
whole lot of integration into their writing […]. 
The next day, we looked at the categories that came up in our examples and created a 
capitalization poster to be placed on the wall. The students liked being responsible for 
coming up with the rules. These younger kids enjoyed this activity more than the older 
kids did. 
My Own Lesson Format 
 After I attempted the three different formats of grammar lesson, I decided on an 
amalgamation of the three. Weaver’s ideas from her Grammar Plan Book tended to 
coincide with Anderson’s, but Anderson provided a permanent graphic organizer for the 
classroom that the students could use as a reference whenever they needed it. After 
seeing Anderson’s lesson format in action a few times, I knew that such visual aids 
would increase engagement during the lesson and assist in retention later. Noden and 
Anderson promoted getting student writing noticed, and, when I attempted it, I noticed 
that the students got excited and even a few of my shyer or weaker writers offered to 
share after they were comfortable with the class. I thought this was important and so 
implemented it in the following Frankenstein of a lesson format as well: 
53 
1. Show students an example of the concept, either teacher-created or from 
literature, focusing on the grammatical rules being used. 
2. Create visual scaffold in front of the class, which can be posted in the classroom 
as a reference. Apply examples from literature or student writing to show the 
validity of the scaffold. 
3. Have students create their own models in small groups or pairs and share. 
4. Have students compose models individually and share. 
5. Ask the students to apply the concept in their own writing. 
6. Get student writing noticed. Ask for volunteers to read their writing and then ask 
for positive comments from the other students, or have the students switch with 
another student and ask them to read aloud their partner’s best sentences. 
7. Provide an editing checklist for the concept, if applicable. 
8. Allow time for teacher or peer feedback. 
9. Teach a mini-lesson or allow an editing or revision conference on the concept at 
a later date. 
10. Re-teach to all or specific students, if needed. 
I used this format at least once a week to introduce or reinforce a grammar or other 
writing concept. One example of the above lesson format in action is the lesson I taught 
on the concept of the compound sentence with my 8
th
 grade class. I decided to use 
Bridge to Terabithia as my mentor text, partially because a few students in the class had 
read it or seen the movie, but mostly because I think that Katherine Patterson did a 
wonderful job on the novel. 
54 
1. We quickly reviewed what we knew to be the requirements of a simple 
sentence (subject, verb, agreement between the two) and then I wrote the 
following sentence on the board, from Bridge to Terabithia: “Leslie liked to 
make up stories about the giants that threatened Terabithia, but they both 
knew that the real giant in their lives was Janice Avery” (Patterson 48). I 
asked the students to identify the two simple sentences within the example, 
which they did easily enough. I pointed out and circled the coordinating 
conjunction, “but,” as well as the comma before it. I explained that whenever 
there were two complete sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction, or 
F.A.N.B.O.Y.S., there would always be a comma before the conjunction. We 
had covered the F.A.N.B.O.Y.S. (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) in a previous 
lesson. 
2. On a 24” by 36” piece of sticky-backed paper, I drew the following visual 
scaffold, based on Anderson’s graphic (Anderson & Spandel 86): 
 
 
 
 
I asked if anyone could compose a compound sentence based on the visual 
scaffold. Being that it was near Thanksgiving break, one student offered the 
following sentence: “I hate turkey, but I love going to Tennessee for 
Thanksgiving.” I wrote it on the board and asked whether or not it was 
Sentence 
sentence 
, 
. 
for 
and 
nor 
but 
or 
yet 
so 
55 
compound, and why or why not. They decided easily enough that it was 
indeed a compound sentence. I asked them to pinpoint the F.A.N.B.O.Y.S. 
They identified but. I wrote a few more examples from Bridge to Terabithia 
on the board and asked them to identify whether or not they were 
compound as well as the coordinating conjunction, if it was. Also, if it was 
not, I requested that the students make it so. We also spent some amount of 
time discussing why certain coordinating conjunctions make more sense in 
certain situations. We defined the relationship of each coordinating 
conjunction for clarity. 
3. I asked the students to work at their tables to come up with some awesome 
and descriptive compound sentences, using the scaffold on the board. I 
circulated while the students worked. This was met with success at all three 
tables, although one table had a little too much assistance from the Title I 
Reading Teacher, I think.  
4. Regardless, seeing this success, I asked the students to draft their own on 
index cards, which they turned in just as class was ending. The remainder of 
the steps would have to wait until tomorrow. Lessons typically move slowly 
due to the need to repeat and a generally slow pace of student work. The 
index cards revealed that about half of the students fully grasped and could 
apply the concept. About a quarter of them have sentence level errors and 
that would need to be addressed in a whole different type of lesson. 
56 
5. The following day, I reviewed the compound sentence, coordinating 
conjunctions and necessary comma. I then asked the students to find 
compound sentences within their previous writing. If they could not, I asked 
them to create one by joining together two simple sentences that appeared 
next to each other. This was a bit of a disaster. There was a lot of whining 
happening about not being able to find anything. Among the three teachers 
in the room, we were eventually able to assist everyone in finding or creating 
one, but it took most of the class period. 
6. Whenever I noticed a particularly good compound sentence in the students’ 
writing, I handed out a sentence strip, asked them to carefully copy the 
sentence on the strip and tape it to the wall. After the first few sentences 
were posted, I had a stampede of students who wanted to post theirs as 
well. Those sentences are still posted in my room. 
7. When the next assignment came due, I marked compound sentence rules on 
the editing checklists of those students who did not use the concept correctly 
in the writing we conferenced about. 
8. Students were asked to conference with a peer as well as the teacher in 
between completion of their assignment and submission. Very few students 
focused on conventions in either conference, unless prompted by the 
teacher. Students tended to address only the errors specifically pointed out 
by the teacher. 
57 
9. About 50% of the class demonstrated mastery of the concept after this first 
round. Another 25% could be prompted to fix their errors with minimal 
instruction. The remaining students needed more than re-instruction of 
compound sentences. We needed to back up even further. 
10. The students who demonstrated sentence level errors were asked to 
participate in a lesson focusing on sentence construction and two-word 
sentences.  
This lesson format worked the best out of any of the above that I tried. It worked 
better because Weaver’s method of introducing a concept in the context of student 
reading, paired with my careful selection of samples, engaged the students in the lesson 
to begin with. Anderson’s advice to create a visual scaffold for the students ensured that 
my lower students had another way to learn the concept and everyone had a constant 
reference guide posted in the room, one that they helped to make and had a connection 
to. Throughout both all of their books, Weaver and Anderson both emphasize the need 
to have students attempt a concept together before attempting it alone. This also allows 
me to group my students by ability and provide them with the correct amount of 
teacher assistance and differentiation. Some students wouldn’t make it past this stage, 
but this format allowed for the students to attempt the concept on their own, also 
allowing the teacher to do a formative assessment on who would need reinforcement or 
remediation. This format also used Noden’s and Anderson’s suggestion to get student 
writing noticed, which motivated the students to write as well as increased positive 
attitudes not only about writing but about my class in general. 
58 
Student Work 
 After a month or so of instruction, the students finally began to provide some 
work samples to refer to. After almost two months, they had finished their first piece of 
writing and had completed the revision process according to peer advice and the 
lessons that I had provided. I had first drafts that were completed with minimal 
grammar instruction and final drafts that were completed with specific lessons taught 
based upon categorized student weakness. After the first draft was turned in, I wrote 
each student a note, making content suggestions and categorizing them by the types of 
errors they made the most. This was my first method of analyzing the students’ writing. 
It allowed me to see who made what sort of errors and what errors appeared most 
frequently. I decided to narrow my focus to capitalization, dialogue, and commas, 
because all students made mistakes within those areas. I didn’t want to overwhelm 
them with a page long list of errors. I also wanted a few lessons that I could teach to 
small groups who would benefit directly from them, and every student fell into the 
category of needing help in at least one of the afore mentioned areas. It was efficient, 
effective, and purposeful. When final drafts were turned in, I counted all grammatical 
errors against the student, but I weighed the mechanics that a particular student had 
been taught more heavily than conventions that had not been addressed. 
 The last way that I analyzed student work was that I chose 15 students, at 
random, from my stack of papers, five from each class. I wanted to compare those 
students’ early writing with their later writing with an eye for whatever grammar rule I 
had taught them. I would look for instances in which the rule belonged and I marked 
59 
whether or not they used the rule correctly, then I would calculate a percentage of 
instances that the student used the convention correctly. While I was doing this, I was 
also looking at the quality of the writing. I tried to judge based on coherence, descriptive 
language, and improved storyline or information included, depending on the type of 
paper. 
 The writing samples were difficult to analyze. Writing is a much more amorphous 
thing than I had previously realized. It is possible to count errors and the differences in 
errors between two papers, but then the following papers must be reviewed as well, to 
see whether or not the rule is truly learned. Content quality is difficult to judge in some 
cases as well because sometimes the writer just isn’t at his or her best. It is easier to see 
a trend over a longer period of time, say six months or a year. I felt extremely limited by 
the amount of time I had. 
 Nine weeks and a few more grammar and content lessons later, I collected 
another set of work samples from those same students, looking for patterns of error 
and any other data I could collect. I weeded out those students who had not followed 
the instructions of the assignments, turned in a half-completed assignment, or didn’t 
turn in an assignment at all. I needed to be able to compare like to like. I even looked 
over students whose work I had previously passed over in my search for samples. About 
40% of my work sample pool was unusable due to incomplete or missing work and 
assignments not completed to the specifications of the assignment. There weren’t any 
students who consistently had issues, but about 40% of them did not consistently 
perform according to assignment requirements or expectations of submission. I don’t 
60 
feel that this was any different than any other year of teaching, but I never noticed that 
it was such a large percentage of students who missed instructions or instruction. I 
would have to do a little research into how to decrease this number. 
Data Analysis and Memo Writing 
 My first data analysis was driven by the educational research professor who 
requested it, but I was also a bit obsessed with the topic at the time. The data analysis 
was based on the amount of things that had happened in the classroom to deter me 
from getting to instruction. I noticed a lot of complaining in my journal, so I went 
through it and copied anything that seemed to mention reasons why we weren’t getting 
to instruction. I pasted them into a new document, marked with their dates, and viewed 
them all together. From this I was able to get a more cohesive picture and I wrote a brief 
memo reflecting my thoughts. My purpose for this was twofold. I wanted to vent my 
frustrations in a physical manner, so that I could look at them later more objectively. I 
also wanted to see if there was any sort of pattern that would help me to overcome the 
numerous frustrations. I wanted an organized way to look at the mess in my mind, and I 
recognized data analysis as a viable method. (See Appendix B.) 
 My second analysis/memo was based on my notice of too much time spent on a 
particular activity, word studies, in class, an off-shoot of my first memo. Because I now 
had some concrete data, in the form of my first data analysis, I chose to conference with 
a class of students in order to address the issue and gather ideas. I presented them with 
the problem as outlined by the analysis. I told them my motivation for word studies, and 
61 
asked them for suggestions about how to spend less time and yet still accomplish 
extension of vocabulary and spelling improvement. I memoed about my observations 
and thoughts on the conference.  
Where previously I would have dropped the activity, I now had a manner of 
thinking about it objectively, and because of this, I also had a reminder of why I had 
initially thought they were important. Instead, I ended up changing the way the activity 
was accomplished and later changing the activity altogether in order to accomplish the 
same goal more effectively. I went from making very general observations followed by 
snap judgments to more detailed observations (through my teacher journal), followed 
by careful analysis (through the data analysis) and purposeful changes. 
 My third memo actually came out of a vignette I wrote for my educational 
research class. During an interview that I conducted with my co-teacher, he said that the 
students needed approval from the teachers. He noted that they were always up in front 
of us, asking what we thought of their writing and if it was any good. I went back though 
my teacher journal and discovered multiple instances of students seeking approval. I 
pulled each out and pasted them into a new document, pulled out more of the same 
from the interview then memoed about them. 
In my classroom, this translated into my being more careful with praise. I was 
always sure to give it, but I started to add a little piece of constructive criticism to 
accompany the praise. I had also inadvertently been discouraging students from seeking 
teacher approval by encouraging them to seek out peer conferences instead. I 
minimized the times that I pushed them away, knowing that the students wanted praise 
62 
from someone they viewed as knowledgeable and experienced. Without delving too far 
into psychology, I could also guess that some of the students were almost desperate for 
adult approval, and writing had become a way for them to meet that need. My approval 
had become like money in the bank that I could trade for student effort and willingness 
to learn. 
 My last memo also came out of my interview. While we were discussing, the idea 
came up that students cannot benefit much from grammar instruction until they care 
about writing. I wanted to see if I could find any evidence to back up the idea. I found 
about ten or so instances and pulled them out for a memo. I also pulled out the ideas 
from the interview for the memo. I was absorbed with the idea. I began to treat 
students differently according to their investment in their writing. From three years of 
teaching the same students, I knew which students cared about their writing, which 
ones completed assignments merely to please me, and which ones didn’t care about 
much beyond passing. I knew which were on the verge of caring deeply and just needed 
a few more little nudges of confidence. I acted accordingly. Ethan, a student who 
completes assignments to please me, is not a student who will self-correct, but he will 
refer back to his writing when I ask and look at a poster outlining the rules of a 
convention. He will try to find a few mistakes and correct them, but he will not correct 
everything. However, over time, his writing has improved, both in content and in his 
willingness to attempt conventions. I snuck grammar instruction in on him, a slow 
injection, over time. There are other students who have become truly devoted to their 
writing, maybe even a little fanatical. They see the value of grammar and attempt to use 
63 
it when they know it. However, traditional grammar instruction confuses many of them 
horribly. When grammar is presented in the context of beautiful literature and their 
writing, it makes sense. Grammar becomes a wonderful sort of art, and it becomes 
worth learning because they want to make their writing beautiful, too. Lastly, the 
students who do not care about their writing beyond a passing grade, those students I 
leave alone the most, only providing minimal feedback and only the sorts of suggestions 
that I hope will interest them in their own writing. After I have them hooked, then I can 
drag them down into the depths of grammar instruction. Otherwise, my time and theirs 
is wasted, especially because I don’t want to chance discouraging them from liking 
writing.  
Vignette 
 The professor of my educational research class asked all of us to write vignettes, 
both to get a focused look at our research as well as to give us another way to look at 
our qualitative data. I began to think about meaningful interactions between my 
students and writing, or at least interactions that I had witnessed. The biggest difference 
between before and after the instruction was implemented was the number of students 
who approached me outside of class time to discuss their writing. I thought back to all of 
the times various students had done so and decided to condense them into one 
morning. I also wanted to give some scope to the research and show some difference, 
so I included the student who started it all for me as a sort of flashback. I found a 
significant emphasis on how important it was to my students that their writing be a 
64 
vehicle of adult approval, specifically mine and sometimes my co-teacher’s as well. I am 
still changing as a teacher, and the exercise of writing this first vignette made me realize 
that the very least I can do for my students in return for their hard work and creativity is 
to look at their writing and find one unique thing in it to comment on. I try my hardest 
to make time for them when they ask, and if I can’t, I set up a more convenient time 
later. This strategy has more than paid for the time I invested with a willingness to try 
and a willingness to trust me with their writing. 
 After I was done with the first vignette, I had an important realization. 
Everything in it was positive. I was only looking at the positive results. I needed to look 
at what was not going well. I decided to do a second vignette. I wanted to adequately 
depict the failures, or at least the not-yet-successes, as well. I don’t mean to say that the 
students were failures, because they weren’t. I mean to say that I had failed to reach 
them up until this point. These were the students who did not care much for writing and 
some of them didn’t care much for me. I was left without a leg to stand on. However, I 
am still working on finding some way to sneak in under their defenses and jumpstart an 
interest in the written word, whether it is through a great book, or by finally finding the 
one thing that student might care to write about. Writing the vignettes was very 
important to me because they encouraged me to find both positive and negative 
themes within my research and results. 
Vignette 1: A Positive Look 
In the mornings, I always have about 20 minutes of good, solid work time. I 
refresh my brain with what has been going on in various classes, as well as what will be 
65 
going on today. I clean off my desk from the previous day and file papers. Today, while 
filing, I see a paper crumpled in the back of my filing cabinet, as if hiding to avoid being 
thrown out like the rest of last year’s papers. I start to pull it out but pull more carefully 
once I see what is on the paper. 
I remember last year when, as a ninth grader, Nathan handed in his short story, 
GothPig. I had spent a whole year gaining enough trust to get him to just write for me 
and he writes Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle into a gothic animal story! I remember 
having to ask him to read it for me because it was written so poorly. I remember being 
afraid that if I let him know how poorly it was written, he would shut down his writing 
life and shut me out. 
I think about this story a lot because, for me, it was the beginning of my own 
hero’s journey. The look on Nathan’s face when he handed in his story and the 
corresponding “can you read it for me? What do you think?” was enough to keep me 
from telling him that I couldn’t even read it. I smiled and said I’d get back to him after I 
read it. It was one page, handwritten, and it took me nearly an hour to decipher and I 
still had to have him read it aloud to be sure I got everything. Nathan’s story fell on the 
heels of a nine week unit on grammar. I felt like a failure. 
I look up from my reminiscence to a cacophony of voices and sounds. The 
heathens were descending. In the chaos of my 10
th
 grade homeroom, three students 
approach my desk. The first is Lee, a frequently misunderstood, mismatched blond boy 
who spent his entire 8
th
 grade year picking fights for a little attention, even if it was 
negative. 
66 
“Miss Hahn! Did you get to read my story yet? I need to know what to fix to 
make it better. And did you give me a list of spelling words like I asked?” 
I sigh. “Lee, you just gave it to me yesterday afternoon. I told you, I have to get 
through all of the papers turned in for grades before I get to any other ones. Give me a 
few days. I’ll get to it, I promise.” 
His face falls, just a little, but he nods and trudges over to put away his jacket. I 
smile because last year, even the beginning of this year, Lee never would have turned in 
extra writing. He had liked to write but he rarely turned in anything extra. Next 
customer: Jessica, my angst-ridden, teen docu-drama, who has developed a taste for 
writing. A lot. 
“Here, Miss Hahn. I brought you my story. I know it’s a little longer than three 
pages but I knew you wouldn’t mind.” She hands over five pages, typed, and double-
sided. “Oh, and my dad said if you could give me assignments that don’t require this 
much writing, it would be better.” 
“But, Jess, I only asked for three pages. If you choose to write more than that, 
then that’s on you. I certainly won’t stifle you.” 
“I know, but, you know sometimes when I start writing, I just can’t stop and then 
it gets to be too long.” 
“I see. So you want something that’s more limiting?” I ask, certain of her seeing 
the error in this reasoning. 
“Yeah.” She pauses, considering. “Limiting? Like telling me I can’t write about 
whatever I want? Or telling me to only write about certain things?” 
67 
“Mmm hmm.” 
“Oh.” She frowns. “Well, no then. I don’t want to do that.” 
“Okay then. Thanks for the story. Try to make it shorter next time, for your dad’s 
sake.” 
She also wanders away, pensive about why her father might need her to write 
less. I think about my struggle with her last year. She didn’t turn in much of anything, 
ever, when she even came to school. Behind her is Nathan, a year older and what seems 
like a foot taller. 
“Miss Hahn, hi!” 
“Hey, Nathanicus. What’s up? How was your evening?” I ask, using my nickname 
for him to encourage that sweet-natured smile he usually hides. 
“Oh, it was good. I brought you something.” He pushes his glasses up on his nose 
and smiles, pulling a slightly crumpled paper from his camouflage backpack. “I know I 
turned in that story for my grade but I really want to put this one in the class magazine.” 
I take it from him and glance at the title. “10 Things Children are Not.” It’s typed 
and there are minimal spelling errors that I can see on the first page. It’s insightful and 
even amusing. Heart-wrenching, maybe. All from a glance. 
“Okay,” I say and smile. “I’ll look at it.” I can’t believe how incredibly far his 
writing has become. I see a few places where he forgot to place a period but because of 
the past few months, I know he’ll know where they go if I ask him to take another look 
at it. Better yet, I know he is expecting me to give him some constructive criticism, both 
68 
content and grammar related. He’s waiting for it so that he can polish his work and then 
be proud of it when it gets published. 
As the class leaves the room and I am left clutching his paper to my chest and 
smiling, Nathan turns at the door. “Don’t forget to read it, Miss Hahn. I gotta get it done 
by next week.” 
 
 
 
 
 In regards to grammar instruction, this vignette demonstrates how some 
students’ attitudes toward grammar have shifted. They see the value in it as a tool to 
polish their writing. It has become the way to make their writing viewable to the public. 
They also see the value in learning about grammar. They still see grammar as a set of 
societal rules for writing, but that is my fault. Maybe next year I will find a way to 
portray grammar as Noden’s painter’s palette. I still have more to figure out and learn. 
Vignette 2: A Less Complimentary Look 
Miss Hahn: 
Today was going to be a typical day, I could tell. Students were talking. Trash was 
flying. Jessica was smacking Brandon. Jose was staring into space and chewing on his 
hair. Nathan was at my desk, staring at me. Ethan was talking louder than everyone else 
and waiting for me to get “The Look” so that he could tell everyone to “Shut-up!” Ugh. 
Themes: 
1. Change in Student Attitude Toward Writing 
2. Change in Student Writing Output 
3. Change in Writing Ability 
4. Creation of a Writing Community in the Classroom 
5. The Importance of Grammar Instruction 
6. Student need for teacher approval 
7. Teacher change in attitude toward student writing. 
69 
 “Nathan, please sit down. Jessica, keep your hands to yourself and I’m giving you 
a check.” I look around the room to see if there is anything I missed before I begin. 
Ethan has noticed that I am about ready to begin and so goes for his customary 
“Everybody, shut up! Miss Hahn is waiting to start!” I roll my eyes and grab for the 
mallet of my Tibetan Singing Bowl. I give it a good BONG and wait. Silence descends and 
all eyes are one me, expect Jose’s; he’s still totally zoned out, and chewing on his hair. 
“Okay, ladies and gentleman, time to get started! Today, we are going to 
continue writing whatever it is you started yesterday. I will be around and Mr. Levstek 
will be around to assist you. I will be noting what you are doing and how much you have 
done and you will be getting points for the work you do in class. So, get to it and don’t 
mess around!” 
I grab my clipboard off of the nail on the bookcase and begin to circulate.  
Jose: 
I wonder what we’re having for dinner tonight. It was pretty cool last week when 
my mom let me eat a whole pizza. I’m pretty hungry now, actually. I wonder if Miss 
Hahn will let me out of this stupid class to go get my snack in the office. She usually 
doesn’t. She usually goes and gets it herself. Doesn’t she realize I need the break from 
this stupid class? I hate this class. It’s so boring. I think I’ll play some Sega when I get 
home. Yeah, Sega. Sonic is by far— 
“Jose!” Miss Hahn shouts. 
“Huh? What?” I look at her, blankly. 
“I’ve said your name like four times now.” 
70 
“Oh, what?” 
“What are you working on?” 
“Uh, I don’t know.” I look down at the blank paper in front of me. 
“You were supposed to have started something yesterday. Come on, man. You 
gotta get something done. We already talked about this. I don’t want you to fail,” Miss 
Hahn says, with that dumb I’m-in-pain look on her face. I hate that look. As if she really 
even cares about me or knows about anything I care about. She thinks I need to get 
better at my writing, but I can already write just fine. 
“I don’t know what to write about,” I say, to make the look go away. It becomes 
an eye roll. 
“Jose, we gave you twenty ideas yesterday. What happened to those? I thought 
you were going to do an op-ed piece on old school video games.” 
“Oh, yeah.” I pick up my pencil, hoping she’ll go away. 
“Mr. L., can you keep an eye on Jose, so that he doesn’t zone out again?” 
“Sure,” he says, and smiles at me. This is not any better. He talks a lot. A lot more 
than Miss Hahn. I can’t think when he’s talking to me. He doesn’t even let me think 
about what he’s saying. He came up with the idea about video games, which is pretty 
cool, but now he won’t quit talking. I wish Miss Hahn wouldn’t have moved my seat by 
him, even though I know I need to work more in here. I put my head down to show that 
I’m working. Maybe that will fool them. 
What games should I talk about in here? Sonic, for sure. And Mario, I think. 
Maybe I’ll play Mario again tonight, instead of Sonic. I like the music on Mario better. It 
71 
would be really cool if they came out with the old games on the new systems with saves 
and everything. That way I wouldn’t have to remember all those dumb codes or start 
over… 
Ethan: 
 “Ethan, how’s it going? Where are you at?” Miss Hahn say from next to me. She 
leans over to look at my paper. She smell good. “How come you’re not using 
capitalization like we talked about?” 
 I look up. I knew she was gonna hit me next. I always know where she at. She 
fine, a little mean, but fine. 
 I smile. “I’m just trying to get some stuff down, you know. I’ll worry about that 
stuff later. But I think I’m done. Can you read it?” 
 She frownin’. Uh oh. “Why don’t you get a peer conference sheet and ask one of 
your classmates to read it for you and make some suggestions?” 
 I hate when she do that. She know I don’t like other people readin’ my stuff. It’s 
personal, and I don’t want these fools readin’ my stuff. Sometimes they say stuff like all 
out loud to make fun. They’d really do that to me. I don’t trust no one in here, anyway. 
 “Can’t you just read it? I don’t want no one else to read my stuff.” 
 “Ethan, I can’t read everybody’s writing every day. I just don’t have enough 
time.” 
 “Well, I’m not doin’ it,” I say, waitin’ for her to give in. Maybe she’ll send me to 
the office. That’ll get me outta dis shit. I’ll just tell her and she’ll send me. She look a 
little stressed today, so I won’t hafta try so hard. 
72 
 She sighs. “You have to do it at least once. What’s the problem? Find one of your 
friends to read your paper. It’s not a personal story.” 
 “No. Just send me to the office. I don’t care. I’m not doin’ it.” I start to yell a 
little, to be sure she’ll send me. 
 She sighs. “Fine. Go.” 
 I smile and nod, grab my stuff and hit the door. I’ll be bad enough to stay down 
there. Principal’s an idiot, anyway. 
 
 
 
 
 In regards to grammar instruction, these students are the students who have 
grown the least grammatically and in content. They don’t care to improve and 
frequently do what they must in order to fly under my radar or avoid putting their very 
self out in the public eye through their writing. Although lately, as mentioned below in 
my findings, Ethan has started to write to please me. I only hope that this is a step 
toward writing to please himself. 
Old Habits as Temptress 
I didn’t see the results that I wanted to see. The positive results I got were an 
unexpected bonus, but I didn’t see a solid improvement in grammar and mechanics. I 
think that much of this was due to my old habits, as well as the old habits of my 
Themes: 
1. Disinterest in subject area 
2. Students pre-conceived positive or negative attitude about themselves and their work 
prevents their acceptance of instruction 
3. If students don’t care about their writing, grammar instruction is irrelevant 
4. Students will increase negative behaviors to avoid unpleasant tasks 
73 
students. We were used to a different sort of classroom. Reading and writing workshop 
were new and different to us. We needed time to adjust. We were trying to learn how 
to do this thing called workshopping. Their papers didn’t reflect more purposeful writing 
or stylistic choices and I didn’t blame them. I don’t think we ever got to the level where 
we could talk about making stylistic choices with any amount of understanding. Their 
grades were not what they were used to from when I edited their papers, forced them 
to revise, and kept my proverbial foot to their neck every step of the way. 
I can’t say I was much better. I was not always as clear as I should have been 
because I was not sure what I was doing. This was my first year using such a strategy, 
and I was unprepared in a lot of ways. I had materials, but too much stationary, glue 
sticks and folders and not enough notebooks, pencils and time. I set up my classroom in 
a way that I thought would promote the workshop. I was wrong there, too. I didn’t have 
enough space between the writers and conferencers. Sometimes the students had to 
climb behind my desk for reference materials, and the students weren’t the only ones 
with time management issues. It always seemed as if they were rushed with their final 
drafts. I knew that part of it was their fault for not planning their time out well, but I 
tried to add editing lessons on the fly that ate up time. We had things come up, as all 
schools do, things like assemblies, snow days, fire drills, student absences, and one time 
the janitor came in with a drill to fix something and made it impossible to work for a full 
20 minutes. Because I had report card due dates to deal with and a requirement to 
show student work for portfolios, I had to be somewhat stringent on due dates, and the 
final products suffered. Alternately, I thought we spent entirely too much time on one 
74 
piece of writing, and I didn’t get as many writing samples as I wanted, let alone student 
samples that were usable for comparison.  
I am not giving up, though. I learned a lot of things, about myself, my students, 
and teaching writing. I will use those things to fine-tune what I have already tried and 
liked. I will increase the number of students who complete assignments according to 
requirements and I will have a classroom where writing happens. 
The Rest of the Journey 
I am still working my way through the rest of the journey. I am not yet 
comfortable with teaching in this manner. I see the merit and I am definitely continuing, 
but there is still much work to do. At the very least, I have developed an understanding 
that I want to teach in this manner, because, even though I have not found that it works 
definitively, I still believe in it. I understand that until I am comfortable with this manner 
of teaching, my students will not benefit fully from it. However indefinite the 
documented results, I know how it feels as a teacher. There have been many days where 
all 18 students in a class were engaged to some degree (an amazing feat in an ADHD 
school), and we all developed a different sort of love for literature and writing. We have 
also developed a sense that grammar and mechanics are important for us as readers 
and writers and we all, including me, need to work to get better at them. While my 
students have not increased the number or pages of finished pieces of writing per 
grading period from last year (two 2-3 page papers per nine weeks), they have increased 
75 
the amount of informal writing produced, especially writing drafted outside of class 
time.  
The revision process is still difficult and new for the students and also for me as a 
teacher. Last year, there was little to no revision. I simply did not have time to 
conference with every student and tell them every mechanical mistake they made. I also 
refused to mark all over their papers. Now, on average, 4-5 students per class have 
begun to seek out revision and editing opportunities on their own. Another 2-3 in each 
class will revise when asked without argument or constant supervision. The remaining 9-
10 students have to be watched constantly, reminded to get back on task or why 
revision is important, and occasionally refuse to edit or revise at all. We are still learning 
to get rid of our bad habits. 
76 
 
CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS ALONG THE WAY 
Student Feeling Toward Writing 
It is difficult to prove quantitatively, but through my observations, I get the 
impression that there has been a slight increase in positive feeling toward writing, but 
there are still a few outlying students who have remained unaffected. As I mentioned in 
the section above focusing on the vignettes, my students are writing more. Some are 
even writing in their free time. 
I know that there are some unaffected students because I still have to constantly 
monitor what these students are doing during freewriting time. They frequently choose 
to talk, stare off into space or have a pressing need to use the restroom. I also have to 
pester them to turn in anything at all after the due date has come and passed. Their 
freewriting is minimal and they require as much assistance now as they did at the 
beginning of the year when it comes to getting started. In my 18-student classes, I have 
3-4 students on any given day who require this extra vigilance. I know that this is due, in 
part, to my specific population, but I am determined to decrease this number by 
persisting with these methods of teaching. I can say that I am reasonably sure that there 
has been no increase in negative feelings toward writing. 
The most interesting reason, to me, that there has been an increased interest in 
writing, is the surprising love of language that my students have evinced. It was a 
surprise to them, I think, and it was certainly a surprise to me. There have been some 
77 
instances that have led me to believe that my students love language. One example is 
one student’s request for a cool word of the day and then many subsequent reminders 
over the course of the year from a handful of other students to change the word when I 
forgot. Other examples are 3 particular students who found out that the dictionary has a 
lot of neat words in it and now make it a habit to read through it when they have free 
time. Also, my oldest class, the 11
th
 and 12
th
 graders have repeatedly used the unique 
words I pick out for them for word studies from the literature we read. They use them in 
everyday conversation and they use them a year after they learned them. While there 
were little hints of this throughout my study, the most glaring incident occurred with a 
student who regularly fails my class. Here is an entry from my teacher journal, dated 
October 14
th
, 2010: 
Today I used Harry Noden’s Artist’s Palette activity and had them use 10-20 of 
the words and phrases that they collected from Beowulf and then another 15-20 
words and phrases that they came up with on their own to write a paragraph. 
Wow! This was great. I had a few kids testing but I worked really closely with 
Robert, Scott and Tim. All three got really excited about writing. Tim was asking a 
lot of spelling questions for words like “shred,” “unbeatable,” and some others. 
Scott asked a few questions about commas and semi-colons. Tim said, “don’t 
that sound good! I am a beast writer! I should write stories.” He was also excited 
to read it to me. 
Another piece of evidence came from my interview with Dean Levstek, my co-teacher: 
78 
 At the same time, they see you getting excited about things, and they see you, 
you know, displaying an earnest love of literature and language, and I think that 
pushes a little bit. It’s definitely something that can’t be taught like math. Like, 
anything in this classroom, we gotta act like it’s the best thing that’s ever 
happened in life, and how awesome it is, and how cool. We love it. Because 
that’s the only way they’re gonna buy into it, especially the younger kids. (7). 
Language has been a surprising motivator of interest in writing. I can’t say that it has 
been the reason for writing, but it has certainly increased their interest when I talk 
about it. 
 Harry Noden, the author responsible for the activity mentioned above, has built 
his entire grammar repertoire on the idea of interesting words, or images, built from 
those words. One of my favorite quotes from Noden is: 
Traditionally, the study of grammar has dealt only with words, phrases, and 
clauses. However, when I began to see grammar as the process of creating art, it 
seemed unnatural—even impossible—not to view grammar as a continuous 
spectrum in a whole work. (ix). 
Noden recognizes the importance of words, like brushstrokes on a canvas for a painter. 
While his ideas don’t lend themselves very well toward mechanics like proper comma 
usage or semi-colons, he does provide a number of strategies for improving language 
usage and increasing the chances of style and voice coming through student writing. He 
encourages writers to show images instead of telling them, increasing their interest or 
even love of writing. 
79 
 I could guess at other reasons that seemed to encourage students to get more 
interested in writing. The students seemed to enjoy the instances of literary examples 
that I pulled in for examples. The language in the samples was lively, and I also provided 
background from the stories that seemed to interest them, if not in writing, then at least 
in reading. This relates to another reason that I can guess at. Most of the students have 
dramatically increased the amount of reading that they do. This has increased their 
interest in the written word. 
Reading Workshop 
After two solid grading periods of reading conferences, I tabulated the following 
class averages to show what percentage of the required weekly 50 pages was being 
accomplished by each student: 
Class Average % 
Grade 12 43.38 
Grade 11 77.63 
Grade 10 72.38 
Grade 8 66.63 
To get this data, I allowed the students to tell me how many pages they had read and 
then used their book (present in class for independent reading time) to quiz them on 
whether or not they had read as well as their ability to use comprehension strategies we 
went over every Friday. Each student was given a score out of ten based on the number 
of pages they had managed to read and comprehend. Students were provided with 
80 
books at a variety of reading levels, to ensure that this reading experience was as 
pleasurable as possible. The goal was to encourage them to enjoy reading, and for some 
of the students, giving them books at grade level would have entirely defeated that 
goal. 
Although not entirely a surprise, it shocked me a little to see exactly how poorly 
my seniors had done with the reading. On average, they were reading less than 22 
pages a week! I know that all of the teachers have been complaining about the seniors’ 
work ethic this year, but to see it in one specific area made it more real and gave me 
some statistics to put in front of them. It is yet to be seen whether or not this will 
encourage them to pick up their reading during the remaining grading period. 
However, I was pleased with my other three classes, even the 8
th
 graders. This 
new aspect of my class wouldn’t affect those who were already readers, but those who 
weren’t readers were reading, at least a little bit. I even had a few students become 
readers because they found authors or genres that they liked. Those students who 
scored less than 50%, dragging down the class average, ranged between 10% and 40% 
of each class, with the exception of the seniors, where only one or two students 
maintained good scores. So, statistically speaking, at least 60% of my students were 
reading a decent amount each week according to the conferences we had. This was a 
vast improvement over the initial two to three students per class that I knew were 
reading outside of school before I instituted the reading workshop and weekly reading 
requirement. 
81 
Motivations for Writing 
As I mentioned, there was a slight overall change in student feeling toward 
writing. I’m not sure that it is a positive change, or, more specifically, I don’t know that 
the motivation for the change is truly a good thing. Many of the students appear to like 
writing more in that they are quicker to begin writing assignments and have 
demonstrated an interest in others’ reading of their writing. 
The reason for my concern is that, as evidenced by my data analysis on Student 
Eagerness for Approval from the Teacher and also through the interview and vignette, 
many of the students seem to be writing because they are actualized by the teacher’s 
approval, not only for completing class work, but they are also touted as skilled writers 
in a number of ways. Teachers in my classroom understand the importance of being 
supportive of student work and we always manage to find something positive to say 
about student writing, whether it is the story line, correct usage of a convention or just 
one great word. The students have come to rely on this complimentary method of 
dealing with their writing and are eager to write and show the teacher their writing for 
that little morsel that makes them feel appreciated or just noticed. 
If I consider my 18 student class of 10
th
 graders, there are 6 students who will 
almost always stop the writing process after they have received acceptable praise from 
the teacher. This usually results in minimal revisions and only the editing that is directly 
discussed in the editing conference with the teacher. There are, of course, also one or 
two students who never attempt the revision process unless they are forced to in some 
manner, but these students hardly perform, regardless of teacher disapproval. 
82 
Notice is a big word for Jeff Anderson. He invites students to notice things about 
writing and then notices that they have said something intelligent, creative, or have just 
tried. He also encourages teachers to notice student writing. Anderson addresses this in 
both of his books by encouraging the teacher to post good examples of student writing 
on sentence strips and posters around the room. He uses this method in various lessons. 
He also posts student work that is not correct but a great attempt for a particular 
student, in order to encourage that particular student. (Anderson). 
The other big proponent of this finding is Nancie Atwell. Atwell suggests that 
teachers provide publishing opportunities for students such as class magazines or even 
bigger, more public opportunities, such as newspapers and journals. She expects her 
students will be published before they leave her class (100). This may be a better 
method of fulfilling this student need. 
I had initially planned to create a class magazine. I even put out a schedule to the 
students, but when it came time to take submissions for the first issue, I only received 
three pieces of writing. We were still working on learning routines and no one had 
actually finished a product in class. The three submissions were from students who had 
written them at home because they were excited to be published in a magazine. I 
pushed publication back. When I attempted to publish the second issue, I got 17 
submissions, but only six of them were typed (one of the requirements of submission). I 
had to allow extra time for the students to type them, and we have no computer lab 
and only six computers available in my class room. I decided that with all of the other 
83 
changes going on in my teaching and their classroom, the class magazine would have to 
wait for next year. 
While neither author outright says that students need that approval, they both 
imply it through Anderson’s noticing and Atwell’s call for publication opportunities. 
Practically speaking, most adults don’t write without reason, so why should we expect 
students to? 
Change in Quality of Student Writing (Content, 
Structure, Conventions) 
Time has not been my friend in this research. It is too early to tell whether or not 
there will be permanent improvements in student writing in regards to any of the 
questions I was interested in, namely: 
a. How will in-context grammar instruction affect student feeling toward 
writing? 
b. What other motivations might be involved? 
c. What format/structure of lesson works best? 
d. How will the quality of student writing, including content, structure and 
conventions change? And 
e. What frustrates the process? 
I blame this partially on myself. I need to get better at teaching this way. However, 
as of right now, I have seen a lot of improvement, across the board, in content. There 
84 
has not been a lot of improvement, over time, in conventions, and I have not even 
begun to address structure. 
I have included some samples of student work to show the differences between first 
drafts and second. They are not always obvious improvements, but most of the students 
have shown some amount of improvement, if only due to increased familiarity with the 
task of writing in my classroom over the course of nearly a year. Improvements tend to 
appear in quality or quantity of content and willingness to get started on the task of 
writing. However, second pieces of writing are completed now and there is minimal 
proof that the lessons have had an impact. This was the area where I got the least 
answers in the time that I had. 
Dialogue is a great example. I taught this convention to my 10
th
 grade class in 
October. In November, after I received first writing submissions, I separated the 
students into groups based on what sort of grammatical mistakes they made and I 
thought they might benefit from the most. I had seven students in a group that focused 
on capitalization, another topic we had already covered, and mostly the remedial group. 
Many of these students made many other mistakes, but capitalization was something I 
thought that they could succeed at. I had six students in a group with a focus on 
dialogue, and I had the remaining five students focus on comma usage. Out of the seven 
students that attempted dialogue in their writing, only one used it with any success. 
Per the lesson plan that I formed, each group rotated through a brief 
reinforcement lesson on their specified convention, free writing while I was not meeting 
with them. I also placed dialogue rules on those students’ editing checklists. Two 
85 
months later, when I collected final copies for second submissions, only two out of the 
five students who were in the dialogue group and attempted dialogue used it 
successfully, most of the time. They both still struggle with dialogue rules a little, but are 
easily reminded of the conventions. Another two students, including Ethan below, 
attempted to use some dialogue rules, albeit incorrectly, and the last of the five did not 
include any dialogue punctuation. One student opted to write a piece that did not 
contain dialogue. 
Ethan: Attempting New Conventions 
I had a number of students who displayed no use of a convention and then 
misuse after a lesson was taught addressing that convention. Misuse included overuse, 
underuse, and new mistakes using the convention as can be seen in Ethan’s examples 
below. Weaver and Anderson both frequently comment on how new mistakes are not 
necessarily bad. They show that the student is trying a new concept. Here are two 
pieces of Ethan’s writing. They both feature dialogue. In the first, it is obvious that Ethan 
either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the rules of dialogue. This piece of writing 
was something that he chose to do during freewriting time during the writer’s 
workshop. It was not specifically tied to any set of assignment requirements. However, 
after the first submission of assignments, Ethan was grouped with other students who 
needed to improve dialogue use in their writing. 
86 
  
Figure 2: Ethan's Pre-Grammar Instruction Writing 
 
After the lesson was taught, using the above lesson format, Ethan put forth 
another piece of writing. While the content is a great commentary on how Ethan thinks 
socially, his usage of quotations marks is a great commentary on how he is learning. He 
demonstrates an understanding of the fact that quotations marks are necessary, but he 
obviously is not using them correctly, confusing what is spoken for the speaker in 
regards to what gets put within the marks.  
87 
 
Figure 3: Ethan's Writing Post-Dialogue Lesson 
However, all is not lost. I am not even disappointed, much. I applauded Ethan’s 
attempt but told him we had a little more work to do. Many of my students evidenced 
new errors after we have addressed a new convention. There were times when I grew 
very frustrated with the new errors, but I tried to keep Anderson and Weaver in mind. 
Number 10 of Weaver’s twelve principals specifically states, “Progress may involve new 
kinds of errors as students try to apply new writing skills” (Weaver and Bush 45). More 
specifically, she goes on to say that students do not typically master a concept all at 
88 
once and may develop many wrong ideas about how to apply a concept before 
demonstrating mastery (Weaver and Bush 48). Ethan demonstrated this tendency 
toward hypothesizing wrong ideas before, hopefully someday, getting it right. Ethan’s 
example is representative of a host of such small victories. 
José: Adopting Rules through the Editing Process and How Getting Started Reflects 
Change 
José represents a few changes that occurred throughout the process. One of the 
positive changes was that students seemed to find it easier to write. I mentioned José in 
my second vignette. He was one of my most reluctant writers, although he would tell 
you that he knew what he was doing. In this, his first pieces of writing, it is blatantly 
obvious that he does not take writing or even my class seriously.  
89 
 
Figure 4: Jose's Pre-Grammar Instruction Writing 
90 
 
 José was placed in a group where Capitalization was stressed, specifically 
capitalization of the first person singular, “I.” In his first submission (above), José was 
not consistent with capitalizing his “I’s.” After about nine weeks of instruction in the 
manner described above, José produced the piece of writing below. Through the writing 
process and peer conferencing over his editing checklist with a classmate, José managed 
to eliminate all of his mistakes in regards to capitalizing “I.” However, he obviously did 
not transfer all of the capitalization rules to his writing.  
91 
 
92 
 
Figure 5: Jose's Writing After Grammar Instruction 
 Also of note: José became much better at getting started. This was something 
that I noticed across all of my classes. I spent a lot less time assisting students in the 
beginning stages of writing. In comparison to the beginning of the year, many more of 
93 
the students get to the work of writing within five minutes of being instructed to begin 
writing workshop activities. This occurs with minimal teacher assistance and, for the 
most part, continues throughout the 15-20 minute time period, only interrupted by a 
student periodically asking for teacher approval, or sharing with a neighbor. Even 
through a poetry unit, which typically causes students all sorts of problems in the initial 
stages, students were more likely to start on their own. From an observation at the 
beginning of the year in my 8
th
 grade class, I noted that 55% of the class required initial 
attention from the teacher before they wrote anything on their paper during writer’s 
workshop. In April, during a poetry unit featuring writer’s workshop in the guise of 
poetry workshop (all of the same rules apply), only 18% of the class required assistance 
of some sort from the teacher before beginning. One of the students only needed to be 
reminded that there were self-starters posted on the board for those who were 
struggling to start. This reflects a change in the way the students feel about writing as 
well as a change in confidence. If they are willing to begin without added impetus from 
the teacher, if signifies that writing has become easier for them, they are less 
intimidated by it, and, although this is a guess based on some few months of 
observations, they might just enjoy it a little more. 
David: Confidence and Ease with the Writing Process 
 Another thing that I noticed was that many of the students demonstrated more 
comfort with the whole writing process. When we began, I was lucky to receive even a 
completed first draft from some of my students. There were very few who proofread, 
revised, edited or even provided a neat final copy. In March, when we completed our 
94 
third grading period and drafts were once again due, there was a remarkable change in 
the number of students who saw the process all the way through to the end. I received 
quite a bit more submitted copies that were legible and showed evidence of editing or 
revision after the first draft. I think that this has happened because I pushed and pushed 
and pushed the importance of revision and a polished product at the end. I modeled 
how to conference with a peer. I took the time to meet with each student for an editing 
conference when assignments were due. The students say that as they adjusted to their 
new freedom, they started to care about the final product because they liked their 
writing more. It is difficult to know for sure why the students have increased time spent 
on final projects, but it is easy to observe that they have, and that this demonstrates 
more care about their writing. After all, I do not force them to conference with peers or 
apply the editing discussed in their conferences with me. 
One particular student, David, an 8
th
 grader, who frequently moaned and 
groaned about any assignment that took longer than five minutes turned in a piece 
about Halloween at the beginning of the year. It was not edited and wasn’t very neatly 
written. I also spent about ten minutes helping him find enough information to fill a 
page, which was the assignment length requirement. He did not care much about what 
his final product looked like and he didn’t want to hear about his spelling, punctuation 
or anything else that might require him to spend more time working on this particular 
piece of writing. This was normal for most of my students at the beginning of the 
95 
year.
 
Figure 6: David's Writing Pre-Grammar Instruction 
However, last grading period, with minimal help from the teaching staff, David 
turned in a poem. The assignment did not require a poem, but permitted it.  
96 
 
I was shocked to find that he had decided to write in this format, one that required a 
little more thinking. He was a student who turned in minimal writing, not even enough 
to meet assignment requirements. Here he was choosing a genre that required him to 
think carefully about words and grouping ideas into stanzas. He even thought he had to 
rhyme his words. He initially started by rhyming it, but after I told him that poetry did 
not require rhyme, he just went with what came into his mind. His finished product 
showed a wonderful difference in his confidence in his writing, his willingness to 
experiment and he even asked a peer for a conference on his conventions and content. I 
think his classmate, one of his best friends, was a little shocked when he read what 
David had written. The spelling is not perfect, and the capitalization and punctuation 
leave something to be desired, but he did most of this on his own, with minor assistance 
from a peer. Also, it was much more neatly written, definitely an attempt at a final draft. 
97 
98 
 
Figure 7: David's Post Grammar Instruction Writing 
 This was a pattern that I noticed throughout all of my classes, as well. Many of 
the students were turning in something that could be called a final draft. Many were 
typed and those that were not were neatly written. I only had one or two students per 
class who were not going through the entire process eventually. 
Frustrations to the Process of Research and In-Context 
Teaching Method 
 There are a lot of obstacles to teaching in this manner. The biggest one that I 
encountered was the new routines that needed to be mastered, both by student and 
teacher. We spent a lot of time focused on learning how to learn in this new way. The 
students had to learn to come into the classroom and get their materials for the day 
right away. The students were used to more hands on activities and they had to learn to 
sit and be attentive for 10 minutes during focus lessons. The students had to learn the 
proper procedure for requesting peer conferences. They had to learn how to finish a 
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draft early enough that the teacher could assist in editing. The students were not the 
only ones who ran into adjustment issues. 
 I had to learn to lesson plan using a writer’s workshop. I had to figure out how to 
differentiate instruction using in-context grammar instruction. I eventually came up with 
a three group rotation that allowed me to design the grammar lessons for a specific 
group of students. I had to learn what writer’s workshop was all about so that I could 
clearly explain it to my students and allow them the illusion of freedom while still 
making it clear that they had to work. I also had to learn how to assist in editing without 
marking all over a student’s paper. It was tough on all of us. The only answer for this 
problem is time, time and determination to continue to try. It is also important that the 
trying be systematic. I need to maintain this new purposeful way of making decisions in 
my classroom. We need time to perfect these routines. We need time to learn about 
being a writing community in a classroom. 
 Another obstacle to teaching in-context grammar is the time schedule of a 
normal high school. There are only five 50-minute periods in a week and those must be 
split among writing, reading, analyzing literature and words, revising, editing, 
comprehension, and so on. A block schedule would be more appropriate. The problem 
was that we were always on the verge of getting into a lesson when the bell rang and 
we were done. Some days we did not even get to the writing because we took too long 
to get through the lesson. 
 A huge obstacle that came in the beginning of the year was the students’ 
negative opinion of reading and writing. The intensity of the apathy or hate that the 
100 
students felt for these activities could be specific to my particular school and student 
population. However, it was a large hurdle to overcome. I spent a lot of time waxing 
poetic on the benefits of reading and writing, how they were important to life, why they 
could be pleasurable. I was lucky that we had already established a rapport and the 
students trusted my word. They were willing to listen to what I had to say and they were 
willing to try. Most teachers don’t get this advantage. 
 A similar issue that a teacher who adopts this pedagogy will face is the obstacle 
of the students’ grammar readiness. This idea came as a bit of a surprise in my interview 
with my co-teacher. He said: “grammar instruction is probably irrelevant if they don’t 
care about writing to begin with” (Interview 7). There were also multiple observances, 
some in my journal, that lead to the same idea. The observances from my journal can be 
seen in my data analysis memo on the topic (See Appendix B).  
 This would seem to almost kill my study, but it doesn’t. It narrows it. Just 
because not every student will benefit from grammar instruction, doesn’t mean that we 
shouldn’t teach it. Also, even though I haven’t been actively using Weaver’s or 
Anderson’s techniques with my oldest class of students, the percentage of these 
students who care about improving their writing, is larger than younger classes. It is 
reasonable to guess that this percentage will grow larger as students get older. 
However, there are students in all of my classes that care about improving their writing. 
 In addition, there are aspects of grammar that can be taught to those who do 
not care about their writing, and those should be addressed. Lessons on sentence 
101 
structure are particularly important. Plus, though I hate to mention it, grammar does 
show up on state tests and so cannot be ignored for that reason. 
 Lastly, since student attitude toward writing appears to have improved, and the 
impetus for the big change in pedagogy this year has been in-context grammar 
instruction, it is logical to guess that a more efficient program of in-context grammar 
instruction could further improve student attitude toward writing. 
102 
 
CONCLUSION: THE CHANGING WAY WE TALK ABOUT GRAMMAR 
When I began my teaching career, grammar was just another subject that got 
looped into the English/Language Arts curriculum, like reading and writing. These were 
three separate things to be considered. They were certainly related and none of them 
belonged in any other content area, but they were still separate. I learned them 
separately, and subconsciously, I planned to teach them separately. I was told by my 
college professors that they were to be taught in conjunction, but it wasn’t a philosophy 
that was covered well. Regardless, it was a tidbit that my brain found useful enough to 
store. 
In my first year classroom, when I saw how shockingly low the writing ability 
was, we talked about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and all of the other eight parts 
of speech. Most of my students were two grades below where they should have been, 
or worse! I had little sea-themed elementary style posters with all of the parts of 
speech, examples and definitions on them. They stayed up in my room all year round. I 
tried worksheets on each of the parts of speech. I tried diagramming sentences. I taught 
quotation marks and commas and colons. I tried grammar exercises that were printed 
out from the internet or self-created. I tried getting the students to create games to 
help them learn the parts of speech. I could frequently be heard saying things like, 
“Okay, what is a noun again? If you can’t explain it, can you give me an example?” We 
103 
were still struggling with these questions at the end of the year. I knew I wasn’t going to 
get more than a blank look when I asked a more advanced question such as, “Where is 
the verb in your sentence?” I was at a loss. 
This is the language of Traditional Grammar. It has only the most cursory 
relationship with writing, and the two are not friendly. This is the language that was 
spoken in my 8
th
 grade year. It was the language of my graduate level grammar class in 
college. It was a refreshing challenge to me because I had to expand my thinking in 
order to encompass this new way of thinking and talking. I never looked at my writing 
and thought, you know what would make this sentence? A participial phrase! Grammar 
was like solitaire or the Mensa challenge puzzles you can buy in collections from the 
bookstore. Writing was something that happened deep in the back of my brain. The 
words just magically came out. The two were not connected, not even in my thinking. 
Looking back, it seems that I understood that grammar should feed writing 
instruction, but I used writing as a diagnostic tool for grammar instruction, and then I 
treated grammar as if it were more important than writing. I eventually abandoned it 
when I didn’t see any improvement in student writing. Writing was important, but I 
knew that grammar, at least that kind of grammar had no place in the education of my 
population of students. My students were high risk for dropping out. I needed them to 
see the point in school, and if they didn’t, I needed to sneak in the important stuff while 
I could. Traditional Grammar is not the important stuff to a below poverty level child 
who thinks that his biggest goal in life will be to work at a local fast food restaurant with 
104 
his mother or deal marijuana downtown so that he can finally have the kind of jeans he 
likes. Grammar was coming between us. It had to go. 
At the beginning of my second year of teaching, those same sea-themed parts of 
speech posters went back up on the walls, but we didn’t talk about them. On the off 
chance that I said something like, “you have no verb in this sentence,” and a student 
would ask what a verb was, I would point silently to the wall and move to the next 
student. I voiced nothing about grammar. I figured, they should know it, and if they 
didn’t, they had to learn it on their own, because we had more important things to 
worry about, like spelling or reading comprehension. I was leaving them behind and I 
didn’t even care. It bothered me, at first, but I let my helplessness lull me into 
complacency, and from complacency, I moved to purposeful ignorance. 
This is the language of no grammar instruction. The crazy thing was, the writing 
improved. It is possible that I simply became a better and more experienced teacher. It 
is possible that because we didn’t spend nine weeks on Traditional Grammar 
instruction, we were able to spend more time on writing instruction, and writing gets 
better with practice. It is also possible that the students were more focused on writing 
because they weren’t worried about where the comma was supposed to go, or whether 
the end point went inside the quotation marks or outside of them. My students were 
less worried about whether or not they were following all of the rules in this writing 
activity, and more worried about telling a good story, or getting their facts straight. I 
wasn’t teaching them grammar, and I was not sorry. However, mechanics were not 
improved at all and the content was only slightly improved. In fact, there weren’t any 
105 
good writers in the bunch. They didn’t use description, figurative language, or sound 
devices. There was little sentence variation and verb tense was all over the place within 
one piece of writing, but the writing was the upper side of mediocre, instead of less 
than mediocre. I was less disappointed, and sometimes, I thought, that was all you could 
ask for. 
This year, my third as a teacher, we talked about the way writers use language in 
their writing. “Cool words” were a frequent topic of discussion. We collected them like 
different species of butterflies and pinned them to our writer’s notebooks, the 
chalkboard, our writing, and sometimes to our very skin when paper wasn’t handy. 
Students traded them like old school baseball cards and candy. We talked about 
compound sentences and why they sounded better mixed in with all of the simple 
sentences, the way a room full of plain girls will make the few attractive ones that much 
cuter. Instead of staring blankly when asked for a verb or noun, the students were 
treasure hunting for them in their favorite books and racing to the board to smack them 
up there in the best place to create new and crazy sentences. We were interacting with 
words in new ways. There was a sense of excitement about reading and writing. 
Grammar became a little less like a set of rigid rules and more like a compound that 
suddenly made language malleable and moldable. 
This is the language of grammar instruction in-context. My students were more 
interested in writing than they had ever been before. I had them coming up to me 
before, during and after class, slipping me poems, hand-drawn comics, and pages and 
pages of story. They were excited to write. Reading on Fridays was like ice cream. They 
106 
begged, wheedled, and connived to get more of it. In-context instruction did not greatly 
improve everyone’s use of grammar and mechanics. We spent a lot of time getting used 
to new routines. I spent a lot of time and energy getting them to meet deadlines. It was 
very tiring. It was a lot of work but mostly because I had to change almost everything 
about the way I taught. I am still glad that I did. 
107 
APPENDIX A: STUDENT HANDOUTS 
Personal Spelling List
2
                                                      
2
 Adapted from Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle, p. 501 
108 
Procedures for Independent Word Study 
1. Copy no more than five words from your Personal Spelling List or Personal 
Vocabulary List into the first column of your Independent Word Study form. 
Copy exactly as the words appear on your list: don’t learn misspellings. And 
print, so you can see the individual letters. 
2. Now, read the first word: look at it and say it. 
3. Spell the word to yourself: touch each letter with your pencil and say each 
letter to yourself. 
4. Close your eyes. See the word in your mind. Say each of the individual letters 
to yourself again. 
5. Take a short break to give your long term memory time to process the look of 
the word, its letters and their order. 
6. In the meantime, grab a dictionary or refer to your Personal Vocabulary List 
and copy the definition of the word onto your form. 
7. Now, back to the spelling: cover the correct spelling and print the word in the 
second column. 
8. Proofread: check the word you just wrote, letter for letter, against the original. 
9. If you spelled the word correctly, put a star in the third column and go on to the 
next word on your Personal Spelling List or Personal Vocabulary List. If you 
misspelled it, repeat steps two through five and step seven, this time printing 
the word in the third column. 
 
Procedures for Spelling and Vocabulary Reviews in Pairs 
Tester: Say the word, use it in a sentence, and say it again. 
Printer: Print the word. 
Go through the whole list this way. Then: 
Tester: Spell each word out loud, slowly. 
Speller: Proofread by touching each letter of each word with your pencil. Circle any 
errors: just the part you missed. Then, with a star or checkmark, highlight the words on 
your Personal Spelling List or Personal Vocabulary List that you spelled correctly 
in the review. Circle any words you missed, and study them again next week.
109 
 
Root Word Reference Sheet 
Root act 
 
aud 
 
cred 
 
dic 
Meaning do hear believe speak
Ch
oose
 5
 
words that use 
the root 
action
      
actor
      
react
      
transact
      
enact
      
Root graph 
 
loc 
 
man 
 
mot 
Meaning write place hand move
Ch
oose
 5
 
words that use 
the root 
      
      
      
      
      
Root ped 
 
pop 
 
port 
 
sign 
Meaning foot people carry mark
Ch
oose
 5
 
words that use 
the root 
      
      
      
      
      
 
Root spec 
 
tract 
 
vid 
 
volve 
Meaning see pull, drag see roll
Ch
oose
 5
 
words that use 
the root 
      
      
      
      
      
110 
Weekly Root Word Study Worksheet 
 
Root: 
 
Definition: 
111 
Word Sort Instructions Handout
3
 
Monday 
Demonstration   
The teacher will introduce your new words and categories. We will identify 
patterns and begin the word sort together. 
Sort and Check 
(Individually or 
with a partner) 
 
1. Sort your words alone or with another student in your group. 
2. Say the word and then place it in the column you think it belongs in. 
3. If there are any words you are unsure about, set them to the side. 
4. I will come around to check on you when you are done. 
5. Copy your sort into your notebook. 
Reflect   
Make a statement about your word sorts. Think about these questions: 
 What do you notice about the words in each column? 
 How are the sounds in the words alike? 
 What kind of pattern do you notice? 
 Are any of these words similar in meaning? 
 
Wednesday 
Extend 
  
Choose one of the following activities and complete it according to 
instructions: 
1. Speed Sort 
2. Blind Sort 
3. See activities for your word study level 
  
Friday 
  
 
 
                                                      
3
 Adapted from Words Their Way by Bear, Invernezzi, Tempelton and Johnston 
112 
 
APPENDIX B: DATA ANALYSIS 
Data Analysis: Procrastination of Grammar Instruction 
Teacher Journal 
10/4: we have barely been writing anything meaningful yet and this makes things 
difficult. Without seeing the student’s writing, I cannot format grammar lessons. I need 
to get them writing. 
-I worry about the usefulness of such studies, especially when I have so much grammar 
and writing to get in. 
10/5: I think that the periods are too short this week to really get anything 
accomplished. 
10/6: We tried to do a little drafting today and my three talkative students seemed to 
struggle with what they were going to write for me. For some reason, there isn’t a lot of 
reliance on the WNB. I wonder why and how I could fix this. 
-Many expressed a worry about getting some writing done in time for the deadline. 
10/7: We didn’t do anything other than this today and I still had to assist quite a bit. 
-Word studies today. Again, this is all we got done. I need to change this. I think it might 
actually be cutting into the flow of reading and writing. I want them to increase 
113 
vocabulary but this is too much. Plus, I haven’t really even introduced a grammar topic 
yet! 
10/8: I also talked to the kids and we decided that we are cutting down Word Studies to 
every other week instead. I think this will give all of us a break and I can fill the time with 
grammar or writing. 
-We had zero time in this class. 
Memo 
I am beginning to notice that I am spending more time on house-keeping and 
preparing for the grammar studies than actually doing the grammar studies. This is 
awful! I only have so many weeks left and I need to buckle down and see if what I think 
will actually work. I notice that I complain about time a lot. I know that part of this is just 
the kids getting used to new ideas and rituals. The other half is my fear of being 
unprepared and then failing when the actual grammar instruction takes place. I think I 
need to just jump in. 
 The other problem is that I don’t know where to start. One of my classmates 
from my educational research class and I started talking about this and it has been 
weighing on me. I need to just take a breath and jump in and then adjust as I need to. I 
do this with everything else I teach. I don’t know what the problem is here. Also, writing 
attitude doesn’t seem to be changing too much, since we don’t write a whole lot. The 
only thing that seems to be a great motivator thus far is the fact that I am not reading 
114 
their pre-writes. This seems to open up a lot of kids, taking away the fear of being 
judged. 
115 
 
Data Analysis: Student Grammar Readiness 
Teacher Journal 
10/12: Oh, my God! This was a disaster! I tried to do the Sentence Smack Down activity 
with this class. They were out of control today. 
10/13: Same activity today. Went waaay better. I made my own worksheet and I used 
my Tibetan singing bell to manage the activity. I also gave the instructions one at a time. 
10/14: We did a little more of the sentence structure stuff. This did not go so well. As 
soon as we got some more complex sentences, they got lost, which I should have 
expected. I need to back it up a little more. I also need to segue into how this is useful 
for them. 
10/18: Then I started going over the dialogue rules. I asked them to highlight what they 
got right or fix what they got wrong. A lot of talking. Very few indented correctly. Four 
students used quotations. Most capitalized the first word inside the quotations. 
10/20: I introduced peer editing today. It seemed to go alright. The kids were a little too 
eager to fork over their papers. I had to ask them to stop before I could explain 
everything. 
11/9: Eight of the students were with me working on complex sentences, or adding on 
without running on. I don’t know how to check if they get this other than to sneak into 
later writing and see if they use it. One girl wanted to make compound sentences, David 
116 
didn’t know to add, and another girl got it solid. Toya wanted to do a comma splice. 
Jason got upset again and I had to fight him to get him to work. 
11/10: This was miserable. I tried to get them to apply the concept to their own writing. 
I reviewed it and then asked them to find the sentences in their own writing. If they 
couldn’t find any, I asked them to add one somewhere. Toya is still splicing. Justin was 
doing compound sentences. Taylor kept saying he was sick and left for a bit. […]Three of 
the boys at the lowest table needed a lot of direct help. This idea is not ripe enough in 
their heads to be applied to their writing. 
I think I need to have them creative new before I have them fix the old. Maybe this 
means that students need to create before they can fix. 
11/17: There isn’t a whole lot of integration into their writing and I worry about skipping 
a day for word studies. 
Four of my more advanced students all showed me examples that were incorrect. None 
were indented and some wasn’t even dialogue, just parts of text with quotations around 
them. I need to re-cover this somehow. I think my two most advanced female writers 
have it down. I showed them how to do it while they were typing their own work. 
Interview: 
DL: I feel like [grammar is] something that should come 
after they’re comfortable with writing. 
DL: I don’t think the grammar part’s having any impact on 
him, really, but I think he’s becoming more 
comfortable with doing the writing in class, to the 
117 
point where he doesn’t need as much prodding to get 
the process started. And like any of the other ones, I 
don’t think that instruction’s really gonna take until 
they feel they have something to apply it to. Until 
they want to improve their writing. Because, 
otherwise, you’re just teaching them something they 
don’t care about. But once they care about writing, 
and they care about their own writing and what you 
think about their writing, then they’re going to want 
to improve it. 
DL: So, again, it’s probably the same thing. I’m trying to 
get them to the point where they want to make their 
writing improve and I never actually thought about 
this before, until just saying it, but, you know, 
grammar instruction is probably irrelevant if they 
don’t care about writing to begin with. 
DL: I think he actually cares about making it sound better 
and the subtleties of writing, I think, matter to him, 
more than other people. Because he’s to the point 
where he’s confident enough that he’s got some skill 
in writing, but he also knows that, if you serve it up 
looking like trash, the ideas don’t even matter 
because it’s sitting in a trash can. So, it’s all 
about the presentation, and even when he talks about 
118 
writing his rap, especially when he talks about 
writing his rap, it was all about he wanted to make 
sure that the flow was right. He wanted to make sure 
he wasn’t rhyming something for the sake of rhyming 
it. He wanted to make sure that he broke the lines 
where he wanted people to look at it and wanted the 
emphasis. And that directly translates into grammar, 
to punctuation. So, I mean, somebody like him, who 
actually cares about it? Totally. I mean, the 
opportunities are kinda endless. 
Memo: 
 Wow! This is an interesting idea that could affect how I will continue this 
research. I understand that we cannot just NOT teach grammar because kids are not 
ready to receive it, but what can we do to encourage students to become ready to 
receive it? Also of note: students can vary in when they are ready to receive grammar 
instruction. Every class of 7
th
 grade and up that I teach has at least a few students ready 
to receive grammar instruction. The percentages increase as the students get older, but 
I cannot ignore the younger ones. Lastly, an interesting thought: what grammar can we 
teach to students who are not yet grammar-ready and how can we increase the chances 
of instruction being meaningful? 
119 
Data Analysis: Student Eagerness for Approval from the 
Teacher 
Teacher Journal 
10/6: Lisa and Justin seemed very excited to show me their work. I like to encourage this 
but I simply don’t have time to read all of the drafts. 
Michael showed me his draft from P1 and it was about a man finding peace. I told him 
that I really liked it and found it to be deep. He disagreed. 
Two students from P3 keep giving me their stories to read. 
10/14: Tim said, “don’t that sound good! I am a beast writer! I should write stories.” He 
was also really excited to read it to me. 
10/20: Ethan got very stubborn and refused to participate. He requested to be sent to 
the office, so I did. When Levstek had him down there, he started tipping chairs and 
crying. He told me that he didn’t want to share with anyone. I tried to make him and I 
guess I shouldn’t have. 
10/25: The students were very eager to share theirs, and they did a good job. I had more 
kids that wanted to read but class was over. I paused periodically to read aloud a 
student’s writing who was managing well. 
New student volunteered to read. So did Steve. A few others wanted to read but we ran 
out of time. 
11/17: Four boys all showed me examples that were incorrect. 
120 
Interview: 
DL: Most of them don’t have confidence, even those that 
enjoy writing, don’t have confidence in their writing. 
Because those that enjoy writing, the first thing that 
they always do is, hey, look at this, hey, read this. 
What do you think? Do you think it’s okay? And I don’t 
think they’re doing that for the pure bouncing idea 
off somebody else. I think they’re looking for—for 
some sort of gratification. And they want that and 
they desperately need that. 
Memo: 
 There are a lot more times above that students asked me to read their writing. 
Even when I tell them to have their peers read it and ask for help, they still come to me. 
They ask what I think more often than anything else. Rarely do they ask for help with 
their grammar or spelling. 
 This is rather interesting. Even students like Ethan, who doesn’t seem to like me 
too awfully much, is constantly asking me for my opinion of his writing. He won’t show 
his to any of the students, either. Perhaps the issue is that he is afraid they will laugh at 
his poor spelling or frequent slang. He knows that we won’t laugh at him for that, I 
guess. 
 This is an interesting motivation for students to write. I wonder how I could play 
on this to get them to write more.   
121 
APPENDIX : HUMAN SUBJECTS RESEARCH APPROVAL 
Protocol Number: 80-2011 
 
 
 
 
122 
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