hecetahead Building Community, Class Discussion, Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, Engagement and Motivation, Social and Emotional Learning

Unmuting Potential: Rethinking Speaking Opportunities Within ERWC to Unleash Student Voices

By Grace Adcock and Cristy Kidd

October 20, 2025 

Grace Adcock
Cristy Kidd

Picture a student in your classroom who has mastered speaking and listening. You probably saw someone who is actively listening, speaking with confidence, informed with facts and ideas, knows when to speak up and when to make space for others, considers counterarguments, and has audience awareness. 

We know, however, that there are barriers keeping students from growing into their potential: anxiety, practice (or lack thereof), past experiences, low confidence and devaluation of their ideas. We must break down these barriers so students can find and use their voice.

Creating Norms and Expectations
The first step is creating norms and expectations around speaking in your classroom. In the HIST (High Impact Strategy Tool Kit) many options already exist.

We found success in using one strategy, “Discussion Norms/Norm Setting,” as a cornerstone in our classrooms throughout the year to establish all speaking and listening norms. It provides space for students to share in the decision-making process around how discussions will work. Choose the norm setting activity that works best for you, use it early in the year as a foundation for your classroom discussions – revisit and reference it often. 


Responding and Modeling

Revisiting norms allows space and time to respond to situations where they have been broken and to model the expected behaviors.  It is important to shut down the harmful behaviors that impede a student’s ability to participate through reframing. Making sure students have had a say in the norms makes them easier to uphold. Reminding students their feelings and experiences are shared by others in the room helps build confidence. Modeling that even teachers get nervous or that speaking is not always easy for us helps to reinforce this. There are many examples in ERWC modules where teachers are asked to model and frontload expectations because it works and supports student learning. 

“Reminding students their feelings and experiences are shared by others in the room helps build confidence.”

Intentionally Planning

When we think about speaking opportunities we offer students we identify reports, speeches, presentations, and class or group discussions. As ERWC teachers, we spend time considering the activities we will keep or cut, the order in which we will present modules to our students, and when we will teach certain skills, but we don’t often consider how we spiral a progression of speaking and listening. 

Once we have set our norms, made efforts to conscientiously break down barriers, the next step is intentionally planning opportunities in the classroom. This starts with the low risk activities we already do: pair share, whip around, single word answers, etc. Not all speaking activities need to be formal; it is imperative to remember that speaking is something students do every day. We must make planned, intentional spaces to support their growth. Just as ERWC modules spiral and follow the arc, we need to spiral and scaffold speaking in our classrooms.   

Like Bloom’s taxonomy shows us a progression of complexity of tasks, the image below illustrates a continuum of low-risk speaking opportunities to high-risk ones. 

These opportunities, especially at the lower level, are not explicitly delineated or spiraled in the ERWC modules. But we know students need to be guided through a variety of activities. We can’t expect them to be successful at the higher risk activities if they do not have the foundation from the lower risk ones; they work hand in hand to build upon each other.  Go back to the ERWC foundation of making decisions: intentionally choose module activities and build a progression. 

Here is a sample from the ERWC unit “Into the Wild”;  We combined activities that exist in the module with our own to carefully plan a progression. 

If after all your careful planning and spiraling, you encounter students who are still struggling, remember there are additional options: one-on-one presentations with you or speaking in front of a small group of trusted classmates, for example. 

As long as you are providing small opportunities for speaking and normalizing it each and every day you will see growth in student’s confidence and skills. Progress is the goal, it looks different for each student, and it can only be measured individually against their own growth. It is not a competition. Students “win” only when the end game is encouraging them to find and use their voice. 

Biographies

Grace Adcock is an educator, wife, mother, and avid baseball fan from Redding, California, where she was raised and her family lives today. She attended CSU Monterey Bay, majoring in Human Communication (HCOM) and minoring in outdoor education and recreation. She then attended CSU Chico for credentialing and graduate studies. She holds a valid Single Subject English, Mild/Moderate Special Education, Multiple Subject, and Reading Specialist credentials, along with her masters in Special Education. Camping, attending baseball games, and traveling take up most of her spare time in the summer and over breaks. 

Cristy Kidd is an educator, a scholar, a wife, a reader, and a nerd, born in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently living in Redding. She has been teaching Communication Studies at the community college level for seven years, and has taught high school for five years, first as an English teacher at a traditional site and then at an alternative education independent study school. Outside of academia, she enjoys Dungeons & Dragons, is a certified yoga instructor, and loves live music and musical theatre.

admin Blog, Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, English Language Development, Middle School Modules, Modules and Minis

Extending the Pipeline: The ERWC-ELD Middle School Curriculum

By Robby Ching and Debra Boggs

  • Should technology be used as a solution to problems in nature?
  • What are some dangers of the metaverse, especially for young people?
  • What are the stories only I can tell the world? 
  • How is plastic pollution affecting us and our future as individuals, communities, and globally?
  • What is the role of a citizen in addressing the wrongs of their government? 
  • How can words and images work together to communicate information or tell a story?
  • How can stories help us deal with the problems we are facing?

These are a few of the compelling questions that students grapple with as they read, discuss, and view the texts that form the basis for the new ERWC-ELD middle school modules. The modules guide students in reading complex texts across a range of genres, including novels, memoirs, graphic novels, TED Talks, interviews, and articles.

These modules are being rolled out on June 23 at the ERWC Literacy Conference in Long Beach. After that, they will be available to teachers across the state who have participated in professional learning to guide their implementation.

These modules implement the vision of the California Framework for English Language Arts (ELA) and English Language Development (ELD) and support teachers in creating instruction that meets the California Common Core Standards (CCCS) and the California ELD Standards. The modules are designed for ELA with Integrated ELD classes linked to Designated ELD classes but are adaptable for ELA only or ELD only classes. They are also intended to be customized depending on the teaching situation and the place students are in their literacy development.

The modules include whole books and shorter texts that raise complex issues and employ complex language. Recognizing that students require guidance and support as they learn to make meaning of these texts, module writers have built in a variety of scaffolds to ensure that all students, including English learner (EL) students, build their reading stamina and productively with the texts that are central to the modules. Students practice applying the strategies of expert readers to understand and analyze these texts and then create texts of their own, producing many of the genres they have experienced as readers. They collaborate to produce a TED Talk, write a micro-memoir, produce a slide show with presenter notes, deliver a speech at a climate summit, and create an infographic.

The language-focused activities in the modules foster English Learner (EL) and Multilingual Learner (ML) students’ understanding of how English works at the word, phrase, clause, and text level while supporting disciplinary literacy growth for all students. The language-focused instruction is offered in the context of the texts students are reading as they participate in engaging and collaborative activities. Many activities implement high-impact strategies that have been shown to be especially effective in this literacy development, building students’ awareness of how writers and presenters make choices about the language they use depending on who their intended audience is and how they hope to impact that audience.

Analyzing Mentor Texts

As they experience these modules, middle school students are introduced to the foundation of a rhetorical approach to reading, writing, and language. As part of this approach, in each module, students analyze mentor texts that model the form, the rhetorical strategies, and the language required by the culminating task. During this analysis of mentor texts, students develop a shared understanding of what is required for a specific kind of text to be successful. The teacher provides or they work together to create success criteria they can use to guide their drafting, and which can be used for peer feedback as well as grading.

Although each module reflects the expertise of its individual writers, they take a common pedagogical approach reflected in “Essential Pedagogies for Integrated and Designated English Language Development in ERWC,” available in the ERWC Online Community. Best practices for English Language Development suggest that students learn best by collaborating with other students, an understanding reflected in the California ELD Standards. The ERWC-ELD middle school curriculum assumes student-centered classrooms where students are constantly interacting with each other around the texts and tasks of the modules.

These modules do not make up an entire curriculum.  Including assignment sequences from textbooks or other sources will be needed to create a full year-long curriculum. But the rhetorical approach embedded in these modules enables middle school teachers to apply a similar approach to all the texts they teach. The High Impact Strategies Toolkit, available on the home page of the ERWC online community, provides a rich source of proven protocols to craft instruction, following the full ERWC arc from the professional text to the student text, and from rhetorical reading to rhetorical writing.

Experiencing these ERWC-ELD modules in middle school invites students to cross the threshold to becoming rhetorical readers and writers as they discover that writers create texts in particular contexts, for particular audiences to achieve particular purposes. These students will leave middle school having acquired a portfolio of reading and writing strategies to apply in their high school ERWC classes, in other academic classes, and in the wider world.

Works Cited

California Department of Education, California Common Core State Standards: English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Sacramento, CA: Adopted by California State Board of Education August 2010 and modified March 2013.

California Department of Education (CDE), California English Language Development Standards: Kindergarten Through Grade 12. Sacramento, CA: Adopted by California State Board of Education November 2012, CDE 2014.

Fletcher, J. (2015). Teaching arguments: Rhetorical comprehension, critique, and response. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

The Expository Reading and Writing Course, 3rd ed. (2019). California State University Press. Long Beach CA.

–Katz, M., Graff, N., Unrau, N., Crisco, G., and Fletcher, J. “The Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) Theoretical Foundations for Reading and Writing Rhetorically” (2020).

–Ching, R., (2021). “Essential Pedagogies for Integrated and Designated English Language Development in ERWC.”

— Arellano A., Ching, R., Boggs, D., and Spycher, P. (2021) “The High Impact Strategies Toolkit to Support Students in ERWC Classrooms” in The Expository Reading and Writing Course (3.0). California State University Press. Long Beach CA.

About the Author:

Debra Boggs is a retired educator. She taught high school English and worked as a school and county office administrator. She is a member of the ERWC Steering Committee and part of the leadership team that created ERWC-ELD modules for grades 9-12. She is also currently a member of the team that created the new ERWC-ELD middle school modules for grades 6-8. 

Roberta Ching is a Professor Emerita in English at California State University, Sacramento. She coordinated the English as a Second Language program at CSUS before becoming chair of the Learning Skills Department. She was a member of the original 12th Grade Task Force and is currently a member of the team that created the new ERWC-ELD middle school modules for grades 6-8. She serves on the ERWC Steering Committee.

To learn more about ERWC or how to access this free curriculum, please visit https://writing.csusuccess.org/.

Editor’s Note: The 2025 ERWC Literacy Conference will be June 23rd in Long Beach, California. Our theme this year is “Leaning into Liminality: A Return to Language, Wonder, and Inspiration.” Registration is free! Please visit the ERWC Online Community for more information.

MS ERWC Conference PostDownload

admin Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, Digital Texts, Social Justice

Upcoming ERWC Webinar with Antero Garcia!


Editor’s Note: ERWC is delighted to announce a free webinar with Antero Garcia on Thursday, January 18th at 4:30 pm PST. Antero is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and Vice President of the National Council of Teachers of English. A former English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles, Antero’s research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America. His new book, co-authored with Ernest Morrell, is Tuned-In Teaching: Centering Youth Culture for an Active and Just Classroom.

Register for Antero’s webinar here.

By Chris Lewis, Ph.D.

In 2015, I was deep in my dissertation research, floundering in theory about utopian philosophy and feverishly re-reading M.T. Anderson’s brilliant young adult novel Feed.

As part of my study, I was working with a group of high school seniors reading dystopian novels and talking about youth civic engagement and participation in resistance movements. There had been an increase in dystopian fiction being published for young readers, and I wondered what they were thinking when young characters overthrew the oppressive systems in their respective societies.

I was fortunate to come across Antero Garcia’s (2013) Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres, where he discussed an essential element in all of young adult dystopian (also a feature of many fairy tales) where the adults/parents are incapable of maintaining the society they built. Antero argued,

“It is a powerful transfer of responsibility found in these books: adults cannot rectify the past nor can they correct the future. It is up to the students in our classrooms-the students reading these books-to transform society for the better. YA, then, if we are to look for a unifying message across the books, is about teaching youth to grow up and own the future.”

(Garcia 133)

The youth participants in my study agreed with Antero’s assessment throughout their own reflections, noting how the effect of youth-led movements would lead to a more inclusive future and how contemporary classrooms may not be preparing them for this important work. 

In the years since my defense, where Antero was a member of my dissertation committee, his scholarship has focused on the importance of youth voice, civic engagement, and humanizing education. His writing continues to inspire me and helps me think through the complexities educators face when youth express their disillusionment in turbulent political times. I am constantly reminded how, without constant reflection on pedagogy and practice, educators might inadvertently disempower youth through our curricular choices or the systems we put in place. 

We need more classrooms to be spaces of incubation where our students’ ideas, however outlandish they may seem through an adult lens, have space to grow and flourish. And while there will be times where youth feel helpless and fearful, there is power in radical hope. Antero’s research provides essential practices where teachers and students can engage in this kind of learning that just might change the world for the better.

Interested in some more reading on these topics, check out:

Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. New York, NY: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.

Hogg, L., Stockbridge, K., Achieng-Evensen, C, & SooHoo, S. (2021). Pedagogies of with-ness: Students, teachers, voice and agency. Myers Education Press.

Mirra, N., & Garcia, A. (2023). Civics for the world to come: Committing to democracy in every classroom. W. W. Norton.

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2016). Doing youth participatory action research; Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.

Chris Lewis is a TOSA supporting ELs and a part-time lecturer for a graduate education program. He also serves as the ERWC Social Media Coordinator. His publications include two chapters in Pedagogies of With-ness : Students, Teachers, Voice and Agency: “Who is Listening to Student?” and “Finding Hope Through Dystopian Fiction.” You can follow Chris @chrislewis_10.

Save the Date!

The 2024 ERWC Literacy Conferences will be held June 17 in Northern California and June 25 in Southern California. Please make your calendar. All are welcome!

ERWC 2023-24 Literacy Webinar Series:

In the Classroom

All webinars are scheduled for 4:30 pm on a Thursday. Registration is free. Connect with your ERWC colleagues, enjoy top-quality professional learning, and hear ERWC updates.

Antero Garcia: January 18, 2024 at 4:30 pm PST

“Building Student Engagement”

Does your classroom ever feel stuck, or out-of-tune? Meaningful teaching is something educators strive for each day. Educators also know that there is no such thing as a perfect classroom. Despite our best intentions, our classrooms sometimes feel like they’re stuck, or out of tune. In this webinar, Antero Garcia will explain why we should allow students to play an integral role in turning classrooms into spaces for greater engagement and innovation.

Troy Hicks: February 15, 2024 at 4:30 pm PST
“Teaching with Technology”

Interested in using technology more effectively in the classroom? In this webinar, Troy Hicks–an ISTE Certified Educator–will introduce “digital diligence”–an alert, intentional stance that helps both teachers and students use technology productively, ethically, and responsibly. Hear his strategies for minimizing digital distraction, fostering civil conversations, evaluating information on the internet, creating meaningful digital writing, and deeply engaging with multimedia texts.

Looking for an ERWC Workshop?

Find upcoming in-person or virtual ERWC professional learning sessions. ERWC workshops are free to teachers in California!

Please contact Dr. Lisa Benham at lbenhan@fcoe.org for information on ERWC professional learning services outside of California.

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The Bias that Divides Us

Review of Get Free: Antibias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers by Tricia Ebarvia

By Carol Jago

Are you looking for a book to spark fresh conversation in your English Department or PLC? Tricia Ebarvia invites readers to reexamine many practices that we take for granted as beneficial. For example, asking us, many of whom give up every lunch hour and stay long after school to help students, “Whom are we not helping?” That question hit me hard.

Every assertion Ebarvia makes is supported by research. She cites Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow in which the eminent psychologist describes experiments where he demonstrated how people were disproportionally and unknowingly influenced by a single piece of information, often the first piece of information presented given to them to solve a problem. I could not help but think about assumptions I had made about students that deserved much greater attention. I know you are thinking about how you have 36 kids in your fifth-period class and a student load of 180, but that doesn’t change what individual students deserve. Ebarvia asks, “How many troublemakers are simply students who are least like us?”

Along with posing questions that challenge the status quo, the book offers an extraordinary list of essays to use as mentor texts for student writing. The extensive list is organized by topics such as: Our Bodies, Ourselves (“The Clan of the One-Breasted Women” by Terry Tempest Williams), Falling in Love (“What We Hunger For” by Roxane Gay), and What Keeps You Up at Night (“Difficult Girl” by Lena Dunham). Ebarvia’s suggestions are excellent and abundant. This is a treasure trove for anyone looking to refresh curriculum.

Art by Gian Wong

A fascinating feature of the book is the author’s note on the artwork that appears throughout the text. The artist Gian Wong designed patterns and images inspired by traditional ethnic textiles and Filipino culture. On many pages Maya birds, indigenous to the Philippines, break free in flight.

Get Free is also a practical guide for supporting students as they encounter rich, challenging texts, discovering along the way what they have to say about the provocative ideas of others. A chapter on classroom discussion, “Setting the Table for Radical Openness in Our Conversation,” offers suggestions for navigating choppy waters. I predict that this book will disrupt how you think about your work with students. It did for me.

“The Philippine Sun” by Gian Wong. Description from Get Free: The Philippine sun (“araw”) symbolizes the spark and light in each individual that makes them unique.

Carol Jago is a long-time high school English teacher and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and serves on the International Literacy Association board of directors. She is the author of The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis and can be reached at cjago@caroljago.com.

Editor’s Note: If you’ll be traveling to Columbus, OH for the 2023 NCTE Convention, you can see Carol Jago in person at her session on Friday, November 17th at 2:00 p.m.

Please see the recording of Tricia Ebarvia’s webinar for the ERWC Community from 2021 for more information on antibias literacy instruction. You can find the recording in the ERWC Webinar Series.

The next ERWC webinar will be Thursday, November 16th at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time with Marc Watkins, a leading researcher in classroom applications for generative AI. Marc is an academic innovation fellow at the University of Mississippi. In this special webinar, Marc will explore best practices in teaching students AI literacy, AI assistance, and AI aptitude. Registration is free.

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Upcoming ERWC Webinar with Kelly Gallagher!

Editor’s Note: ERWC is excited to announce a free webinar with Kelly Gallagher on Thursday, September 21st at 4:30 pm. Please visit the ERWC Online Community for details and registration.

By Jennifer Fletcher

In the summer of 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English published a new statement on writing instruction in school. The statement opens with a line I’ve been thinking about ever since I first read it: “How writing is conceptualized has consequences.”

For many teachers, myself included, there can be a disconnect between intention and impact. We want to help and support our students. But sometimes the ways we try to help can harm our students’ self-efficacy. Scaffolds that aren’t designed with student agency in mind can become barriers to growth and independence. Agency is about choice and control–two things adolescent learners are often denied.

Kelly Gallagher has long been one of my favorite mentors for helping me get out of the way of students’ learning. His book Readicide was a revelation. It showed me that the surest paths to a love of reading were through choice and volume, and not through accountability, compliance, and over-teaching. Gallagher’s Write Like This was another gift that helped me check my teacher ego, showing me that the best mentors for my students were other writers.

For over two decades, Kelly has been one of our profession’s strongest advocates for student agency. His most recent book with Penny Kittle, 4 Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, transforms the principles behind cultivating independent learners into everyday practice. Kelly and Penny describe the harm caused by formulaic writing instruction through examples and research that will resonate with teachers experienced in ERWC’s inquiry-based, rhetorical approach.

The way to get better at making choices as readers, writers, and learners, of course, is lots of practice making choices. That doesn’t happen when students are just handed a template to fill in or outline to follow. As Kelly and Penny note in 4 Essential Studies, “Completing teacher-generated step-by-step work is not learning; it masquerades as it” (xx).

For me, one of the biggest takeways from Kelly Gallagher’s work is how the choices we make as teachers impact the choices our students have as learners.

How writing is conceptualized indeed has consequences. If writing is conceptualized as a straight and narrow road laid out by teachers, students don’t see the full array of options that characterize authentic rhetorical situations. The journey toward expertise is full of obstacles and opportunities–what rhetoricians call constraints and affordances. Having the freedom to choose is ultimately how we find our way as writers.

Jennifer Fletcher is a Professor of English at California State University, Monterey Bay and a former high school teacher. She serves as the Chair of the ERWC Steering Committee. You can follow her on Twitter @JenJFletcher.

Work Cited

Kittle, Penny and Kelly Gallagher. Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency. Heinemann, 2021.

ERWC 2023-24 Literacy Webinar Series

All webinars are scheduled for 4:30 pm on a Thursday.

Kelly Gallagher: September 21, 2023 at 4:30 pm
“Kelly Gallagher Presents”

The ERWC 2023-24 webinar series kicks off with a very special guest. In conjunction with the CSU Chancellor’s Office, ERWC is proud to welcome Kelly Gallagher to our webinar community. Gallagher will offer insights into a variety of issues confronting classroom teachers today including some featured in his recent book 180 Days: Two Teachers and their Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents. This is a webinar you do not want to miss!

Felicia Rose-Chavez: October 19, 2023 at 4:30 pm
“The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: Decolonize Your Classroom”

The fall 2023 webinar series continues with an exciting presentation from Felicia Rose-Chavez who will present “a new approach for a new millennium–a blueprint for a twenty-first-century writing workshop that concedes the humanity of people of color so that we may raise our voices in vote for love over hate.” This session will include select readings from Rose-Chavez’s book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Can’t wait to see you there!

Troy Hicks: February 15, 2024 at 4:30 pm
“Teaching with Technology”

Interested in using technology more effectively in the classroom? In this webinar, Troy Hicks–an ISTE Certified Educator–will introduce “digital diligence”–an alert, intentional stance that helps both teachers and students use technology productively, ethically, and responsibly. Hear his strategies for minimizing digital distraction, fostering civil conversations, evaluating information on the internet, creating meaningful digital writing, and deeply engaging with multimedia texts.

Looking for an ERWC workshop?

Find upcoming in-person or virtual ERWC professional learning sessions. ERWC workshops are free to teachers in California!

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20th Anniversary Message Board

This summer ERWC is celebrating two decades as a literacy initiative. As part of the anniversary festivities, we’ve been collecting congratulatory messages from some of our favorite educational leaders, including Kelly Gallagher, Carol Jago, Jim Burke, Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, Trevor Aleo, Matthew Johnson, and Carol Booth Olson.

Continue reading to see what esteemed colleagues and mentors have to say about the impact of the ERWC community. And if you’d like to add your own anniversary message to the collection, please use the comment box at the end of this post. So pop the confetti and join the celebration!

Congratulations to the ERWC community on your 20th year anniversary! I have much appreciation for all you have done to position all students for success as they transition to the Cal State University system. I know many of my students benefited from your hard work and dedication. Your work is making a difference and is deeply appreciated. Again, congratulations, and here’s to the next generation of students who will benefit from your efforts.

Kelly Gallagher, author of Deeper Reading, Write Like This, and Readicide; co-author of 180 Days

Dear ERWC Leadership and Community:

ERWC changed everything for those fortunate to go through the trainings in the earliest days, often at county offices but always with teachers who were deeply committed to teaching what our credential programs seemed never to get around to before we entered the profession: teaching kids how to read, write, and think as needed to get into and succeed at college. And on top of all this instruction in teaching these academic literacies, ERWC provided us all a community of equally committed professionals, led by those remarkable educators who had the vision for what the ERWC could be and why it needed to be! Ever grateful to all those who contributed much to our collective growth and my own personal improvement as an English teacher.

Jim Burke, author of The Six Academic Writing Assignments, The English Teacher’s Companion, and Writing Reminders
Matthew Johnson, author of Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster–Without Burning Out

Over the course of two decades ERWC has held true to its belief in the power of literacy to change lives, and the world, for the better. ERWC’s impact has been made possible by the collective blood, sweat, and tears of everyone in this community. Much has been achieved. Much remains to be done. Happy anniversary to us!

Carol Jago, author of The Book in Question and With Rigor for All

Happy Anniversary to the ERWC family from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Thank you for all you do to help students join academic conversations with skill and confidence!

Best,
Jerry and Cathy
Trevor Aleo, Co-Author of Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World

Warmest congratulations and happy 20th anniversary to the ERWC community from the editorial group at W.W. Norton! We admire and applaud your two decades of helping students become close readers and confident writers.

Sarah Touborg
Editor & Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

As I look back at ERWC for the last 20 years, I am struck by how it has totally exceeded my expectations. I joined the ERWC team in 2006 when I came to the Chancellor’s Office as an Associate Director. At that time, we were working on the 2nd edition, and I remember going to many of the professional learnings throughout the state to learn about the program. I was struck by the dedication and commitment of the teachers and professors involved and the innovations they were implementing. It was incredible back then…and then came the I3 Grants, the validation studies, the 3rd edition, and national recognition and I must say, it has totally exceeded my expectations. The impact has been far-reaching and I am looking forward to the next 20 years to see where we can go with this innovation as the CSU emerges as a national leader.

Zee Cline
CSU Chancellor’s Office
CAPP Director

My warm congratulations to the ERWC community–our CSU faculty and high school teachers–on your 20th anniversary! The ERWC curriculum and programming has had a deep impact on the preparation of hundreds of thousands of young people in CA and across the country to be successful in college. The California State University, Chancellor’s Office is so proud of ERWC’s accomplishments as it has evolved over these 20 years

Shireen Pavri, Ph.D.
Assistant Vice Chancellor,
Educator & Leadership Programs
Academic & Student Affairs
Carol Booth Olson, Director of the National WRITE Center at the University of California, Irvine
admin Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, English Language Development, High Impact Strategies Toolkit, Modules and Minis

Into, Through, and Beyond the High Impact Strategies Toolkit

By Robby Ching

Over the decades of my career, I’ve observed creative teachers devise multiple engaging and effective ways to support students in learning English, especially the English valued in academic settings. When the first ERWC middle school modules were written, I thought how valuable it would be to gather the strategies that appeared throughout those modules along with others that have become hallmarks of the ERWC approach so teachers could transfer them to whatever texts they were teaching. 

During the development of ERWC 3.0,  along with my ERWC-ELD colleagues, Adele Arellano, Pam Spycher, and Debra Boggs, I was given the opportunity to do just that. We identified strategies in the newly developed ERWC-ELD modules, focusing on the activities we recognized were especially high impact for English learners students but would be valuable for most students still developing disciplinary English. In consultation with the ERWC-ELD team, I organized these strategies using the same structure that provides the DNA of all ERWC modules, the Assignment Template. We also identified activities that could be used at any point across a module, for example, activities focused on goal setting or discussion strategies.

The result was the High Impact Strategies Toolkit to Support English Learners.

Later, we revised the Toolkit by adding even more activities and identifying the ELD Standards that students would meet when teachers employed the protocols. For ease of access, Debra Boggs created a searchable Table of Contents. We created a Word version so you can modify and adapt the student version of an activity for your own texts and teaching situation. Our final document (final for now, since new strategies could certainly be identified and added) is a 129-page treasure trove of inspiration for good teaching.

All ERWC modules can be adapted to include additional Integrated and Designated ELD, the vision of the California Framework for ELA and ELD. Beyond that, using the High Impact Strategies Toolkit means that whatever other texts or text sets you are teaching, you can move through the stages of the ERWC Template and draw on strategies that will ensure a student-centered and inquiry-based approach and the ongoing development of students’ disciplinary language. 

For example, Save the Last Word encourages students to engage with a text and discuss it in small groups. Charting Claims Across Multiple Texts transfers responsibility to students to track what they are reading so they have what they need at their fingertips when they are ready to do text-based writing. Sentence Unpacking guides students in understanding the writer’s craft at the word, phrase, and clause level so they can apply what they learn when they go to craft sentences of their own. Purpose Analysis prompts students to read their own writing rhetorically and revise accordingly. Students develop active listening and encounter key concepts as they work together to do Collaborative Text Reconstruction.

Charting Claims Across Multiple Texts

I’ve even observed schools adopt a strategy such as Annotation, Summary, Response to use across the disciplines in history and science classes, not just in English classes, a powerful way to truly make students college and career ready.

Early in my ERWC collaboration with high school teachers, an outstanding teacher told me the ERWC template kept him honest. Since then, the federal studies that supported the development of ERWC 2.0 and 3.0 have confirmed that students whose teachers are faithful to the Template—not teaching every activity in a module but guiding students as they move through each phase of Reading Rhetorically, Discovering What They Think, and Writing Rhetorically—are likely to be more successful than students whose teachers short-circuit it. 

Self-accountability is key—asking myself, am I making sure that my students experience a robust set of activities at each stage of the reading and writing process so that at the end of a module or assignment sequence, they can successfully contribute their authentic voices to an ongoing conversation of consequence? And to answer yes to that question, I can turn to the High Impact Strategies Toolkit in planning a module or a year-long pathway to support students as they practice the strategies of proficient readers and writers. And in the spirit of expansive framing, I can make sure my students reflect on how these strategies can be transferred to new situations in other modules, other classes, and in the world beyond school.

Robby Ching is a professor emerita at Sacramento State in English and a member of the ERWC team since 2002. She has written many ERWC modules, most recently those with an ELD focus.

2023 ERWC Literacy Conference

June 20 in Sacramento & June 26 in Pomona

Conference registration is now open! The $75 registration fee includes continental breakfast and a buffet lunch. Discounts available for administrators, literacy coaches, and counselors.

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admin Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, Engagement and Motivation

The Right to Read

By Carol Jago

Powerful forces are gathering to demand control over what is taught, what students read, and what can and cannot be spoken.

A recent report from PEN America called “Banned in the U.S.A.” reports an astonishing 1,586 book bans in 86 school districts and 26 states. California is not one of these states. Yet. Overwhelmingly, the majority of books being targeted explore issues of race, racism, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

“It is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processes–or lack thereof–through which such removals are being carried out,” the report states. “Objections and challenges to books available in school are nothing new, and parents and citizens are within their rights to voice concerns about the appropriateness and suitability of particular books. In order to protect the First Amendment rights of students in public schools, though, procedural safeguards have been designed to help ensure that districts follow transparent, unbiased, established procedures, particularly when it comes to the review of library holdings.”

The American Library Association, which has been tracking book challenges for 20 years, reports a surge the like of which they have never seen before. “What we’re seeing right now is an unprecedented campaign to remove books from school and public libraries that deal with the lives and experiences of people from marginalized communities,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s office for intellectual freedom.

The struggle to control what students read seems to be driven by fear: parents’ fear that their children will be brainwashed. They want to protect their babies. But keeping young people ignorant of reality, particularly when it’s harsh, won’t keep them safe. In fact, blinders can prevent children from understanding what they see in the world around them and what they feel within themselves. Not talking about Bruno won’t make him disappear.

The danger is silence. Classroom discussion is essential to educating tomorrow’s citizens. And teachers, in concert with their school communities, are in the best position to make decisions regarding what to teach and how to approach controversial subjects in age-appropriate ways. Controversial readings and topics always make for the most engaging classes and most engaged students. “Argue the point, not the person!” I reminded my students again and again.

Teachers find themselves crippled by curricular caution. And self-censorship may ultimately have more of an impact than school board bans. Results of a survey conducted by School Library Journal suggest that censorship attempts are likely to have a long-lasting insidious effect on school library collections. Removed books can be counted. What about the books that are never purchased?

Terry Stout Anderson, a district coordinator for secondary English in a large Midwestern school district, writes: “I don’t want teachers in my district to play it safe, but I do want English teachers across our district to feel safe when engaging students in adventurous thinking and free inquiry.”

No book worth teaching is neutral or without troubling moments. And even the most perfect book adoption process still cannot protect us from a potentially raucous school board meeting. Professional communities like the National Council of Teachers of English, the California Association of Teachers of English, and ERWC can help us navigate these difficult times. Educators committed to bringing great literature into classrooms do not need to go it alone.

Carol Jago is a long-time California public school teacher and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and currently serves on the executive board of the International Literacy Association. Carol is the author of numerous books including The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis.

Looking for ways to promote civil discourse and facilitate meaningful conversations on sensitive topics in ERWC classrooms? Please see the recording of Matt Kay’s webinar: “Hitting for Contact: Consistent Success in Race Conversations” and.” The ERWC Theoretical Foundations for Rhetorical Reading and Writing, ERWC UCOP-approved course descriptions, and Introduction to ERWC 3.0 also offer rationales and research for ERWC’s inquiry-based approach to civil discourse.

Save the Date! The 2024 ERWC Literacy Conferences will be held June 17th in Sacramento and June 25th in Pomona.

admin Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, English Language Development, High Impact Strategies Toolkit

ERWC Designated English Language Development

By Chris Lewis, Ph.D.

How do the ERWC modules support the language and literacy development of students who are identified as English Learners?

In 2017, the California State Board of Education unanimously approved the English Learner Roadmap. This revolutionary language and literacy policy focuses on an assets-based approach that celebrates multilingualism. This policy shift occurred after the voters of CA passed Proposition 58 in 2016, repealing almost twenty years of restrictions on bilingual education. Each of the ERWC modules includes elements of Integrated ELD where students are engaged in language and literacy development aligned with the CA ELD Framework. The Designated-ELD modules add an additional layer of support through an emphasis on specific ELD standards. 

The “High Impact Strategies Toolkit to Support Students in ERWC Classrooms” is a helpful resource to review learning strategies that support multilingual students. These strategies appear throughout the ERWC modules, but they are essential practices within the modules focusing on Integrated and Designated ELD. I taught the 12th grade ERWC course for several years and adapted many of the module strategies, often adding texts to build more background knowledge or spending more time on during-reading strategies where students practiced meaning-making through speaking activities. Now that I am a Teacher on Special Assignment support English Learners, resources like the toolkit are imperative in my planning.

A few of the strategies in the toolkit have positively impacted my students’ learning include:

  • Concept Mapping where students build visual representations of key vocabulary demonstrating how words and their meanings are connected and inter-related;
  • Charting Multiple Texts where students document their reading of multiple texts by identifying the authors’ purpose, claims, and evidence in order to make connections across the texts;
  • Mentor Text Analysis where students complete a close-reading to identify how an author constructs an argument through a variety of sentences (e.g., opinions, facts, evidence, anecdotes, etc.) each used for a different purpose;
  • Guided Editing where students focus on selected writing skills in their own piece (e.g., claims, precise language, sentence length, transitions, punctuation, etc.) to emphasize how each piece is part of their overall purpose.

The Designated-ELD modules follow the same assignment template as the other ERWC modules. Each lesson is aligned with the CA ELD Framework allowing students to address the two main parts of the standards: “Interacting in Meaningful Ways” and “Learning About How English Works.” The texts and writing tasks in ERWC are challenging in all of the best ways. I loved teaching ERWC because of the complex content. Students continually impressed me with their reactions to the material and their reflections about the learning goals they identified. I was a better teacher, particularly for my multilingual students, because the modules empowered me to enjoy the intricacies and intersections of language and literacy. Planning with language in mind made each module more impactful.

Chris Lewis is currently a Teacher on Special Assignment supporting multilingual learners at Mountain View High School in El Monte, CA. He is also a part-time lecturer in Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University. He serves as a board member for the California Council for the Social Studies. His research interests include youth voice, dystopian fiction, civic engagement, and LGBTQ literature and history. He wrote two chapters for the 2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice and Agency. Follow Chris on Twitter at @chrislewis_10 or www.ateachersponderings.com.

Editor’s Note: The theme of the 2023 ERWC Literacy Conferences, to be held June 20th in Sacramento and June 26th in Pomona, is “Doing Language: Rhetoric, Identity, and Power.” Plenary and concurrent sessions will explore ERWC’s approach to language learning and linguistic justice, including modules and resources for designated English language development. Please watch for a Call for Presenters in January.

admin Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogies, Professional Learning

ERWC and Teacher Preparation

By Amy K. Conley

What do K-12 administrators, literacy instructors, and literacy researchers think should be included in literacy coursework?

I have taught the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum (ERWC) for more than a decade, but I didn’t expect my experience as an ERWC teacher and facilitator to be so relevant in my recent EdD dissertation. I surveyed 233 California K-12 administrators, literacy instructors of preservice teachers, and literacy researchers to ask what should be included in literacy coursework to eventually replace the Reading Instruction Competency Assessment required for new elementary and special education teachers.

After the survey, I used focus groups to really delve into what participants thought should be included in literacy coursework for preservice teachers.

I was surprised when the three big takeaways about the needs in preservice literacy instruction also resonated with what teachers have told me in ERWC certification workshops. Preservice teachers need less standardized testing and more instruction in these areas:

  1. Culturally sustaining pedagogy for both methods and materials
  2. Supporting foundational literacy, especially for older readers, based upon a focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, morphology, and writing
  3. All teachers need more support in teaching writing. Being able to write is not the same as being able to teach writing.

In the ERWC community, we discuss the recursive nature of reading and writing, but that research-based idea holds true for every level of reader and writer. To grow reading, students need to use the language to write, whether we call those related ideas orthographic mapping, reflective writing, or revising rhetorically. To grow writing, students need to decode independently, get a chance to acquire academic language, and learn to read rhetorically.

There is also a growing realization in all levels of education that everything we do must be culturally sustaining. It must be the sea in which our students swim, not an add-on. ERWC has long tried to create modules with engaging topics, with support for emergent bilinguals, but is now actively considering how best to incorporate home languages, empowering topics, translanguaging, and diverse authors into its profusion of modules for teachers to choose from to meet student needs.

ERWC has long been a professional development model to support high school teachers and students. It’s interesting to see how it could translate to work with preservice high school and middle school teachers.

You can read in more detail what stakeholders think should be included in literacy preservice coursework in the executive summary. Please see the updated “Theoretical Foundations for Reading and Writing Rhetorically” for more information on ERWC’s efforts to create more inclusive and representative learning experiences.

Amy K. Conley is a lecturer and supervisor at Cal Poly Humboldt in literacy in the education department. She served as a high school English teacher for 20 years, where she worked to promote educational programs that foster excellence in service-learning, literacy, and equity. Her dissertation for her doctorate in educational leadership from CSU, Fresno examined what stakeholders believe should be included in a coursework replacement to the Reading Instructional Competency Assessment.