ASSIGNMENT FIVE: WRITTEN REFLECTION-Section Three- The Essential Writing Day Chapters 7-10
Chapter 7: Be Efficient and Integrate Basic Skills
• How might we integrate skill work into student writing rather than teaching it in isolation?
• Daily Oral Language exercises – THEY DON’T WORK!!!
• The importance of focusing on meaning and quality first
• All writing needs both a PURPOSE and an AUDIENCE
• How thinking aloud can make your teaching more explicit
• Teaching WRITING – not just the language of writing (process, process, process)
• What about writing standards? In your District and State?
• Key writing minilessons
• Revision – how to get students to care about it
• Letting kids in on the secret that – Yes! – Conventions do matter!
• How can we effectively use word walls?
In Chapter 7, suitably titled “Be Efficient and Integrate Basic Skills,” Regie gets to the heart of what so many teachers struggle with: “Fitting it all in!!!” Many of the elementary teachers that we work with are beginning to feel as though their personal motto is: “Jack of all trades; master of none.” We just don’t have the time to teach well what has to be taught. The only answer to this problem is to modify our instruction so it agrees with Regie’s stance that isolated skill work (such as Friday spelling tests, DOL, grammar worksheets…) will not help our students grow into writers (or readers.) On page 144, Regie shares four components for an integrated Writing Workshop:
1. Identify writing genres that would interest students (and meet district requirements)
2. Decide who the audience would be for each piece of writing.*
3. Model your own writing process and show students how you struggle.
4. Have students share writing regularly (for both celebration and great teaching moments.)
*This created the biggest change in my own class’s writing - once my students began to write with an audience in mind, the quality of writing shot right up!
Regie also gets to the heart of what writing with “voice” really is and addresses how to teach children to write with an honest voice in their own writing. She describes voice as “the writer’s unique personality on paper, his own melody in words, her ‘mark’ as an individual. To write with voice, the writer has to be interested in the writing.” We think that many teachers and students are unclear as to how to add true voice to their writing. Regie suggests, “Voice is in the details – but details that show the real person and story behind the words, not just details for the sake of adding more words…”
Integrating those isolated editing skills such as grammar, punctuation, and spelling into our writing will increase the efficiency of our instruction. Bottom line – if the students care about their writing, are writing for a specific audience, and understand that “the importance of editing (and spelling conventionally) is to make their message clear and easy to read for their audience – or reader, they take this job seriously and work hard at making their writing clear.”
Chapter 8: Organize for Daily Writing
• What is our definition of Writing Workshop? What does Regie say?
• How can we have student choice within a structure?
• The importance of writing talk (teachers and students)
• The ultimate nightmare for all of us…scheduling…finding the time to write everyday
• The importance of routines, organization and modeling expected behavior
• Genre study – why it’s important to have both school-wide and district-wide conversations
• The possibilities within genres
Figuring out a way to “fit it all in” is usually one of the most frustrating things many of us face. It starts at the beginning of the year as we first plan our daily schedule and continues throughout the remainder of the year. Considering how you will create your schedule to include a solid chunk of time for both reading and writing will probably be the most stressful piece to the start of your year.
Create a Comprehensive Literacy Framework: Play with your time and consider what changes you might make in your daily literacy framework for next year. Take a look at the samples that Regie provides on pages 185-187 for some possibilities. You do not have to post your schedule, but we believe this is a worthwhile activity to complete on your own.
Chapter 9: Conference with Students
• What is the purpose of a Writing Conference?
• What are the different types of Writing Conferences?
• How can Share be used effectively?
• How to conduct a productive conference
• What about management and routines?
We are so glad that this chapter talks about Share during Writer’s Workshop. Too often this component is skipped by teachers who feel there isn’t enough time in the day to “fit it all in.” However, it’s a vital piece of the workshop and beneficial to all the students. Share sessions are an additional time to teach. The teachers in my school are quite comfortable using Share as their mini-lesson if the need arises. Given the reality of daily schedules they were finding that they couldn’t have a mini-lesson, confer and share everyday. They then realized that their Shares sometimes were the minilessons. For more information about Share we recommend looking at Leah Mermelstein’s Don’t Forget To Share: The Crucial Last Step in the Writing Workshop. In this slim book, Leah explains in detail four types of Share: Content Share, Craft Share, Process Share and Progress Share.
The “Tips for Successful Whole-Class Shares and Conferences” on page 215 are excellent ones to keep in mind. The bottom line for Conferences and Shares is that students should feel successful and want to continue to write. Make sure what you say to the child encourages them to keep on writing. “The conference is secondary; the student as writer and confident learner is primary.”
Chapter 10: Make Assessment Count
• Understanding how rubrics work
• What about Test Prep? THE BEST TEST PREP IS EXCELLENT TEACHING!
• How can we collect reliable data on students’ writing throughout the day?
• Guidelines for grading and providing evidence for parents, administrators and the public
“There is lots of writing assessment going on these days, but little of it actually improves the quality of students’ writing.” As Regie continues she points out that this ‘assessment’ “is seldom used to improve daily instruction.” This chapter is about becoming more knowledgeable about assessments. Regie notes, that unless teachers know how to teach writing well, it can be a waste of time to examine students’ writing and place students on a writing continuum. She encourages you, as a staff to “write together, study together, converse together, gather school-wide data, analyze these data and set goals for improving writing instruction. There is no shortcut to helping students become effective writers and there is no program you can buy that will do it for you.”
Remember to use rubrics judiciously and not overdo it. They should be “used as an evaluation tool, not as the driving instructional force.” “Use professional common sense. It is not advisable to apply rubrics to ALL writing nor to score ALL writing. Just as our students need lots of practice reading many texts without the expectation that they will be assessed on everything they read, they need lots of practice writing without being assessed on everything they write.” (Page 243)
Have your students do a lot of writing! “Extensive writing across the curriculum as part of an excellent writing program is the best preparation for doing well on (standardized) tests. Readers have to read avidly to become readers and the same holds true for writers. Kids who write a lot develop higher-order thinking and understanding that translates to higher achievement on all types of tests.” Be sure to check out “Try It Apply It” on page 246 and throughout the chapter for ideas to incorporate into your program.
As Regie points out in this chapter, “The joy has gone out of writing.” We need to “concentrate on developing kids as learners rather than kids as test takers.”
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Chapter 7: I am listening to Reggie when she says that teaching the skills in isolation doesn’t work. But I think I would feel that if I wasn’t doing all or at least some of those isolated skill exercises that I wasn’t being a very good teacher! I guess that’s just because most people around me who I think are good teachers do the isolated skill exercises. And then I wonder about assessing common core standards and assessing student growth on IEP goals. Is it possible to do this without isolated skill progress checks? I guess I can imagine perhaps analyzing a piece of student writing to decide a student’s accuracy on conventions or fluency or whatever goal area, but it does seem a little less solid information that a worksheet that dealt with skills in isolation. Maybe I just need more practice reading student work and analyzing it? Probably. Speaking of which, I’m interested to hear Reggie’s later discussion about rubrics. She often talks them down, but in my own limited experience rubrics are the only common sense way for me to make sense out of student writing and to score it.
ReplyDeleteI’m pretty curious about the discussion around writing for an audience and how much that can improve a student’s buy into their own writing. It makes sense, I just wonder what that will look like with my high schoolers next year. Many high schoolers I’ve worked with in the past really struggle with the not caring attitude. Of course if their was an audience they cared about writing to, that would logically help them to care about their writing, but I wonder how hard it will be to find that audience?
As to word walls, I’ve really only been vaguely aware of them in the past. So I wonder how I might use them well in a high school classroom? I like the idea of creating them together with my class, and also the idea of personalized word walls that students might attach to a class notebook or binder.
Chapter 8:
If next year I am able to teach resource reading and writing classes, then I think I would most likely want to do alternate days with reading and writing. I don’t think there would be enough time in a single period to do both reading and writing well. So ideally I’d start the first 20 minutes of class with teaching. And then the next half hour would be students writing independently and doing conferences with students. The last 10 minutes or so would be time for sharing student writing. I think there might be some flex between the first 20 minute teaching time and the 30 minute independent time on days when I was needing to do a lot more shared writing.
I very much agreed with her writing about the need for strong classroom management skills being something that supports the success of writing workshop, and really any style of classroom I think. I see this every day, behavior issues steal very immediately from a student’s and a whole class’s ability to focus and learn. But I think also students doing work that they value, perhaps if they are writing to an audience they care about, then I think that would very much positively impact classroom behavior as well.
ReplyDeleteChapter 9:
I am pretty much convinced that whole class shares are going to be a very valuable part of writing workshop. Both for the student sharing, and as an opportunity to teach, as Reggie explains. My nervousness about trying them is two fold. Reggie says that behavior isn’t a problem during these class shares because the whole class is so engaged. I do believe the class will be engaged, but I still have concern of behavior issues - inappropriate comments, students getting wound up - and these seems so much more difficult to deal with when I have a student and his or her writing being shared, which is very vulnerable. But I guess modeling how it should be done well first might help somewhat with this.
My other piece of nervousness is will I be able to think of what to say to help encourage the student to next steps. Part of that is sorting through what would be the next best steps in the moment, sometimes I see so many needed next steps it feels difficult to know where to begin and certainly wanting to make sure I don’t communicate too much. Probably watching the examples on the DVD will help with this, also I think trying to get a good idea of what students at the grade level I’m teaching/or at their individual ability levels should be expected to be able to produce. Having a better idea of what we are working towards I think will help me decide what to suggest as next steps.
Chapter 10: I appreciated this chapter. Currently as I teach my mind is oriented towards taking data frequently on my students’ IEP goals and letting that data inform my teaching. So this chapter fit in well with what I felt like I was wanting to learn more about. Reggie’s description about how to use rubrics seemed balanced and made a lot of sense. I really appreciated suggestions about creating classroom specific rubrics and even having students be part of creating those rubrics. I remember as a high school student evaluating my own writing, and also having to change papers with classmates and having to evaluate their essays. I never liked it as a student, but remembering back, I know reading my classmates’ essays helped me to improve my own writing by giving me ideas of techniques to try.
I thought Reggie’s writing around the area of taking data frequently throughout the year was really exciting. The idea of giving a writing prompt, the same one, at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year - and throughout several grade levels is awesome. I already know I want to implement that next year at least within my own classroom. There is a chance as a resource teacher that I’ll get to work with the same group of kids throughout several grade levels, so that would be perfect to be able to give that same writing prompt several years running. Looking at Reggie’s checklist on page 250 and 251, I see a lot of great information for assessing regularly throughout the year and each class. Looking through it, it makes me want to get to work right away creating record keeping sheets to be able to quickly and easily store the information, especially the Assessment for Learning ideas.
You can still focus on certain skills in students work and assess for those skills when students write in a workshop style classroom. But in general over-reliance on worksheets don’t work for most students. There’s nothing wrong from using a purposeful worksheet from time-to-time, but when your entire instructional program is built around worksheets, that is when you need to start questioning your methods and what works best for students.
ReplyDeleteI believe finding out who the audience for your students’ writing would be easy, just ask them. Is there a video game they have comments about? An app they think could be improved? A sports team? An actor or activist group they are interested in? The possibilities are endless. I’d have them do a shared writing of a list of potential topics/people they’d be interested in writing to our about. Then post the list.
Here’s a link to read more about word walls at the secondary level.
http://www.readingrockets.org/content/pdfs/World_Walls_-_A_Support_for_Literacy_in_Secondary_School_Classrooms.pdf
One of my 6th grade teachers has pictures that describe vocabulary words. For example instead of writing the definition of a vocab word she prints pictures that show the meaning of the word.
Yes, taking the first 6 weeks to develop your expectations and classroom community is time well spent. You will have to revisit these rules and expectations as the year goes on esp. around vacations and holidays but setting the tone early on will help you get on with the work you all need to do for the rest of the year.