How to Teach Writing with Digital Media with Dr. Sarah Levine #6 Ranked Episode on the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast

Announcer (00:00)
This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:04)
As we’re counting down our top 10 episodes of all time for the 10 Minute Teacher, today we’re coming in at number six with How to Teach Writing with Digital Media, with Dr. Sarah Levine. This one received 25,026 downloads.

Vicki Davis (00:24)
Today we’re talking with Dr. Sarah Levine. She’s assistant professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She has spent 10 years in secondary English, and now her research focuses on teaching and learning of literary interpretation and writing in under-resourced urban high schools. And so, Sarah, we are talking today about using digital media to teach writing. And isn’t writing a challenge right now as we’re going back to school in fall 2021?

Sarah Levine (00:59)
Yes, it’s a challenge. It’s always been a challenge. It’s such a difficult thing to teach, in part, I think, because — as any teacher in the classroom knows — half the time your kids are wondering why it is that they have to write anything. Especially if you just had a discussion about something and now you’re supposed to write about that thing. And the kids are wondering why, we just talked about it. Or, who’s going to read this besides you, the teacher? And I think that’s where things get really challenging.

Vicki Davis (01:30)
They can. And I always talk about, we don’t want wastebasket work. We want to publish for an authentic audience when we can.

Sarah Levine (01:35)
Yeah, I completely agree. And it can be really hard to create those authentic audiences. It takes a lot of work sometimes. For example, let’s say you wanna have a trial, you wanna put a character on trial, you wanna bring somebody in who’s gonna act as a judge, somebody who isn’t you. Or let’s say you wanna publish a review on Amazon. Or let’s say you want to have a poetry slam. All of those things take a lot of work and coordination.

And one of the things I’ve been working on — both when I was an English teacher at the high school level and also here now at Stanford — is using audio. That is, especially podcasting, but it’s really even simpler than podcasting. It really is just recording on your phone. Using audio as a way to create authentic writing with authentic audiences.

And one of the interesting things that I’ve been kind of looking into lately is how, for a lot of kids, you don’t need a gigantic audience for something to be important. Sometimes just one person really is enough. For example, I’ve been working on these little things called audio gifts. So this is a memory that a kid might have about someone special in their lives. And they’re going to tell the story of that memory and give that memory as a gift to whoever that person is in their life.

And we have been finding, in the research that we’ve been doing, that kids care just as much about making that gift work for that one person as they do as if they were going to be published on public radio, or on a commercial radio station with a ton of people listening.

Vicki Davis (03:20)
What a fascinating idea. So as they’re preparing their audio gift, are they — I assume — writing and preparing that script to prepare to read it? Is there a process involved?

Sarah Levine (03:33)
Yeah, there is a process. And so there’s lots of ways you can go about kind of scaffolding for this final product. One way to start is simply by having kids listen to a bunch — let’s say five or 10 different audio stories, especially if they’re done by kids. And I can give you a couple of links where you can listen to, for free, stories written by high school students.

So the first thing you might want to do is have your students listen to a bunch of those stories and then compare them to one another. Ask the students to start building criteria. Which stories did they like the best? Which seemed most effective to them? Which moved them the most? And then, how did those stories do that? And what students will come to, when they’ve listened to, let’s say, five different stories and said, oh, I really like that third one — because I could really see it, I could see what they were talking about, I could feel what they were feeling — what they’ll get to is that the language that the students are using when they’re producing these pieces is what makes those pieces effective.

And when you think about writing for radio or writing for audio, you’ve got some really good built-in principles for good writing. Like, for example, when you’re writing for radio, first of all, your story has to mean something. It can’t be, like you say, just waste paper basket writing. It has to be a story that is specific. It needs concrete images and detailed examples, because people won’t have anything to look at. It’s not a movie. You’ve got to make that movie with your words. It has to be a piece where you’re not wasting words. It has to be a piece that has strong verbs. It has to be a piece without cliches.

So these are all things we want students to be doing anyway. It’s just that when you’re writing for audio, every one of those rules becomes more important. So as your kids listen to these different pieces, they can begin, with your help, to kind of develop these criteria. Like, oh, they had really strong verbs. Or, I could really see what they were talking about when they used that image.

And then you want to set up a couple of lessons where they’re practicing, for example, using strong verbs. Where they’re practicing getting rid of — first figuring out what cliches are, and then trying to get rid of them. Like a lesson where you say, you know, “I had blank in my stomach,” and everybody says butterflies. That’s a cliche. So now we’re not going to use that cliche anymore. We’re gonna try to come up with other ways to help express nervousness that don’t have to do with butterflies in the stomach.

Then the second part of the lesson is having kids think about different memories that are important to them, and important to one other person, living or dead, that they can remember and re-describe on tape. And then prepare that script, as you’re talking about, to give to that special person. Like, my aunt — you know, I remember that day when we… and describe that memory so that we can hear it and see it and taste it and touch it just like you did.

And then, once they’ve done writing their script, then they can practice recording on a smartphone, for example. And then they’re giving that little clip of sound to that one person. They’re sharing it with that one person. And that’s where the stakes are. That’s what makes it authentic.

Vicki Davis (07:11)
I love it. In particular — it’s an older book now — the first book I co-authored, with another person, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds, we talked about connecting with many different audiences. And one thing that we said in the book is that connecting with multiple ages — the generation behind you, the generation in front of you — multiple ages actually adds more meaning to everything, but it also adds meaning to your life as you make those connections with multiple ages. So I absolutely love that. Now, do you have any examples of projects that students have done that really stick out in your mind?

Sarah Levine (07:45)
Yeah, I got a couple that really have stayed with me. One is, a kid was remembering this time that she went to Chuck E. Cheese with her mom when she was little. And she remembered how they went in and she got a bunch of tokens, and how she played these different games with her mom, and the sounds of Chuck E. Cheese. And in fact, this kid went back to Chuck E. Cheese and recorded some of that sound and put it in the background of her piece. And how they ate pizza together.

And she wanted to share this memory with her mom because now that she’s a teenager, they’ve been fighting. They fight, you know, a lot. And she wanted to just kind of share this memory with her mom to tell her, I’m still here. I’m still your kid. You haven’t lost me, you know. And I’ll come back around.

And then another great one was a kid who wrote about remembering how her aunt, who was living with her, was working so hard. And one night her aunt came home from work and she was just crying because she missed her kids who were at home in Mexico. And this writer, this student writer, wanted to let her aunt know how much she loved her, and that if she could do anything in the world for her aunt, she would bring her kids over on the airplane and she would set them up in first class and she would bring them so that they, you know, walked right into the Chicago airport and they could hug each other and see each other again.

It’s just, you know, these kind of little pieces of memories that allow someone that you care about to know that you love them and that you see them.

Vicki Davis (09:21)
Wow. And so I assume — I mean, you can even text these or email these after you create your product. And you hate to even call it a product, because it truly is a gift, isn’t it?

Sarah Levine (09:31)
Yeah, that’s why I like this particular approach. And we often would do these around the holidays, but you really can do them anytime. But the idea is, I’m creating this memory for you. So I really want it to be right, and I want it to represent that memory correctly. And it’s easier for kids, you know, to care about that than it is like, OK, I guess I’m going to revise my essay on The Great Gatsby — even though that’s important.

Even though that’s important too, this is something that still allows students to use strong writing skills, to refine their writing, to practice important, useful word choice — but something that they also can give to somebody outside of school that they care about.

Vicki Davis (10:11)
Well, and when they’ve learned to remove the cliches, learned to use stronger verbs, and learned all of these skills to create this audio gift — then that does carry forward to their Great Gatsby essay, doesn’t it?

Sarah Levine (10:24)
Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Well, I mean, there’s a couple of things. So one of them is, obviously writing an essay about Great Gatsby is a different kind of writing. But I think what it does, if you’re going to write another narrative like your college essay, for example — well, then all of those skills apply. Choosing a story that’s meaningful, finding a particular moment to write about, using strong verbs. All of those things apply.

And I think it also applies to reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, or The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and saying, oh, let’s check out his verbs. He’s clearly trying something here with those verbs. I’m just going to check them out and see what they do, what kind of work they do.

Vicki Davis (11:07)
Okay, so Sarah, so you have teachers that are sold. They’re ready to go. Where do they start?

Sarah Levine (11:13)
I would start by going to a website called prx.org. And I’ll actually give you a couple of links that will take you specifically to some of these audio gifts that I was just talking about, and have teachers listen to a couple of those just to get a feel for what they’re like. Choose a couple that they might want their own students to listen to.

And then begin developing probably a three- to four-week writing unit, depending on your time, that goes from listening to stories, to having kids build criteria for what makes a good story, to having kids decide for themselves what kind of moments, what kind of gifts do I think I might want to write about, to having kids kind of lay those out and pick the one they think might be the best, to having them outline the story, to having them work on the verbs, to having them cut it down, edit it — and then to begin recording.

And practicing recording is also a whole thing, because, you know, you can sound really stilted and unnatural. So you got to learn to speak to the person you’re talking to as if they were, like, a real live, honest-to-God person.

Vicki Davis (12:23)
Well, and I’m sitting here thinking, I can use it to teach Adobe Audition, which is an editing software that I use for my own podcast. So I could even incorporate that with writing, because all of our classes have to teach writing.

Sarah Levine (12:34)
Oh, yeah. And I mean, if you really want to dive in, you know, get the kids working on something like audacity.com, which is free, or another editing software, and they can spend a week putting in music, putting in sound, editing. It’s a whole other set of skills.

Vicki Davis (12:50)
Love this idea. So, Dr. Sarah Levine from Stanford Graduate School of Education — thank you for this gift of audio gifts. This is fantastic. I’ve literally never heard of this idea, but it’s just so transformational. And then having multiple literacies involved, and multiple modes of communication, does add meaning. And I love this. So thank you for this best practice.

Sarah Levine (13:18)
Oh, yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for talking with me.

Announcer (13:21)
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