Writing Blogs

When I looked for blogs this week, I wanted to focus on finding posts that talk about the writing process and editing/revising. I find these to be tougher areas to teach and I was hoping to find something that could help spark ideas for me.

On Edutopia, I found a blog post called Creating a Writers' Workshop in a Secondary Classroom, and thought it would be a great read. In this post, Shelby Scoffeild talked about how she started using writing workshops within her high school English classes. Her first two ideas were the best and most helpful bits of advice that  I never thought of. First she states that workshops should be done in a station format. She says that her classroom is set up into stations with a topic for students to focus on. When class starts, students come in to find an assignment on the board. From there they find a station they wish to work at and focus on. The stations range from “Learning how to Analyze” and “Structure an Essay” to “Reading Out Loud” and “MLA Formatting”. This leads to the second word of advice, let students pick what they focus on. I like this because students are meant to pick what they focus on based on where they have weakness in their writing.I like that this format of a writing workshop because it gives students the chance to reflect on themselves and their writing. Scoffeild goes on to tell about each station and how they can be used to improve writing for students.

The second blog I read, The Thesis Whisperer, is written by many different teachers on writing. The post I read, Doing a Copy Edit of Your Thesis, Dr. Jay Daniel Thompson talks about ways of editing your work. This can be linked with Scoffeild’s idea of using stations for workshop writing. When students finish writing and to the point of editing and rewriting their paper, Thompson gives a set of steps or topics to pay attention to when editing your writing. He states that grammar is important, but reminds readers to focus on the structure and topic of the paper. If we forget about the topic of our papers, they could fall apart. I could go back and edit all my work and have no grammar mistakes, but is that more important than my understanding of the passage?

I find that when I was taught writing  and when I’ve seen it taught in classes, we automatically look at the big picture. We look at what we need to have and try to reach that goal all at once. When we look at writing we break it into sections and paragraphs to be more organized, in a way we should be doing this with the writing process. There are so many different parts of writing we take for granted or overlook, for me one can be MLA formatting or whatever formatting I’m using at that time. I hope to one day use the station format of a writing workshop. I think it would greatly help students to break down their writing and editing process by focusing on one thing at a time.

RI CEC Con

Last weekend I had the chance to attend the Rhode Island Council for Exceptional Children conference. When I went, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The conference focused around working with students who are either special needs students and students with emotional struggles. I try to be open minded when it comes to working with students with special needs. I currently tutor a boy who may qualify to be in a separate special needs classroom with only ten other students, and I’ve heard from him that he hates the idea. The boy I tutor told me how mean students can be to “those kids” and basically said that there is a horrible stigma behind students with special needs. He is right. This conference helped me to recognize the stigma even more and see the need to fight against it.

At RI CEC Con there were two keynote speakers who spoke together about their work at the Henderson School in Boston.They described the importance for special needs students to be included in regular classrooms not only for academic growth, but for personal growth as well. They noted how happy their students were to be with “normal” peers rather than be separated like outcasts. This made me think of Skip, the first deaf student who attended my high school.

In high school everyone would be considered “normal” in the eyes of society. Very few students had IEPs and there were no students with significant needs. When I was a junior, my school accepted their first deaf student, Skip, who would then attend the school with his interpreter. The first year for him was hard because no one knew ASL and he relied on his interpreter, but his second year at my high school they introduced an ASL class and students were able to talk with him without help from his interpreter. Skip was also an honors/AP student who received many scholarships when he graduated.

Skip was an example of how the stigma we place on special needs students is often very wrong. Just because he needed a little extra help to understand the class lecture, didn’t make him a low level student. I have known many people who are ADHD, autistic, and dyslexic who were very intelligent and were able to do well in school. Some of them were blessed with the opportunity to be integrated into a general ed classroom, but not all were. The students who were put in separate classrooms told how miserable it could be and how peers looked at them differently.

Nikos Giannopoulos, one of the speakers at RI CEC Con and Rhode Island’s 2017 teacher of the year, spoke about trauma within the classroom and what we can do for students. Though he focused on students who may have hard struggles at home or a bad history, he noted that students just want to be understood and know they are in a safe place. This applies not only for students struggling with trauma, btu special need students as well. They need to know that they are welcomed in a general ed classroom and that their teachers are there to help them. One of the things that made Skip happy at my high school was that even though he was “the deaf student,” he was still just like everyone else and he knew he fit in.

6+1 Traits

When I started to read the 6+1 Traits, the first thing I thought about was Fu and how this could help ELL students and even students on an IEP. The traits break down the seven most important things that make up a strong work of writing. I can see teachers using this in the classroom to help teach how to edit work and how to improve writing skills.

When I read this, I imagined a class where students are given time to peer edit, but go through each of these steps. Students look at the work and then ask “What is the main idea” before looking at the structure and organization of the work as stated by 6+1 Traits. The students start small and go step by step through the process rather than just look at spelling and grammar. The traits seem to pinpoint the small details that can be overlooked when peer editing. Voice, for example, is something I was not taught to directly look for when editing a paper. I would not think analyze this, and in turn, I wouldn’t be helping my peer as much as I could have. The same goes for sentence fluency and presentation.

The only traits I remember working on in school and paying close attention to was word choice and conventions. I remember we would always try to help each other with spelling and grammar when correcting a paper, but we als would look at if the sentences were worded well. Did the writer use “very” too often within the text? Is there another word they could have used for “good”?

In a classroom I could see this done as a “checklist” activity where students go through each trait and edit the paper according to what the 6+1 Traits say make a strong paper. Students will first focus on the main idea and then the organization. The activity may take a day or two, but they are focusing on making the paper as strong as possible. This also would make the students slow down their editing process.

I can’t wait to try our lesson in class for co-teaching. Frankie and I have great ideas and I’d love to see how this could work in a class setting

ELL in the Classroom

The reading this week evoked many ideas in me that I’ve had for a while. The school I worked at for four years had a heavy population of ELL students who speak Spanish or Portuguese.

Fu made many great points that hit home with me after working in a school with many ELL students. There does seem to be this expectation that students will enter schools and only be writing in English even if it isn’t their first language. At one point Fu mentioned a gentleman saying to her that he was told “… one should only think in English when writing in English.” This made my heart break because it seems to devalue the original language of a person. When a student comes into a school, of course they will want to write in their original language to express their ideas. I found Fu’s stages of writing very interesting in how she things it is great or students to slowly start writing in their language and then merge English into their writing as they learn.

I like that she also pointed out the horrible idea that it is frowned upon to write something in one language at first then translate it later. In Spanish class, that is how I learned to write. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but that helped me to learn the language faster rather than being forced to only write in a language I didn’t know. This is where the gentleman said that he was told to write in one language only. How is that possible when you aren’t familiar with it?

This also links later to a section in Pahl and Rowsell’s article where they mention literacy and power. In this section they mention that there are students that are not as literarily advanced as other students. I couldn’t help but feel that the ELL students are a large percentage of these students. They say they looked at the relation to literacy in “ethnographies of neighborhoods” and this felt like the polite way of saying they looked at the different cultures and ethnicities in the area of schools. In this case I would be willing to guess that there are many in those areas that may be ELL students and therefore lack power in literacy.

In their passage, Pahl and Rowsell said something that caught my attention. “The word literacies signals that literacy is multiple, diverse, and multilingual and spans the domains of practice, from home to school to community, and in each domain there are different literacies.” This idea seems to be forgotten at times. Literacy is made up of so many parts, including other languages. English was not always around; it was made from different languages put together slowly over time. So many of our words come from Latin roots, yet we still refuse to let people speak their language that may have influenced out own language.

Quick Write: Question 1

When I was in school, I started to learn the five paragraphs structure starting in middle school. The structure was drilled into our heads and even in high school we were forced to follow it. In high school some papers may have become six or seven paragraph essays, bit if we added more we were expected to stay on topic. As I got higher in grade we did begin to learn more about adding paragraphs beyond the typical five, but even then, it didn't help much to prepare for college.

When I started my first college classes and had to write essays, I was very overwhelmed. I would try to get all my ideas in as few paragraphs as possible and all my essays were terrible at first. I felt like I had to learn a new way of writing all together. When I started at RIC I started to map out my essays. By map out I mean a bullet list of all the paragraphs and what they would be about. My first bullet would say introduction of course, then I'd quickly write a one sentence summary. All the rest would be body paragraph numbers followed by what the paragraph would be about. This helped me a lot to organize my thoughts and stay on topic.

I have shown this method to students I've tutored for the past few years and they said it helped them a lot. One student, who is now in college, said it "saved" her when her essays were assigned because she knew how to approach them. Her classmate who graduated from high school with her still struggled.

I agree that the five paragraph structure is a form of training wheels for students, but when do we start to take the training wheels off and teach more advanced writing? I don't recall ever being taught how to go beyond five paragraphs in a productive way.

Be Gone Five-Paragraph Structure

When I was reading Gallagher, one phrase that stood out to me was that he feels we should “…spend less time teaching writing and spend more time teaching the writer.” I love this idea because it seems like a form of backwards teaching that can change the classroom. He also mentions being more experimental with teaching writing and that we should get students to “mess around” and “play with” their writing when we can. When I was in school I was always taught one way of writing, intro paragraph, three or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This is also what Kenney spoke about when Erica was struggling with her paper. When we were taught how to write poetry, we were taught to follow a certain structure and we were graded on how well we followed those standards.

Reading that sentence again I noticed that I was always taught “how to write” in school rather than being taught to be a writer. It wasn’t until I studied writing in London with Teen Ink that I learned to think outside the box with when I wrote. All through time writers had to experiment and “mess around” with how they wrote in order to become great writers.

During my four years working as a substitute teacher, I had to be one of those teachers who followed a lesson plan that taught the five-paragraph essay format that Kenney talked about. As I began correcting papers in my long term positions, I felt like I was reading works from robotic students. Every introduction read the same way, every body paragraph was structured too perfectly with five to six sentences, and a conclusion that mimicked the introduction and restated the main idea. In a way it was almost scary because I couldn’t tell one student’s work from another. There was no individuality in their work.

I love the PEAS idea in the classroom as a new approach to teaching writing. There are fewer limitations and allows students to have more freedom in how they approach their writing. There are no paragraph requirements to restrict the students to five paragraphs, but still sets up the idea that they should make their point, give evidence, analyze their idea, and state why the idea is important. This can be achieved in so many ways without following the five-paragraph structure.

I enjoyed the readings and think they make some amazing points about writing. I’ve always wondered about this idea and questioned why we are so restrictive on teaching writing. I love that Gallagher and Kenney promote more freedom in writing for students.

Personalized Learning?

After reading the three articles for class this week, I found myself puzzled and suffering from headache (not sure if this was from the reading or lack of sleep). The idea of giving that much freedom of learning style to students and having less control can be scary. I also find it scary to give students more access to the internet to do their work in different styles in school.

One of the most basic things I’ve learned through all my classes is that all students learn differently. Because of this, personalized learning gives students new options for learning other than sitting and listening to a teacher for an hour. Roberts-Mohoney compares personalized learning to a Netflix profile very cleverly. When you use Netflix so many times, it starts to learn the types of movies and shows you like to watch. After learning more about you, Netflix makes a personalized list of movies that you would enjoy watching. This is what teachers need to do in the classroom. We need to learn more about our students and adapt our lessons and create a “playlist” based on what they like. If we adapt lessons to the student’s interests and their learning ability, then they may be more productive and interested in the work.

After reading Coiro’s passage, I find that he touches on a topic I often think about. We are teaching students so they can advance in the future, however not all students have the same future. Coiro’s first point under “Where do we go from here?” states that we should adapt the lessons and learning to the interests and needs of the students. If a student is looking to become an engineer in the future, their lesson will and should be different from that of a student who aims to be a cook. I also like that he points out that students should be pushed to think on their own and create original works. Students should work to produce original and creative works that demonstrate their knowledge on a topic rather than have exams or essays to test their knowledge.

I thought that Couros was clever for pointing out the use of different internet platforms to engage students in learning. I wouldn’t have thought that you could have a good lesson that incorporates Twitter or Skype, but it would be interesting to see how it works. I like the idea of using Blogger in class to teach lessons and have students engage in writing. I’ve done it in many classes before and greatly enjoyed it, but considering the dangers of the internet, using the internet in personalized learning can be daunting. I think it was key also inform students on internet safety.

One of my favorite poems

A Whole New World

After reading the first chapter in Christensen book and the blog post by Macaluso, I noticed a theme between them that I not only loved, but find very important today.

Macaluso talks about how she went went to the store and saw the world a new way when she wrote the poem about the old woman and her husband. Until that time she never thought of the supermarket in a way that may seem scary, but meeting this old woman who fears her husband may forget her there changed her view point. Christensen also mentioned this when she had her students write poems about who raised them. When the students shared their ideas and their poems, they began to see each other differently and realized that some of them had more in common than they thought. This also opened up for more opportunities to have students grow and be more accepting of each other.

When the students were told to think about who raised them, the learned to think outside the box, reflect on their lives, and realize that there are more influences on them then just people. One student wrote that music raised them. They saw the world from a new perspective and realized that they are so surrounded by music at all times, the music started to shape them as a person. This is also done when one student wrote about how they were raised by video games and how they changed their personality.

When I write poetry I notice I begin to look at many things in a new way. I am writing a poem for my RAFT project and found I was trying to look at the common core standards from the perspective of students of different races, classes, and interests levels. I tried to imagine how the standards would apply to a student wanting to be a mechanic, a profession where essay writing may not be needed as often. I never thought of it that way until I chose to write a poem on the topic, rather I thought of the standards in a singular way that is expected.

On a random note, I love how both writers gave examples of poems on their topics. Macaluso wrote such a good poem but it was also so sad. I also liked seeing the work by different students in Christensen's class. I think writing poems on who raised you would be an amazing lesson and project to do one day with students.

Freedom to Write

Gallagher spoke about how students need to be given freedom on writing assignments. He noted that students will not only produce better work, but it will be more passionate and doing tasks like revising will be done well due to their interest level. I fully agree with this and experienced it here at RIC. When I took my senior seminar for English, I took a Victorian Literature class with Russell Potter. When we did our final paper, which had to be between 15 and 20 pages long, he gave us freedom to write about anything dealing with the Victorian Era. Because I was also getting a degree in film studies, I wrote my paper on the rise of the film industry. Many don’t realize that short films were starting to be filmed in the later years of the Victorian Era, so I thought it would be interesting to write about. In my time at RIC I thought it was the best and most passionate paper I wrote.

Another time I loved writing and had freedom was in high school when we studied narrative writing. Christensen talked a lot about how students seemed to enjoy narrative writing and telling their own stories. It feels like a more open form of expression that is also personal. One of my favorite assignments for narrative writing was when we all took an item to school that had a story attached to it, put it in a brown bag, and then we randomly picked items from another student. We then wrote a story about the item and the real story about the item we brought in. My item was the gold ring I wear with five small diamonds on it. It was my grandmother’s engagement ring that my father gave to me after she passed away. Though the classmate who got the ring knew nothing about it, their version of the story was fairly close to mine.

The coteaching article made me think back on my time as a long term substitute for a fifth grade ELA teacher. The teacher taught three ELA classes each day and one Social Studies class. Because the students had fallen behind, the team of teachers and I met and thought about doing a jig-saw activity where the students helped to teach the two chapters we needed to cover. During this time I did little in terms of “teaching” and more helped the teachers with their “lesson plans” and understanding the topic they were going to teach the class. At first I was worried about how it would work, but students were greatly interested in the idea and they were able to present all the ideas well.

Of the Three readings I enjoyed Gallagher the most because I can’t help but agree whole-heartedly. The best papers I’ve ever written where the ones I had the most freedom with. I just wish more teachers would understand this and give students more freedom.