Just a few weeks away from the beginning of school, I am seriously thinking about what one new thing I am going to concentrate on this year.

Mentor texts is the winner for teaching strategies.  But growth mindset is the overarching winner for teaching philosophy. Is there a way that using mentor texts supports growth mindset?

Ever since I attended Kelly Gallagher’s workshop in May, I have understood the importance of explicitly teaching using mentor texts. I say “explicitly” because even though that is what I have been doing this all along I never told the students about it, and I never fully developed their role in finding mentor texts for their future learning.

Gallagher explains the importance of mentor texts beautifully when he discusses how the special effects teams worked on Star Wars. They studied video from World War II footage of actual dog fits and, after they identified the kinds of moves the pilots did, the team members modeled and imitated those kind of moves as they created the storyboard.

Here is what I like about the way Gallagher explains using mentor texts.  First, expose the students to a wealth of texts.  If I want to teach argument, offer them samples of argument essays to read and analyze. Lead them to uncover the different devices the authors use, looking at the entire work all the way down to the sentence and word level. Help them to find the strategies the authors use.  Coach them to discover the conventions of that mode of writing.  Let them create a list of best strategies to use when writing something like the samples.  Have them write lots of little pieces, eventually creating a longer, polished piece incorporating the characteristics they uncovered.  For example, have students “discover” the effectiveness of parallel structure in a piece and learn to use it in their own writing, instead of “teaching” it.

Certainly, this simplistic explanation does not fully explain the nuances of Gallagher’s work, but it gives an idea of the kind of framework I hope to use this year.  As an AP English teacher, I always used mentor texts–to a degree.  We read and analyzed the rhetorical devices and strategies the author used in a particular piece, and I encouraged them to incorporate that kind of writing when they wrote their practice essays in Synthesis, Argument, and Analysis.

However, I never use professional written texts to demonstrate how one might write an essay that had the features of those three response demands.  Certainly, we read student samples of each, and we read plenty of prose that had argument, but I did not expose them to mentor (professional) samples of the kinds of writing that make up synthesis and analysis.  So that is one change I need to make.  

Nevertheless, the biggest change this new requires me make is in Digital Literacy.  Let me give an example.  When we studied infographics, I would have the students look at a variety of samples and ask them to write what the message was.  I never really delved into having the kids react and then analyze HOW the message was delivered.  It seemed evident to me that they would know that without me pointing it out.  However, the biggest takeaway from my last few years of study with PLN has been to “make visible the invisible things’ that good readers do. That is something that is key when using mentor texts.

This year, I plan to surround my Digital Literacy students in samples of the work, professional samples, and let them discover what makes a good digital memoir, or pro-con infographic, or digital process analysis. Then I will proceed with helping students to uncover what they want to “write” about and how they want to deliver that content.

For me, though, what is most notable is how this attention to mentor texts supports growth mindset.  A recent article by Dave Paunesku,a Stanford University mindset researcher, reveals that mindset is not just about trying harder. For teachers, it is about creating an environment where each student can “focus on the fact that working through mental challenges strengthens the brain.”  

Kids cannot perform tasks that are unthinkable just because they try harder.  We have to set the challenges for them, ask them to think a little more, require them to work a little harder.  Scaffolding their work by providing mentor texts is one way to introduce students to looking at writing that will help them become better readers AND better writers.

I cannot expect a student to sit down and write something–or even analyze something–like Virginia Woolf’s “Death of the Moth.”  But by using that piece as a mentor text, and struggling to find the meaning and then determine the strategies, the student will be able to “try harder” and “grow” his/her brain.

The most important part of this endeavor, however, is helping kids to reflect on the role mentor texts can play in their own lives and their lifelong learning.  As Gallagher explained, when he first needed to write a grant proposal, he found examples of effective models and emulated them. This, I think, is the real goal of making mentor texts a focus in the classroom.  In the future, they can TRANSFER the idea by finding their own mentor texts for required work in classes or the workplace.

Mentor texts and growth mindset.  I wonder if Kelly Gallagher ever met Carol Dweck?