A Novel Idea

A conversation with Dina Howell, 2016 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year Finalist, about using inter-classroom collaboration and creativity to combat the rigidity of standardized testing.

Dinners at my house growing up usually circled back to my parents’ kids. Not me—their biological child—but their students. Having teachers as parents was a special way to grow up, and I promise you, I never got away with “I left my homework in my locker.”

My mom, known as Dina to peers and Mrs. Howell to her students, taught special education for over 20 years. But when Pennsylvanian lawmakers began increasing class sizes and caseloads, she debated if teaching was still her calling. “I did not feel like I was given the means to do my job successfully,” she said.

Instead of stepping away, however, she pursued a reading specialist certification because “a lot of new research had come out!” It was a very teacherly move: further educating herself to reignite her passion for education—and, incidentally, for writing.

I did not follow my parents’ footsteps and become a classroom teacher, but writing has shaped my professional life. I work as the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, where we help thousands of writers better their craft. This role has given me deep appreciation for the complex work my mother does, and I’m not alone in that appreciation: in 2016, my mother became a finalist for Pennsylvania’s Teacher of the Year. The recognition was a huge honor for our family, and it inspired me to use my own skills to share her knowledge. So I sat down to speak with her. I hope that my mother’s expertise as a reading specialist and special education teacher can uplift a new generation of teachers—my generation—who are out there in front of students every school day. 

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That’s how I wrote my curriculum: by asking what teachers needed.

Moriah Richard (MR): Not many schools have a Reading Workshop class! Can you give us insight into what a reading workshop is and how it relates to the more traditional English class? How did you develop that curriculum?

Dina Howell (DH): Reading Workshop was a 40-minute junior high class that was supposed to level the playing field in reading because students came from different elementary schools. When I started, there was no written curriculum. So, in the hallways, I stopped teachers and asked what they needed from me. What didn’t they have enough time to do in their curriculum that they felt could be beefed up by mine? A few of the areas they noted were note-taking and study skills—including summarization—and reading textbooks. For that one, I taught a guided lesson on outlining using their history textbook, so they had notes ready to go for history class. I also taught mini-lessons on passive and active voice, subjective and objective voice, and writing a text-dependent analysis. That’s how I wrote my curriculum: by asking what teachers needed. And that’s how I ended up joining Mrs. Shawnee Heckman on her novel project. 

MR: As a writer myself, I’d love to talk about that project. How did it come to be?

DH: We called it the novel project, but it was really a short story. I worked in conjunction with Shawnee, the seventh-grade English teacher, who originally started the project when the PSSA [Pennsylvania System School Assessment] writing was a narrative. Even with the narrative requirement, she barely had time to help each student flesh out their stories and concentrate on reading and writing standards, which were also part of her curriculum. But when the PSSA changed the narrative to a text-dependent analysis, she had even less time! But the students loved it, so we found a way to do it together. 

I introduced the project—basically, we gave the kids clear guidelines on everything that their novel needed to have. We wanted a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They were not allowed to end by saying, “And the world blew up and everybody died,” or “You’ll have to see the next book.” We required a thought-out problem and a solution to that problem. They had to have a theme. These were things that they had learned about in their English class, but we wanted them to create an original narrative with all the components that they’d analyzed in others’ work.

We made the kids handwrite—except kids who had IEPs or who had handwriting issues—and they moaned and groaned about it, but the reason we did it was because then they would find their mistakes. When you let them type their first draft, it rarely gets any better than that. But when you have them handwrite their first draft, they’re having to look at it again, they’re going through that process of typing it into the document, they are adding things and changing words. It’s important for kids to get their hands dirty. 

I also checked in with every single kid every single week. That was part of their grade. They had to sit down and show me their progress, and we’d discuss whatever they needed. Junior high kids are masters at flying under the radar, and meeting with them gave them a sense of accountability. Some kids chose to just tell me about their progress and let me flip through it. Some kids wanted me to read and give them feedback. Some kids might have been stuck, like they had worked themselves into a problem and they didn’t know where to go from there. So the conferences varied, and allowing them to dictate what they needed out of our one-on-ones was a choice I made because I was fostering independent writers. But if they appeared evasive, that clued me in that they needed more guidance and instruction. Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you had kids who wanted me to read absolutely everything and give them all my thoughts. For them, I focused on taking a step back and encouraging them to trust in their storytelling.

I focused on taking a step back and encouraging them to trust in their storytelling.

Each day before the kids would do their independent writing and one-on-ones, I would give them mini-lessons. I taught them mini-lessons on dialogue, on the six plus one traits of writing, and on brainstorming. I had videos in their Schoology accounts, so there was always an extended lesson if they needed more. We did lessons where we would take a sentence and switch up words to make the sentence more exciting, or we’d use more nouns and verbs and things like that to make your sentences more fluent. 

They did the pre-writing and the first draft with me, and with Shawnee, they did editing, proofreading, and publishing. The Reading Workshop class had the unique position of diving deeper into the creativity aspect, while the English class instructional time had to focus on grammar and mechanics. 

For the publishing aspect of the project, Shawnee would order blank hardback books, then they would print out their stories and glue them to the pages in the book. They did their own original artwork, and they would do the covers. They did an author page; they did a dedication page. When their books were completed, Shawnee displayed them in the school library, on top of the bookshelves, and then took the students there to give them the opportunity to enjoy each other’s stories.

And they were so proud of the final product. One thing that Shawnee said was, “Some of them, it’s almost reverent the way they carry [the novels] when they’re complete.” It was wonderful to see their passions that way because, you have to understand, because of the pressure of standardized testing, my curriculum was mostly about analyzing, and there was no creativity. 

MR: I can imagine that due to the pressures of standardized testing, it can be easy for teachers to focus on mandated requirements and less on the way that we can participate in and create literature. Would you say that walking that line was the most challenging part of running the project? 

DH: I think the most challenging was to give every kid the amount of time they needed. My classes were sometimes 25, 27 kids, and on conferencing days, I could only see five. They’d sign up on the board—it was their responsibility to sign up. A lot of times, they put their things down quicker and hurried into class because they wanted to see me. 

And in the actual conference, it was challenging to give the kids in front of me my full attention, but still have the rest of the room on track. I had to set that level of expectation from the beginning: if I’m conferencing with one student, then everyone else is writing. But, you know, I was teaching for 35 years. So classroom management was one of my strengths, I believe.

But, at one point, we were told by some administrators that we shouldn’t be taking time to do the novel project because writing creatively is not tested. I was like, “We are doing it after the tests, then. They deserve to be creative.” Fighting for that creative space, knowing that what we were doing was making a difference both on an educational and personal level for these students—that was the biggest reward.

MR: How did the novel project evolve over the years?

DH: In the beginning, I spent more time reading the kids’ work and not talking to them about it. And it was very difficult for me not to make any kind of proofreading changes. I had to pull myself back from that, and I had to be like, “OK, your job is to help edit through the process.” For example, if I read something and it didn’t make sense, I would put a star and write a note to them, saying, “You need to go back and look at this because I know it makes sense in your head, but as your reader, it doesn’t make sense to me.” This was the kind of feedback and individualized guidance that the English department didn’t have time to provide for the approximately 125 students in the way that I did.

I think I also got better at having them plot their stories. One of their check-ins became them filling out a plot diagram, so I knew they were at least thinking of their theme as they got toward the end of their story. Every time I met with them, I would say, “Are you thinking of your theme? How’s it going to be revealed to your reader?” Doing so allowed the students to understand ways that themes are woven into stories, making them better readers more generally.

And I got better at celebrating, really celebrating, them as writers. The last 10 minutes of class, I’d ask, “Anybody interested in author’s chair today?” If kids raised their hands, we’d wrap up and allow the kids to go up to the front and share something. Maybe it was something they wrote that day; maybe it was something that they had written previously that they felt really good about. This was part of the joy of Reading Workshop: allowing them to build their confidence in ways that the standard English curriculum just didn’t have time for.

Just having kids write and talk every single day is so important. That is how you lead to engagement, getting them to write and to think and to talk about their writing.

MR: How do you think other schools could benefit from having similar projects?

DH: Well, I think they could benefit by getting the kids writing about something that they care about. When you assign a child a topic, you’re not going to have the buy-in that you get when you say they can write about whatever they want. 

There’s so little time for them to be creative. In the novel project, they could write anything. Well, as long as it was appropriate for school. I told them, when I read your writing, I don’t want to feel like I need to send you to the guidance office because it’s so graphic and gory. 

But, you know, we did give them leeway. When we came back after COVID, we had a lot of novels about mental health, self-harm, and really mature topics for seventh graders. This gives me goosebumps. I feel like for some of those kids, it was a release. It was a way for them to work through those feelings, all of the anxiety, and all that the pandemic brought. But that year, we had a lot of heavy subjects; it wasn’t your typical killing-my-first-deer story sort of thing. It was a lot darker. But that’s where we were.

For some kids, though, taking that creative leap was difficult. With the pressure of standardized testing, there’s no time to learn creativity. And that is a shame. When some of the kids had a hard time, I told them, “You can fictionalize a true event.” I had stories about going to a softball state championship and being in a tornado. Just teaching kids how to be creative is a benefit, showing them that you can take something that really happened, and you can add and embellish and write a really good, solid story.

MR: What advice do you have for other teachers out there?

DH: Have your kids write every day—they need to write every single day. That’s one thing that I was good at as a teacher; we were trained in learning focus. This model is a backward planning approach for teachers to design standards-driven lessons focused on student achievement. I used learning focus every single day. There might be a bell ringer or class starter on the board that said, “In your journal, write down everything you know about X.” I’d have the kids write in their journals and have them talk about their writing. I might say, “Okay, have a discussion with your elbow partner and tell them one thing that you wrote in your journal about this topic,” because that engages kids. The kids who never raise their hands are going to talk to their partner. Just having kids write and talk every single day is so important. That is how you lead to engagement, getting them to write and to think and to talk about their writing.

And have high expectations and treat them with love. Hold that bar high. Most will rise to meet that bar.

Featured photo by cottonbro studio.