Assignment Nine: Final Course Reflection
(All assignments are due by 12/3 !!!)
Take a look at the last section in Regie's text, Writing Essentials, it's chock full of great resources!!!
Teaching in Action: Lesson Essentials 5 Day Lesson Plans & Appendices
• Secrets of Second Graders• Heart Poems
• Procedural writing• Hero writing
• Persuasive writing
• Appendix survey
Be sure to look through this section. If you haven’t already done so, look at Appendix A (page A-2.) Re-examine your beliefs about writing by re-reading the statements about the writing process and marking true or false in your book. Did you change any of your previous answers? Would you consider bringing this page to your team or even to your entire school to jump-start discussions about writing? Take some time to look through the appendices. There are several useful examples included. One we’d like to point out to you is Appendix L- The Genre Characteristics Excerpt on page A-13. Look to the Writing Essentials companion website at www.heinemann.com/writingessentials for the entire chart as well as directions to assist you playing the DVD.
ASSIGNMENT NINE: Final Course Reflection - Critically examine your current literacy program and develop realistic goals to improve your instruction. Also reflect on the balance between your home and school life. If our students are to become happy, literate people, they need happy, balanced teachers. BRIEFLY, share several of your goals with the class by posting them to the blog for this final assignment.
Thanks for taking our course!!!! Mary & Jackie!
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After reading this book, implementing many of the ideas and refining some of my current practices I feel like I am much better equipped to teach writing. This book made me reevaluate long held assumptions- spelling is not as important as content. I know understand that yes, spelling is important, it how you teach it that is fundamental. Another assumption and practice I’ve altered is that I can just read a story and use it as a spring- board with out much modeling. Wow, I learned modeling is the key to much better writing.
ReplyDeleteThe helpful tips dotting the pages also helped clear up misunderstandings: have the kids read to you, have them fix it up the best they can then do the final polishing, some days just say “good job”.
The practice other than consistent modeling that I found so helpful was group conferences. The sheer ability to use one kid to teach lessons to many kids was such a time saver and practical.
One suggestion that Regie wrote about that I already do is to de-clutter the busy- work. I felt vindicated after reading her thoughts. As I’ve mentioned before, my first inclination is to not spend time on worksheets and such. But, then am tempted because they don’t seem to get it. Now, I know… when in that position, model more!
Finally, the whole -part –whole approach has completely solidified my understanding of what Writer’s Work is, and what it is not.
My goals for the future are to read this book again, or at least parts when I feel stuck in the mud. Everything I just mentioned in this post will now be part of my writing plan.
I am not even sure where to begin. There are so many resources in this book that even though I have looked over it pretty thoroughly, it will still take me much more time to fully absorb how and when I would use all the ideas. I feel so inspired with this course because I don’t have to go and redo everything that I have done so far. I have to actually do less and make small changes that will make my instructional practices much more meaningful for the students. I like the idea of using the students own writing as teaching points for other students during the group conference or celebration time! It seems so obvious but I have never even though of it before. No more wasted time spent searching for a great lesson on how to teach word choice …the students themselves have great examples in their writers notebooks. I actually brought a few writers notebooks home with me and as I was thinking about this idea, I searched through notebooks for ideas and used post its for note-taking and I was astonished to find so many teaching points and samples within their own work. I used to feel like my writers workshop was a waste of time but now I feel like there are so many teaching points and ways to inspire the kids. I feel like I have been pretty consumed lately by teaching and felt incredibly overwhelmed and like I didn’t have enough planning time but as I have taken this course, I have seen that I was wasting a lot of time doing things that weren’t all that productive. I have also taken another course this term, the CAFÉ one and it was also great and I also found lots of ways to keep current data, great instructional practices without adding a lot of additional workload, in fact, I was decreasing my work load. My goals for my literacy program are now a bit of a combination of what I have learned in the CAFÉ class and in this class and are as follows:
ReplyDelete• Implement a writing workshop that follows this consistent pattern: Mini lesson with me doing an example of that writing in front of the class and or a shared writing activity based on time, a student work time and a sharing time. The sharing time could be individual conference or a group conference celebration depending on the day.
• Conference on a daily basis with students-whether in a group setting or individual and keep up to date records of students goals, dates we have met as well as what we have been working on using the CAFÉ style conferring notebook.
• Ensure that every activity, I am asking myself if the activity is meaningful for the students and if it is the best use of my time.
The biggest take-aways from this course and book for myself are as follows:
ReplyDelete1. Make time to celebrate writing! Have a student share his or her writing each day at the end of writer's workshop. It only takes about 3 minutes, and I now understand the importance of students writing for an audience.
2. Conferencing with students can be individual or can take place in a celebration format. Conferencing with students at the end of a celebration can be great learning for other students as well as the student whose writing we are looking at.
3. I love the writing conference model of giving a compliment and a goal. I like how clear and concise the format is for that.
This book was great and truly helped me to reflect on the way I teach writing. I'm glad I am doing a lot of things how I am - this book helped to reinforce my practices in many ways and gave me a lot of tools so that I can fine tune a few things too. :)
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ReplyDeleteI found this text and course beneficial for me to explore and solidify my writing instruction philosophy. To be honest, being trained as a social studies teacher, I had never had any specific training in writing. When I was hired as a language arts/social studies teacher, I read some Tovani and Echevarria and took some suggestions from colleagues to formulate my literacy program, but this course has allowed me to reflect and learn valuable techniques to improve my instruction. In the future, I plan to incorporate the following into my literacy instruction:
ReplyDelete-Focus intensely on a real audience for our writing, not just a bulletin board. For example, if students are writing admiration essays, send the piece of writing to that individual or involve the city council or school board members for persuasive pieces.
-Increase my modeling to where I don’t just share my writing but I select a topic, write a piece and talk through the whole process in front of students.
-Always compliment the meaning of a piece of writing in a conference. Focus lots of compliments on the content and ideas, rather than the structure of the writing.
-Use personal word walls as well as whole class word walls.
-Help my students to view themselves as writers by showing how I am a writer.
-Be more organized with student writing portfolios and keep roving conferences box charts to help organize student writing data to help myself and the student know where we are at.
-Share my literacy philosophy with future colleagues.
-Read even less student writing. Although as I wrote I was frowning, I feel it will help me to keep a better home/school balance. Maybe a better way to say it is do not feel obligated to read as much writing as I once was. Trying to maintain literature journals with meaningful teacher comments was just too much to do well with 65 kids.
I definitely see myself referencing this text again and again and I cannot wait to apply these strategies in the future.
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