The Plan
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In March 2007,
I joined a Yahoo! Groups (e-mail list) of teachers to more widely
share EBSTC's technical literacy project materials and strategies.
This article looks back on the first year of that adventure in literacy
outreach by e-mail.
The launch of EBSTC's own e-mail list for chapter members in August
2006 introduced me to the idea of using Yahoo groups as a way to
alert more teachers about technical writing possibilities for their
classes. A search of available groups turned up one founded in 2003
by science teacher and educational consultant John Brishcar. It
is called High School Science Teachers (or HSST for convenience).
When I joined HSST it had 175 members; subscribership grew steadily
to over 240 today (about five times as many participants as EBSTC's
own group). List members teach science (often biology) in high schools
across the United States; a few teach in English-language schools
abroad. HSST is also affiliated with a 1000-member Yahoo group focused
on middle school science teachers. Some members and postings overlap
among these two mailing lists. In 2007, HSST saw 300 messages posted
(averaging 25 postings/month, but rising and falling with the seasonal
demands of the school year). Most posted messages address common
problems, such as finding lab work that students with very different
abilities can handle or how to teach from a cart if you have no
permanent science classroom. HSST's official theme is "we can't
go on teaching in isolation."
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The Postings
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Because
the technical literacy project adapts practical, real-life, technical
writing cases into scaffolded, age-appropriate classroom activities
(especially helpful for underperforming students), sharing these
ideas on HSST could greatly broaden our professional development
reach. So my postings (roughly once a month) to this group/list
summarized highlights from those activities (and pointed out how
each reflects what scientists have discovered about effective nonfiction
communication).
During 2007-2008, these "technical writing in science class"
postings fell into three thematic clusters:
- Theme 1:
Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive apprenticeship builds writing skills in science class
in the same reliable way (scaffolds, iterative refinement, and
externalizing hidden techniques) that traditional apprenticeship
builds trade skills.
- April
2007: Using explicit guidelines promotes and enables writing/editing
practice.
- September
2007: Text revisions have a place in science class because
they have a place in real-life science.
- November
2007: Revealing the method(s) behind stage illusion parallels
revealing the methods behind effective technical writing.
- December
2007 : Mapquest driving directions can show good instruction-design
features even for developmentally disabled students.
- Theme 2:
Lessons from Linguistics
Text linguists have made empirical discoveries about technical
prose that can help students improve how they write about science.
- June 2007: Students can learn to draft better instructions
by treating text as a matrix of actions and items.
- October 2007: Rebuilding big, complex descriptions from
their randomized text chunks can provide guided practice in
text design.
- January 2008: Paying extra attention to proleptic and connective
words disproportionately improves technical text.
- Theme 3:
The CSI Connection
The real-life role of good communication in successful crime scene
investigation can both motivate and guide building writing skills
in the classroom.
- July
2007: DNA extraction from human cheek cells nicely models
strengths and weaknesses in instruction design.
- August
2007: A CDC reporting form for sudden unexplained infant death
(SUID) nicely models strengths and weaknesses in description
design.
- February
2008: CSI court testimony nicely models techniques by which
students can improve their classroom science talks.
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Assessment
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As someone who
enjoys the intensity of working directly in a classroom setting,
I find offering professional development by e-mail tame by comparison.
But as a publisher I can't ignore the serious advantages of such
online education: low personal cost, stunningly wide reach, and
time flexibility that benefits the poster and the readers alike.
Active high-school teachers can read and return to the HSST technical-writing
posts whenever their busy schedules allow.
And although I have summarized much the same material in person
every July since 2006 for teachers attending a week-long on-site
"academy" hosted by U.C. Davis's Edward Teller Education
Center in Livermore, I would have to present more than a decade
of those annual sessions to come close to influencing the many science
teachers that have read the HSST list in just one year.
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An Invitation
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To learn more about the
literacy outreach project, to suggest a teacher who might want to
host future technical writing workshops for their classes, or to
participate yourself, please contact T.R.Girill
(trgirill@acm.org). 
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