I am not sure if it is an appropriate title or not, but I just completed the first of four Google Hangouts I am having this week. I met with CRWP colleagues tonight in our first Monday book club chat. We are reading So, What’s the Story?: Teaching Narrative to Understand Ourselves, Others, and the World (Exceeding the Common Core State Standards). by James Fredricksen, Jeff Wilhelm and Michael Smith. Tonight we got the logistics out of the way and moved forward with a discussion about narrative writing in general.

Throughout our discussion we talked about the art of creating narratives and how teaching students to write a good narrative is difficult and takes a lot of practice for our students. Whether it is character development, purpose, detail, etc, it takes time for anyone to become quality narrative writers. What was perplexing to me is how narratives seem to be forgotten when considering the high school level. Why aren’t high school English teachers teaching narrative writing? Dr. Troy Hicks discussed how he has asked college students in the past about the last time they wrote anything creative such as a narrative; they often can’t remember or say middle/elementary school.

Some thoughts that came to mind during our discussion tonight were that we are spending too much time worrying about informational and argumentative writing. Hear me out, they are both important, but why abandon narratives so much in high school? I am sure ACT testing contributes somewhat to the disappearance of the narrative at the secondary level. With teachers wanting students to be successful, practicing argumentative writing is at the forefront. In addition, the common core standards are geared towards college and career readiness and any college student knows, they don’t write creative stories in their college courses. Now, when you add the thought of Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA), teachers will continue to focus more on informational and argumentative writing. The SBA samples that are currently out don’t even allow students to create their own narrative. Instead, one sample writing assessment asks the students to read an existing narrative and rewrite it fixing and mistakes and revising it accordingly. Below is the link to that sample question.
http://sampleitems.smarterbalanced.org/itempreview/sbac/ELA.htm

Now you add teacher evaluation and the idea of student growth and student proficiency, the puzzle becomes even more complicated. In terms of the Common Core Curriculum, high school teachers are responsible for completing narrative writing with their students. As Dr. Hicks stated tonight (I am paraphrasing here), perhaps with narratives being brought into the light of our conversation, it is time for us as teachers to reclaim the teaching of narratives at the secondary level.

After all, I argued tonight that employers are looking for creativity and innovation in the hiring of new employees and narratives can help bring to the surface that creativity that is missing in new hires that companies are looking for.

Cheers!