Writer's Notebook
January 24, 2017
Reflection on Jigsaw Discussion Groups
I typically enjoy participating in small group discussions compared to discussions with the entire class. This is why I like the Jigsaw approach. I get to hear more from my classmates I am grouped with, and we also experience more depth in our conversations because we are covering a single topic from the article. Checking back in with the entire class afterwards is a great way to hear what the other groups found important in their own sections. I love getting to work more closely with classmates that I otherwise might not have interacted with much.
January 31, 2017
· How does inquiry work?
o It is a recursive cycle, with each of its elements interacting at every point when the inquirer encounters new information
o The five elements: questioning, exploration, assimilation, inference, reflection
· Questions trigger interactions that lead to understanding—and the ability to ask better questions
· Exploration—finding answers to questions by reading, viewing, listening.
· Assimilation—absorbing and fitting to what is already known
· All of this leads to your conclusion which is Inference
· Reflection—pulls it all together
o Always begins: “Have I answered my questions?”
· As your ability to reflect gets better reflection will take up a larger chunk of the cycle
February 14, 2017
Great mentor text for "What Am I?" poems
February 17, 2017
“Writing Next”:
- Along with reading comprehension, writing is a predictor of academic success
- Writing is part of literacy
3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions
4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete
- why do we put more emphasis on reading than writing?
- “While readers form a mental representation of thoughts written by someone else, writers formulate their own thoughts, organize them, and create a written record of them using the conventions of spelling and grammar.”
- What affects does modern day technology and spell/grammar check have on student’s writing development?
- “Writing quality is defined here in terms of coherently organized essays containing well developed and pertinent ideas, supporting examples, and appropriate detail”
Ø Collaborative groups draw upon the strengths of all their members
Ø More and more workplace activities involve project teams. Giving students opportunities to work collaboratively on academic projects can help prepare them for the advantages and pitfalls of collaborative work on the job.
Ø Multiple Ideas: makes for a better story or for a collection of facts. Two or more people can come up with facts from different stand points.
“Modern writing instruction in the United States recognizes that students need to write clearly and for a wide variety of real-life purposes. Thus, flexibility is now perhaps the most prized goal of writing instruction because the fully proficient writer can adapt to different contexts, formats, and purposes for writing.”
- ^^ its interesting how different nations value different features of writing
“Professional Knowledge”:
- “The teaching of writing should assume students will begin with the language with which they are most at home and most fluent in their speech. That language may be a variety of English or a different language altogether. The languages students learn first are the bedrock upon which all other language traditions and forms will be constructed.”
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- “Teachers will want to engage in respectful inquiry with students about significant differences between patterns in their use of their first language and more conventionally written English. Even as they move toward more widely used English, writers find that it is not necessary or desirable to eliminate the ways their family and people in their neighborhood use words to express themselves.”
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- “Such uneven development should be tolerated and, in fact, encouraged. Too much emphasis on correctness can actually inhibit a writer’s development.”
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- Everyone has the capacity to write; writing can be taught; and teachers can help students become better writers
- Writing instruction must include ample in-class and out-of-class opportunities for writing, including writing in digital spaces, and should involve writing for a variety of purposes and audiences, including audiences beyond the classroom.
- Writing is a process- Often, when people think of writing, they think of texts--finished pieces of writing that stand alone.
March 14, 2017
ELLS and Writing- Guest Speakers
· Establish cues or goals for participation- self-regulation (i.e. if you talk too much) invite others in (i.e. if you talk too little)
· Children may need to be taught how to discuss with others during collaboration
· Make class-established group norms
Language Learning Theory:
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BCIS)
Conversations with friends, family, and neighbors
Familiar, routine conversations
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)
Includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material
· A child can have mastered BICS without having mastered CALP
Collaboration is key!
March 28, 2017
Children’s literature
The Dark by Lemony Snickett (didn’t like)
Picture book reading is sort of a performance
You don’t always have to say something at end of read aloud. Sometimes just move on to next activity
This is Not MY Hat (liked, has humor, tells the story with the pictures also- mentor text)
David Wisner – has great illustrated books
· GA Children’s Book Awards- great source for finding books that children enjoy. Voted for by children.
· Lensmire article discussion
o Creating classroom norms around writer’s workshop
o Make them universal enough and specific enough to cover issues raised by “The Zit Fit”
o Consider: norm of student ownership (boundaries to what they can write about?), norm of protecting students feelings, norm of preserving teacher authority, norm of public sharing of student writing, norm of ___,
Norms for Writer's Workshop:
1. Teacher will approve of published/ shared pieces.
2. Try using names that vary from names found in our classroom.
3. Respect your audience.
4. Respect the author.
5. Always keep writing!-- Even when you're stuck, look back at your _______!
6. 6. Everybody will get a chance to share their writing!
April 4, 2017
TPM 2
· “Meaning results from interpersonal negotiations involving what can be agreed upon as shared. And such mutually negotiated meanings (the relation of thought to word) grow, change, develop, and are struggled over by two people and thus ultimately owned by us.
o Language, therefore, both contributes to and is acquired within common interpretive worlds, in which adults and children share intersubjectivity or "mutually created meanings" about experiences.
o As children grow up in families and communities, they learn ways of interpreting and acting on the world through language. Those culturally patterned ways of using language are evident in stories, jokes, prayers, arguments, and other genres through which people construct their social lives together”
· “Nor was it so easy for Louise to figure out what advice she should give about content. Most pedagogical suggestions for young children assume making a better, more sensible text has to do with making ideas more explicit (i.e., writing less "egocentrically"). But the crafting of the singing fish text, for example, did not have to do with explicitness but with rhythm.” (Pg. 21)
· “There was no public forum for Eugenie to present her work in the official world, to bring out her performative language, the dramatized event she had imagined, the family life she had constructed when drawing. Without a forum, there was also no way to socially analyze the work (for example, the decision to imagine details), to compare it to other classmates' decisions, or to connect it with varied kinds of genres in the larger world (e.g., historical fiction, melodramas or child "love stories"). Her unofficial social and language work could not become part of the official classroom culture.” (Pg. 27)
o “Still, if we are to teach the children, we have to tap into these child worlds, and we have to offer them tools--ways of thinking and talking - -that will help them negotiate their way into a future of possibilities.” (Pg. 33)
· “Moreover, we deny them, and ourselves, the scholarly benefit--and the good fun--possible when language and experiences are shared. For, in answering the children, we are also composing ourselves. In their plurality, in their diversity, our children offer us the opportunity to open wider the curtains framing our own world view, so that we might see aspects of experience that otherwise would remain invisible to us, so that we might better understand ourselves as situated in a complex world of multiple perspectives” (Pg. 34).
Before reading this article, I had never been exposed to the term of “permeable curriculum”. I have been around first-graders all semester long for my second practicum experience, and I can absolutely see my students enjoying a forum like this. They love getting to share any kind of work they have created, and I think they would benefit a lot from some sharing time that is more “unofficial”. Classrooms these days are increasingly diverse, so it is important to teachers to understand the mutually negotiated meanings of language can vary between cultures and students’ backgrounds. Collaborating, sharing, and receiving feedback from other classmates (and having the teacher a part of that as well) can have such a positive impact on students developing into thinkers, creators, and writers within your classroom.
I liked how the article mentioned that this type of forum can help not only the students, but also the teacher. By participating in this with his or her students, the teacher gets to expand her own views of the world and gains insight to students thinking and understanding of the content. I thought the author did a good job getting the point across during the example of Eugenie and the Lincoln assignment. If there was no forum for sharing, Eugenie’s work would just be judged at face value because she would not have gotten that chance to “present” and explain the thinking behind the drawings. Reading that made me feel bad for the student and pushed further for me the importance of giving children a voice.
On page 21 of the text, it was mentioned that the teacher, Louise, sometimes struggled with how she should respond to students work or what advice she should give them. I appreciated that this was pointed out because this is a question I would imagine having for myself in this situation. I think it would be important to think about what kind of goals or not were set in place for this forum. I did like how Louise would make links between the students “unofficial” and “official” worlds. I saw this in the way she would take the student’s work and link it to a genre of writing, or how she pushed one young boy to follow his inquiries and learn more about forming music by connecting him with the school’s music teacher, etc. I think that doing this confirms or validates the work that the students have created. Overall, I think I could see myself creating a permeable curriculum in my future classroom to benefit the students, myself, and our overall classroom community.
April 11, 2017
Guest speaker- Kelly Parker
“How to Make Writing Fun in a Standards Based Classroom”
· Stop trying to tightly control everything- it’s their learning and their education
· Academic choice- an instructional approach that motivates children and encourages autonomy by letting them select from among several teacher-offered ways to meet learning goals
· “We cannot change what we teach the children, but we can change how they learn the content (process)”.
· Choice boards (examples handed out)
· 3 Phases:
o Planning- children decide what they are going to do and plan how they will do it
o Working- children complete their chosen task
o Reflecting- children reflect on the work they have done and the learning that has occurred
· Baby steps
· What happened? Showing picture and students have to write about what happened next, before, etc. ----- practicing sequencing
· “Kid Talk” posters- letting children break down different parts of the standards themselves in groups to put it in their own language
· “Whatever standards you set- they will rise to it”- KP
· When the kids see that you really care and are encouraging them, they will want to try harder and hold themselves more accountable
Fish Bowl Discussion
notes following the discussion:
- Discussion has been shown to be one of the best ways to build community, put focus on the students (taking teacher out of center), and work on communication
- I do not like feeling observed from the outside
- Everyone is just constantly thinking about when they will jump in rather than process what’s being said
- I do like that teacher is out of it and students can become pretty independent with it once they know the routines
- Good that everyone needs to participate, but I would prefer the small group settings still
Reflection on Peer Conferencing
Peer-conferencing over a writing piece is an activity that I have not had to do in a while now, but one that I did quite often in my middle and high school experiences. I am not a student that typically enjoys writing, so I tend to have an uncomfortable experience or feel vulnerable when I share my writing with other people. Despite these feelings, though, I think that peer-conferencing is a beneficial part of the writers’ workshop. Collaborating with peers on your writing can be motivating and invite different perspectives into your piece.
For my writers’ workshop piece, I decided to peer-conference with Jordan Moore. After reading each other’s work, we created comments on a document for each other noting any parts we liked or had suggestions for. I found her feedback to be very helpful in shaping my next draft of my paper. I did feel uncomfortable though that I felt I had less feedback to give to her. I loved her piece and did not have much critique. I think that this is okay, and probably very encouraging for Jordan, but I just felt that the peer-conferencing was a little unbalanced (to my advantage). This is something that I could see happening in classrooms with younger students as well, so I think it is important that maybe the teacher creates his or her own student conferencing pairs with that in mind.
I love the collaboration aspect of peer-conferencing in writers’ workshop, and I can see myself implicating it in my own classroom one day. I think that I will have to adapt it though to meet the needs or expectations of whichever grade I am teaching. I am in a first-grade classroom currently for my second practicum, and I have observed these students pairing up to share their work with a partner. There are no formal conversations breaking down parts of the writing pieces, but they are getting the chance to share their work, see their readers’ reactions, and get ideas from their partners. Although I do not personally enjoy peer-conferencing, I think it can be beneficial for my classroom one day. Maybe I can use my own experiences with it to try and make any similar students feel more comfortable.
Book Club Reflection
When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead
I began reading When You Reach Me with no idea what to expect from it. I enjoyed that because I did not know where each chapter was going to take me as a reader. The book was an easy read, due to the short/varying chapter lengths and it being from the very personal perspective of the sixth-grade girl Miranda. I think that students would enjoy reading this book because there is plenty for them to relate to with changing friendships, crushes, bullies, parents, etc. I think there is some aspect of the book that anyone can find relatable.
As a reader, there were some issues with the story for me. The one that bothered me most was how uneventful the story line ended up being for Sal. He was a character that the readers become attached to in a way, because we see through Miranda’s perspective how important he is to her. As a reader, I felt so frustrated for her when Sal just cut her out from his life for what seemed like no reason, and I was waiting to find out what would be the cause and the resolution. I thought it was boring that all that happened just because Sal wanted some space to make more friends. Along with that I also was disappointed that Marcus punched Sal on the street that one day just because his older brother has picked on him before. All that build up just for that. It felt to me like the accident with the bus was the only peak and that the other mysteries lacked luster. Although I would not go recommend this book to a friend, there were still moments of enjoyment while reading, and I still had markings in my books of quotes that I loved and wanted to be able to look back on. I would not say that I regret choosing this book for my book club novel.
I have only had one other experience that I can remember with being in a book club, and occurred just this last semester. I did not hate it, but I also did not love it. It was a very interesting book (Choice Words), but often I would come to the meeting ready to talk about it and others in my group would not have even completed the chapters. I think they could be a very fun time though when they are being done because the members have willingly chosen to participate in it. In my classroom I would like to implement some sort of book club with my students because I think it would be a great way to get them engaged and excited about reading. If done correctly by the teacher, these can seem more like social gatherings around books rather than an academic requirement that they will just be graded on.
When it comes to the “class novels”, I can say that I only had positive experiences with them during my own schooling. That does not go to say though that I will be jumping at the chance to use them in my own future classroom. I typically enjoyed the novels I had to read with the class, and if I did not, then it was still broadening my horizons with genres. The fifth-grade class I had my practicum with last semester were reading the book Wonder all together. A couple students expressed to me that they did not like doing this because they wanted to read ahead. But I also did see some positives with all the different aspects of the writing and story that Mrs. Lee got to discuss with the children- things they would have likely missed or skipped over if reading completely on their own. If I were to do a class novel, I would be okay with using When You Reach Me. It is easy to stay engaged in, and I think it is a fun story to have the students make predictions with. I can see them being excited to finally find out who the time-traveling mystery person is. There are also creative style choices in the reading like how the author chose to make the chapter titles into categories like the “$20,000 Pyramid” show mentioned often in the story. I could see some good conversations occurring from parts of this book. So, while I would not go tell a friend of mine that “they MUST read this book”, I think it is a story that students in my class might enjoy!
TPM on "Exploring Inquiry As a Teaching Stance"
“In this particular set of practices, the noticing and questioning that students engage in around the gathered texts determine what will become important content in the study (the teacher doesn't deter mine this in advance), and depth rather than coverage is the driving force in the development of this content.” Pg. 239
o What is right balance between coverage and depth?
“Because Emily's students knew they were expected to write something similar to what they had been reading, something that could take its place in their packet of op-ed columns, their inquiry had that wonderful sense of urgency that writers who are expected to write something know so well.” Pg. 241
o Set expectations for students early on so they knew how to prepare
o Motivates students
Is Calkin’s Writers Workshop included in these “alternative strategies”?
“It is discipline-based inquiry that puts reading at the forefront of the teaching and lets students develop a knowledge base about good writing in the same way professional writers develop theirs” Pg. 242.
o So the only difference between this approach and the other described is that the teacher does not guide the students on what to look for?
“The reality is, of course, that teaching often overlaps all three of these approaches at different times in different way” Pg. 242.--------Bingo. Usually a balanced approach of strategies is a better and more realistic way of doing things.
“Take, for example, the conventional rule so many of us learned about persuasive writing-state the main idea in the first paragraph and then give the reasons for holding that idea in subsequent paragraphs. But if you actually look at writing of this kind, lots of it isn't written this way at all. Writers sometimes don't state their main idea until the very end, and sometimes they state it right in the middle as a turning point in the text.” Pg. 243
o This makes sense, but I am looking at this while thinking about my current first grade class. Teaching it the first way mentioned seems logical as a beginning point, because it makes more sense for the kids. I think writing should get more like the “real-world professionals” as they advance and develop later on in their writing… So I think this strategy depends on levels…
o Counter to my thoughts on Pg. 243. “And if teachers try to change it into something simpler because the students are, after all, just ten and eleven years old and doing this kind of writing for the first time, they end up teaching something that just doesn't ring true.”
"The writer starts with vision and ends with words” Pg. 245
Overall, I really like the Inquiry approach that was discussed in this article. I love the idea of students being immersed in the readings and discovering features of the writing examples themselves, rather than reading the example texts just to look for pre-determined points. I also agree with the usage of real-world, “grounded” examples of the type of writing that students are working towards. I think that this will really engage the students and allow them to reach a higher level of thinking when they are exploring the texts through their own observations and questions. I can relate to the nerves a teacher must feel hoping that the blank “Observations” chart will be filled productively when left to the students. But if the teacher is serving as a facilitator then hopefully he or she can use their guiding questions to steer a class that feels stuck.
I am curious about how this approach fits with Lucy Calkin’s Writers Workshop. I have only seen a handful of Calkin’s lessons being taught, and I seem to understand that is a very planned out approach and sometimes results in the type of writing that was mentioned on page 243, with persuasive pieces and graphic organizers. I am not sure what all grade levels this approach is intended for, and that is something I would like to find out. I am in a first grade classroom right now, and I personally think the more “conventional rule” of persuasive writing mentioned makes more sense for this age. I think it serves as a good base point, and as the students develop and progress as writers they could work on becoming more creative and more “real-world” with it.
Teacher Emily Steffans mentioned her strategy of “planning to plan” in order to keep a schedule with her inquiry writing schedule, but I still wonder how much more time this could take than an approach where teachers are guiding more. I know many teachers are placed under immense pressure by standards, policies, and administrators to stick to a pre-determined time schedule. Because of this, I believe a balanced approach to it may be best realistically for those teachers. Teachers need a sense of ‘readiness to change’ with their practices, so that they may venture into the uncomfortable or unknown territories that are handing more power to the students in their learning. I enjoyed reading this article, and it gives me ideas of what I would like writing to look like in my future classroom.