Writing Archives

Taking Notes About College Visits

October 1, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Type “college tour bingo” into Google Images, and up pop rows of gridded phrases such as “A capella groups!” “The library is open 24/7 during finals!” “Lots of students enter with undecided majors!” Jokes like these related to college visits are no surprise to anyone who’s toured a few colleges — the ubiquity of these phrases is the point.

But the cards highlight a more serious reality. Even as colleges strive to stand out from their rivals, once an applicant has toured a few campuses (virtually or in person), they can start sounding the same. And the colleges’ problem later becomes the applicant’s problem. If the schools sound the same during the tours and information sessions — while the applicant is on campus — they will be even harder to distinguish months after the visit, when the student is completing applications, and months after that, when the applicant is choosing where to enroll.

Our solution to this dilemma: take college visits notes.

We advise students to always bring two pens and a notebook on their campus visits. If it’s cold outside, bring a pencil too, as pens freeze easily. The notebook should be small enough to hold in one hand, to make it easy to write while walking. As for what to write down, students should record the names of any faculty or staff they meet. If they visit a dorm, they should jot down the name. If they sit in on a class — which we recommend — they should write down the course title and the professor. If the student asks a question during a tour or information session, they should take notes on the answer. Not only will the notes jog the student’s memory later, but the act of taking college visits notes keeps the student engaged in the moment. And we do specifically recommend that students use paper for campus visit notes. Taking notes on a phone looks a lot like texting, so an applicant working on their screen runs the risk of appearing disengaged and disrespectful.

We advise a bit more note taking as soon as the applicant leaves campus. On the visit, applicants take notes based on observation — who they meet, what they learn. Afterwards, it’s time to reflect. How does the applicant feel about the school? Why do they feel that way? What did they think of the academic programs they heard about? That class they observed? The chance to pursue their favorite extracurriculars? The general mood and vibe on campus? What do they not want to forget? Gut feeling: would they be happy here?

The reflection doesn’t have to take long. We recommend writing for 7 to 10 minutes, just long enough for the student to work out their initial impressions. They don’t need to compose paragraphs, or even complete sentences. A list is fine. And while writing by hand has cognitive benefits, they can write this part on their phones, if they like. They can also snap photos of their notebook pages, to store all of their notes from college visits together digitally.

Ultimately, of course, not all colleges are the same. Occasionally, applicants step onto a campus and immediately feel at home; that’s an experience they won’t forget. But students generally apply to several schools, and the entire concept of applying to college — and choosing one, the biggest decision of applicants’ lives so far — can be so intimidating that the details of the schools get flattened in the applicant’s memory. Taking notes about college visits helps to demystify and deescalate that process. The little notebook will help students’ applications go more smoothly, and it will make it easier for students to choose the right school in the end.

Then, with this informed decision made, they can begin preparing for the next “game.” We’re referring, of course, to “first-year orientation bingo.”

By Elizabeth Walters, MFA, and Faya Hoffman, College Counselor and Board Certified Educational Planner

Simple Advice for a Great School Year: Planning and Organizational Systems

September 28, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

If you ask students what it takes to get good grades, many would probably say “being smart” and “studying hard.” But after years of working with students of all ages, it is clear that the key to scholastic success really comes from developing a plan and working hard to stick to that plan. We often support this planning and persistence with executive function coaching in order to help our students develop strong organizational systems and systematic processes. Here is some simple advice for students to help start the school year off right.

Take Stock of Your Strengths and Areas for Growth

To start, it is important to take stock of your strengths and relative weaknesses as a learner. What do you already do well and where can you improve? What types of organizational systems do you already have in place? What were your pain points last school year? Be introspective. No one is perfect. We all have strengths and relative weaknesses, and identifying them early in the school year can be extremely helpful.

Take Responsibility for Yourself

Part of identifying room for improvement and then setting goals and developing organizational systems means taking responsibility for yourself, your decisions and your actions. While this means different things for students of different ages, it’s important to understand that while other people can support or distract you from this responsibility, it is essential to focus on how to improve yourself rather than only looking at others’ actions. Obstacles present opportunities, and you can’t let your plan be thwarted because you don’t like a particular teacher, or you find a particular text boring, or you can’t seem to ignore certain peer influences. You have to take control and acknowledge that you are making conscious choices.

Focusing on your own actions means, as the old saying goes, “honesty is the best policy.” This means both being honest with others and yourself about, for example, how much work you have and what your other responsibilities are. Be realistic when planning how much time to set for each assignment. Misleading yourself or others about how much homework you have will only create more stress in the long-run. You don’t want to be in a position where you are handing in late or incomplete work. Meeting deadlines is an important lifelong skill that takes practice. It’s almost always a bad idea to penalize yourself unnecessarily with reduced grades because of late work. To mitigate this sort of situation, it’s critical to have strong organizational systems in place.

Commit To Organizational Systems That Work For You

But how do you stay on top of everything? Commit to organizational systems that work for you. Whether you prefer a paper planner, keeping track of your assignments online, or a hybrid system, choose the method that works for you and stick with it. Make sure you update your planner every day and actually check it. While digital planning and calendaring works for many students, sometimes “old school,” more concrete methods are better, such as a wipe-off wall calendar using markers and/or post-it notes.

In order to avoid academic burnout, be sure to make time to do the things you love during the school year, whether it’s sports, music, video games, or just hanging out with friends. But also make sure that you aren’t using your favorite activities to procrastinate your school work too much. Moderation is key. On busy school nights, set timers for how long you are going to spend on breaks. Successful organizational systems include time for self care and recharging, though not every week may be equally well balanced.

Most importantly, remember that learning is a process, not simply checking things off of a list. This is particularly important on writing-based tasks where you should not be satisfied until you have edited, edited, and done more editing (and sought feedback from others!). In math, keep trying different ways to solve a problem until you have figured it out. The process in both subjects — or any subject — is more important than just getting the answer or completing the task.

And if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask! Organizational systems need continuous refinement at all stages of life as we incrementally take on more responsibility. Executive function coaching, content support, and test preparation can take on many shapes and sizes in order to best fit the situation. Ask your teachers, parents and/or academic coaches for help when you need it and take advantage of help when it’s offered.

For more information about academic tutoring, executive function coaching, and school planning, please contact Brad Hoffman and Faya Hoffman at My Learning Springboard.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

September 16, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Among the genres of writing projects that students experience in upper elementary, middle and high school, the five-paragraph essay is one of the most popular. Well, it’s popular with teachers. With students, just saying the phrase “five-paragraph essay” can evoke audible groans. For those writers, it calls to mind themes of dullness and standardization, a static formula. Yet the form is a valid one for a number of reasons, and in the right conditions, it can encourage creative thinking instead of stifling it. In fact, among the benefits of the five-paragraph essay are valuable opportunities for writers in terms of cognition, rhetoric, and culture.

There’s a reason that Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists “creation” as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or writing an essay, creating something new is a difficult task. A major component of this difficulty is what educators and psychologists call cognitive load, the amount of working memory resources a task demands of the person performing it. In her widely cited article “A Capacity Theory of Writing: Working Memory in Composition,” the educational scholar Deborah McCutchen illustrates the cognitive load of writing: “to compose a text, skilled writers coordinate within working memory planning goals (e.g., plans for content, audience, overall tone, etc.) and product goals (e.g. requirements of grammaticality, plan fulfillment, etc.) while language generation processes retrieve words to express content and organize those words into appropriate text (see Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984 McCutchen, 1994).” Understandably, it can be difficult for a writer to attend to all of these processes at once, and if the cognitive load is too high, the writer might not be able to complete the task. One way to lighten this load is to focus on different aspects of the writing process and product at different times; educators have adopted this principle in frameworks like the 6+1 Writing Traits or Judith Hochman’s Teaching Basic Writing Skills. Because it offers a consistent structure, one of the major benefits of the five-paragraph essay is that once a writer is familiar with it, using that framework for planning frees more of their cognitive load. With their basic organizational scheme already chosen, the writer can attend more fully to other aspects of their work, such as ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.

In thinking of the rhetorical power of the five-paragraph essay form, rather than the total number of paragraphs, we should consider a different number, a bit of a magical number: three. In his book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark discusses the hidden power of numbers in language. Citing examples such as “Moe, Larry, and Curly. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi. Executive, legislative, judicial,” he notes that “In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole.” There’s just something about a set of three things that resounds with people. In allowing the writer to use three body paragraphs to set forth three main points, the five-paragraph essay invites the writer to tap into this power. It is worth noting that three is not the only powerful number. For instance, before they learn the five-paragraph essay form, many students learn the four-paragraph essay, which reemerges occasionally in high school. This form allows students to graduate from three-paragraph essays, whose single body paragraph generally explores one major point, to use two body paragraphs to explore a duality within their topic.

The cultural argument for the five-paragraph essay may, at first, seem self-serving: It is useful because it is widely used. But just as it serves a purpose for writers, it serves a purpose for readers. Faced with this familiar form, readers know to look for a guiding claim or thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. Anticipating how the structure works makes it easier for the reader to comprehend the piece. This is not to say that all five-paragraph essays work the exact same way. As we noted above, the advantage of a familiar structure is to let students concentrate on other aspects of writing, so as students progress, their ideas should grow more sophisticated even within this same form. Their order of body paragraphs should have a perceptible logic, their analyses should be complex, and rather than serving as a simple summary, their conclusion could emphasize the significance of their argument. Even after writers move on to longer and more complex forms, they may still find occasion to access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay. Two of the highest-stakes pieces in high school, the ACT or SAT essay and the main Common Application statement, lend themselves well to the form. In both the ACT and SAT, testers must compose a complete essay in less than an hour. If they enter the test already tentatively knowing what their structure will be, they will save valuable minutes of writing time. The urgency of time is also a factor for the essays’ audiences. Both the test essays and the Common Application essay are read by people who are consuming a high volume of pieces and consuming them quickly — in the case of the application essay, in just a few minutes. It is to the writer’s advantage to make the reader’s job easier by giving them a vivid, specific essay in a structure that is easy to follow.

The students who rail against five-paragraph essays might be surprised to hear that the form is controversial in academia as well; in fact, a new book by the college instructor John Warner, titled Why They Can’t Write, is subtitled Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. While we don’t want to kill the five-paragraph essay, we agree that the form has at least one downside: the potential for overuse. If every piece a student composes is a five-paragraph essay, that’s a problem. No single structure, essay or otherwise, should encompass all of a student writer’s experiences in a school year, or even in a single class. Writers of all ages need opportunities to wrestle with form. We don’t want writers to believe, as even some first-year college students do, that big ideas always come in threes, or that one paragraph is always sufficient for sharing their thoughts on one of those ideas. Notably, hardly any pieces of “real world” writing, including published essays, take the form of a five-paragraph essay. That’s another downside: ultimately, the structure is too simple for public discourse. Even as we help students understand and access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay, we must emphasize that the form acts like a set of writerly training wheels. Eventually, with instructors’ guidance, students need to shift from letting form determine their ideas to letting their ideas determine form. At that point, the training wheels should fall away, and writers will zoom forward, perhaps a little wobbly at times, but entirely under their own power.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor and Writing Coach

5 Pillars of a Strong Reading Program

September 13, 2021 alla Leave a Comment

A strong reading program includes five components (or pillars) that are based on a systematic, explicit research-based approach to phonics instruction as well as addressing reading and writing. Successful implementation requires careful planning and explicit instruction that teaches concepts and skills in a systematic and logical manner as well as using a backward design model to ensure that teaching matches desired learning outcomes. The five pillars of a strong reading program include:

Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words. There are two levels of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the more advanced level and is characterized by a sensitivity to large units of sound such as words, syllables, and syllable parts (onset and rime). According to the National Reading Panel and more current reading research, the two phonemic awareness skills that have the greatest impact on learning to read are segmenting and blending. Phonemic awareness helps students learn to read by forming a connection between visual information about the word as it appears in print and its meaning, pronunciation, and other information in the child’s vocabulary.

Phonics

Phonics is a way of teaching beginning reading and spelling that emphasizes the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonics instruction helps students use these relationships to read and spell rapidly.

Fluency and Expressiveness

Fluency and expressiveness is the ability to read orally with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. A more recent understanding of fluency includes using phrasing and emphasis in a way that makes what is being read sound like spoken language. There is a close relationship between fluency and comprehension. Students with fluency challenges often have challenges with comprehension. There are two instructional approaches usually used to practice reading: guided repeated oral reading and independent silent reading. The National Reading Panel determined that guided repeated oral reading has a significant and positive impact on word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension for students of all ages.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary instruction and repeated contact with vocabulary words is important to the continued development of reading
comprehension and fluency. It is defined as words we need to know to communicate with others and plays an important part in comprehension. Vocabulary instruction can also serve as a springboard for meaningful word study.

Comprehension

Comprehension is the ability to make meaning from print using background knowledge, making predictions, making connections
(text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world), and making inferences. As students age up into the intermediate and upper elementary grades, written output becomes an important measure of comprehension.

Reading and writing are intertwined processes and both have their foundation in oral language development. As students learn about reading, their writing improves and vise versa. To become successful readers and writers, young children — even preschoolers — need to have lots of experience with oral language, phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, concepts about print, and comprehension. This video demonstrates a sample of a strong reading program in a primary classroom.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

First Grade Reading Skills

September 7, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The concepts that young readers learn in preschool, kindergarten and first grade will provide a strong foundation for them as they master more complicated texts in the school years to come. These most basic skills are vital to their future success as readers. Unfortunately, many students do not develop a robust toolbox of strategies when they are young, and they then can fall behind when texts become more sophisticated and content-heavy. In order to succeed in the upper elementary years and beyond, students need to learn critical reading skills and strategies when they are young. The older a student becomes, the more challenging it can be to close the gap and remediate reading instruction.

In first grade, students need to learn:

Comprehension and Metacognitive Strategies

The point of reading is understanding. Students need to notice when the text does not make sense so they can self-correct their mistakes. Students must learn to reread words and sentences and to use pictures and context clues to help understand difficult texts. Without self-correcting strategies, students often have no idea if what they just read is correct or makes sense.

Basic Story Structure (character, setting, problem, solution)

Students who understand the basic elements of a story have a much easier time understanding why and how events occur in the story, which will in turn help their comprehension of the story. Knowing story structure will also help develop students’ writing skills.

Decoding Skills

In order to tackle unfamiliar words students must have solid sound-letter correspondence and be able to blend sounds together. In addition, knowledge of spelling patterns, including silent or “magic” letters and vowel and consonant combinations (ea, th, ch etc.) will help students be able to decode text

Sight Words

Students who have memorized a large vocabulary of high-frequency sight words (i.e. that, are, one, the etc.) will usually be able to read much smoother and faster than those who have not worked on these words at length.

Students who have mastered these concepts by the end of first grade will be well on their way to becoming strong readers in the upper elementary grades. For students who are struggling with these skills, contact us to get started with an individualized plan for literacy development with one of our reading specialists or learning specialists.

By Joanna Brown and Laurie Gross, Reading Specialists

« Previous Page
1
…
5
6
7
8
9
…
47
Next Page »