To answer your question, to help my students see me as more of an equal, I have started to taken on a more active role of discipline, as well as teaching. I have my own individual writing and reading groups where I work with different students each day in groups to help strengthen their writing and reading skills at their own pace since we have used differentiation in determining groups. Throughout Routman's book of writing, I have seen many of his tips and strategies will be helpful in my individual writing groups, as well as looking forward into my lessons. As a beginning teacher I saw several places where an "expertise" would be helpful for this writing advice. Having an extensive knowledge of why the students are learning that skill and how it will effective them in the future is a key component. If you can't explain why to a student, how should you expect them to be motivated to achieve it? To incorporate the 7 Habits (I think you both use the Leader in Me stuff in your school too), an expertise is also in habit 2, Begin With the End in Mind. If you don't know where you want your students to finish, how will you know the best route to get there? Personally, my MT has shown the writing rubrics to our class, which has helped them to see the basic skills they need to master in order to get a certain grade. This is one way that I have noticed my MT being an "expert" in that would be in sync with Routman's advice, have you seen any expertise in your class?
I also see certain dilemmas occurring in the use of "The Essential Writing Day" advice. It is stressed that conferencing with students is an immense step to learning and progress in students writing. Therefore, teachers should not simply teach a lesson, have students write, then grade their piece and move on. Working even further with students on a small group, full-class 'presentation' and individual basis is essential for students to understand what good writing is. However, some teachers may feel that they do not have time to meet individually with students, or have not developed a sufficient "teacher talk" to conduct such conferences. As of now, I feel that the "teacher talk" is a dilemma for me since I have had little experience teaching any form of writing to students. Since we have individual groups, it is difficult for me to see everything my MT does to help her groups progress, so do you have any advice or little tips you have used or seen an MT use?
Katie- I think it’s great that you have your own reading and writing groups that you get to work with on a consistent basis. That gives you so many great opportunities to try out new strategies and really connect with the students! We do use the Leader in Me and the Seven Habits in our classrooms too and Begin With the End in Mind is a big one for students when they’re completing their work. In terms of my MT being an “expert”, I think she is an expert in many different areas, but one in particular really connects to what Routman is saying in “Writing Essentials”. My MT is definitely an expert in writing conferences. Since the launch of Writers Workshop and writer’s notebooks in our classroom, my MT has really tried to incorporate a lot of conferences into the Writing Workshop time. According to Routman, “conferences can have a number of different purposes-to celebrate, validate, encourage, nudge, teach, assess, set goals-and they can take different forms. A conference can be informal or formal, short or long, public or private, teacher or student led; whole group, small group, or one-on-one” (p. 206). As you can see, conferences can look a variety of different ways and they are flexible to fit any situation in your classroom. My MT tries to introduce a variety of different forms of conferencing. So far, we’ve done a lot of whole-class share outs, individual share outs, and partner share outs. The students have really responded well to these situations and I have seen them learning a lot form them.
ReplyDeleteAs for your dilemma, I can totally see why you consider it a dilemma because it has stumped me too :-/ There is so much packed into a single day of school that it seems impossible to find time to conference one-on-one with each student about their writing. Maybe this is something that we should sit down and discuss with our MTs. I don’t know about yours, but I know mine has been teaching 1st grade for a very long time and she seems pretty comfortable and confident with what happens in the classroom. Does your class work with the writer’s notebooks? Because I think those are a really great tool to help students advance their writing skills.
Yes, we use writer's notebooks, but we usually don't go through them (we haven't read them yet). Do you go through them everyday or do you simply use them for their conferences?
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