Peters Township students published by academic journal
If you think no one cares anymore about putting sentences together coherently, meet some folks who beg to differ.
Carla Goldsmith, Natalie Glover and Devon Milley are among the Peters Township High School students who work regularly to help classmates hone their writing skills, continuing what they started as eighth-graders.
Their own writing about their experiences in Peters Township Middle School’s writing lab and how that affected their transition to high school has earned them publication by a national academic journal.
“Just to be clear, they were all strong writers before writing lab,” eighth-grade English language arts teacher Renee Brown explained. “The writing lab cannot take credit for all their awesomeness. I just don’t know if they knew they were good writers before writing lab, because I have a lot of kids who come in and that’s what they’ll say.”
Brown started the initiative, one of the very few such efforts at the middle school level in the United States, six years ago, based on her experiences as a writing center tutor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
She chose the term “writing lab” to create an atmosphere comparable to the casualness of school’s study labs, intended to dispel students’ notions of “I’m a bad writer, and that’s the only reason I have to go.” Along similar lines, peer tutors are referred to as “coaches.”
“At times, they’re just sounding boards. At times, they’re editors. At times, they’re peers giving feedback,” Brown explained. “The concept is that everybody benefits from talking about their writing, regardless of their strengths. So everyone improves when you have these conversations.”
The writing lab has proved to be a success, prompting Brown to share its story for the benefit of similarly minded educators, in the words of former coaches.
The ensuing project began with a group of nine students. Attrition eventually made it a core of three.
“After the first year, that’s when it started getting down to me, Carla and Natalie,” Devon explained. “That’s when we started the editing and revising process, making sure everything flowed right and had the same style.”
Brown gives the students full credit for seeing the project to fruition.
“They did all the research. They did all the writing,” she said. “I just gave them a place to meet and guided them along in what academic writing is and how to propose an academic article.”
The result, “Writers, Coaches, Leaders: How Being a Middle School Writing Tutor Impacted Our High School Experiences,” has been published by The Peer Review, an online scholarly journal that promotes the work of emerging writing center researchers.
Credited to all nine students who worked on it, the work features analysis based on surveys of former writing lab coaches about what they gained from their experiences.
“They responded very positively to all of the questions, and we formulated that into an article,” Carla explained.
Her own positivity inspired her to lead efforts to open a writing lab at Peters Township High School, which provides support for students throughout the academic day while also scheduling special events. A recent workshop, for example, addressed how to write essays for college applications.
“We created a huge presentation on the different things college admissions are looking for within your essay,” Carla said, “and the to-do’s and what-not-to-do’s in the process.”
Other efforts have involved classroom work, with Natalie citing the example of English teachers assigning papers analyzing Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a popular graphic novel.
“One of the teachers offered that if you came to the writing lab and you got a form signed by one of the coaches, that you would get a deadline extension,” she said. “So that encouraged more people to come to the writing lab and realize that it was helpful.”