That's a Wrap!

My title is quite deceiving considering I'm referring to the wrap of another school year, another degree, and yet I'm graduating from a program that will ensure I am in school for the rest of my life. Ha! Jokes on me, right? 

Anyhow, today was the end of our shared classroom experience in Writing Across the Curriculum. This time of year is always so bittersweet. I'm glad the work load is finally over, but so sad about leaving this amazing program, the fantastic professors that have guided me along the way, and I'm especially sad to leave the family I made out of strangers. All of these people and elements have contributed so much to who I am as a teacher. I always knew teaching was a part of me, but it wasn't until this year that I could define why, or really who I was as a teacher. This class helped develop my philosophy of education, but more specifically the need for balanced literacy in the classroom, ensuring all students are both readers and writers- in all contexts.

This week's question is how do I believe the different kinds of writing will inform my teaching in content areas, and I think the most obvious answer is it will allow me to see whether my students actually understand what I'm teaching them. In various ways, it isn't until a student can explain their thinking that they actually understand it. A lot of writing tools will help students organize their thoughts and keep track of their thinking process. Writing allows you to not only see a student's final product, but also the process it took to get there. Writing allows me to see the students literacy levels, understanding and ability to communicate, and sometimes even their learning preferences. 

My content area is English, so it's quite obvious how different kinds of writing will inform my teaching in my content area. I'll be able to view student's abilities to write different types of writing conventions, fluency, style, grammar, and anything writing related really. Writing will help students make meaning of their learning, make connections with themselves, other texts, and the world around them. It's interesting because the the curriculum document makes references to all the things I believe writing does naturally, the document states: 

Successful language learners:

•  understand that language learning is a necessary, life-enhancing, reflective process; communicate – that is, read, listen, view, speak, write, and represent – effectively and with confidence;
•  make meaningful connections between themselves, what they encounter in texts, and the world around them; think critically;
• understand that all texts advance a particular point of view that must be recognized, questioned, assessed, and evaluated; 
• appreciate the cultural impact and aesthetic power of texts; use language to interact and connect with individuals and communities, for personal growth, and for active participation as world citizens 

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Although English is my content area, I am also a Junior/Intermediate teacher, which means I will be teaching much more than just my content area. I truly believe that everything I will get out of Language classes, I can also get out of other subjects. Writing really helps bring things together, form context, and make connections. 

Sharing is Caring

Saw this great picture on someone's blog, thought it was worth re-posting!

It's called the Profile of a Modern Teacher, I like to call it The Many Faces of a Teacher. I'd like to believe they both work...no? I was once told that teachers are really just actors, really great actors, reaching the end of teacher's college, I couldn't agree more.

Mentoring continued

Student mentoring was a mixture of finding the students strengths, working on areas of improvement, and encouraging him to find his own writing style. We worked on sentence and paragraph transitions, some sentence structure, perspective, and for the purpose of the scene summaries, only including key information and summary structure.

Here are some samples of the writing and editing we did. 

Some Resources we used were:

How to Write a Summary

With thanks to: Swales, John M. and Christine B. Feat. Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 

 Essential Tasks and Skills. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1994. 105-130.

Preparing to Write: To write a good summary it is important to thoroughly understand the material you are working with. Here are some preliminary steps in writing a summary. 

1. Skim the text, noting in your mind the subheadings. If there are no subheadings, try to divide the text into sections. Consider why you have been assigned the text. Try to determine what type of text you are dealing with. This can help you identify important information. 

2. Read the text, highlighting important information and taking notes. 

3. In your own words, write down the main points of each section. 

 4. Write down the key support points for the main topic, but do not include minor detail. 

5. Go through the process again, making changes as appropriate. 

As well as lists of transition words taken from: English Language Smart words- Transition Words http://www.smart-words.org/linking-words/transition-words.html

And The Mentoring Begins!

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience mentoring students at Hawthrone Public School in Ottawa. It had definitely been a while since I had read grade 8 writing, and wow was I shocked! It’s an interesting experience for many reasons; for one thing I don’t think anyone was really sure what to expect. All we were told was we would be working with grade 8 gifted students, hopefully working on the students writing process. Secondly, I had never worked with gifted students. The anxiety was a tad overwhelming, on both my part and my students. But once we got started, I realized that mentoring and being in a classroom was much better than being at the university. 

Our first meet started with trying to get to know each other. I wanted to know what motivated my student, what he thought about his own writing, and what he wanted to work on. He showed me an essay he had recently written and we discussed his writing style and preferences when it came to choosing his writing assignments. The period went by much faster than we anticipated, but I was glad we spent most of the time talking and getting to know each other. Although the meet was short, we were able to set some goals for the following weeks and outlined the areas of both strength and areas of improvements. My student decided he wanted to work on perspective, paragraph transition, and overall flow throughout his writing.  

The following weeks of mentoring consisted of continuing to get to know each other and working  on some writing assignments. My student decided he wanted to work on scene summaries for A Midsummers Nights Dream. We started the process by getting him to write his summaries. We used summary examples to try to compare his writing to others, and worked together to edit his writing. The key to improving his writing is not only to edit his work, but also be able to recognize the changes he is making.

Mentoring has been about a month of work in progress, next week will be our last week with the students. Stay tuned to see the comparison of where we started and where we are finishing!

The Trouble with Math/ The Beauty of Math... or Poetry?

A few weeks ago we had a fantastic guest speaker award winning poet, Deanna Young. It was so interesting to have her come in and discuss poetry. I thought it was great that she started her talk with a discussion, or even a critique of some of the readings we had been assigned the week before. She talked about how the article on poetry, although it was assumed that the article was promoting the use of poetry, it never actually mentions the significance of the affects of reading or writing poetry. Deanna also brought the class some great examples of how poetry can be used at different age levels, and can be used cross-curricular.

Although I thought Deanna was fantastic, I wasn’t completely convinced until she made us write our own poems. First off, poetry isn’t my forte, secondly, the topic took me back immediately: Math.

So here were the rules:

1. Cannot say Math

2. Must be at least 9 lines long

3. No number

4. Cannot directly reference number in any way

5. Must include one colour

6. Must include one emotion

And heres the result:

The Trouble with Math

I always thought it would be useless, I hated it really

I never understood how I could possibly go from being so good to being so bad at it

But then again, maybe it wasn’t me?

Maybe it was all of those awful teachers.

It was like thinking black was a colour my whole life and then finding out it’s actually a shade

What was that about?

Then I realized I would be one of those awful teachers who made everyone do this useless learning

I would have to change that mentality and find its purpose

How do I make it meaningful to students?

Turns out, 7 minutes of intensive poetry writing brings out the best in us. Some of the poems shared in the class were amazing. Absolutely incredible. Not only did we get into a great math talk, but it became a meaningful conversation. What a class! 

Anyways, if there is one thing I will use in my future classrooms, or student mentoring programs it will definitely be poetry!

Cross Curricular Narratives

I love when my classes relate to each other and make more sense then they did at first. Here's a reading log I wrote reflecting on "From Tourist to Storyteller: Reading and Writing Science" by Dawn Abt-Perkins & Gian Pagnucci 

The Learning Process, PED 3101, Week 4 Reading Log:

This week’s article takes us through the journey of students trying to contextualize and further understand scientific reports. This article targets the concept of learning through narrative. The idea however is not just reading stories, but rather writing, constructing, and building narrative through all subject matter. Narrative allows students to take difficult and new information and draw into a more familiar narrative understanding. Narrative is described as a human essential to learning. Humans have the need to organize and make sense of our experiences through narrative and narrative sharing. It’s a way of giving structure to new concepts. Story telling also implies immersing oneself in the text, in the experience, which essentially allows you to become actively involved in the narrative.  Stories allow you to take dull, procedural texts and insert human understanding, sequential ordering of events, as well as narrator’s perspective. In essence, narratives give meaning to abstract concepts; concepts that are sometimes far removed from your own personal experiences. I think narrative, and really any type of writing is imperative within the classroom. It is one of the few ways to get students to take information they are acquiring and analyze it, criticize it, and make meaning that is understandable to them. My only fear with writing is how often is a teacher supposed to implement it into the classroom routine? Also, how do educators overcome the anxiety that writing may cause to students, especially those in younger grades, or those with exceptionalities?


Through class discussions I also realized that narratives do not only mean stories. Narrative can be used in Math, for example, by creating a review game using a common theme your students enjoy (like a food joint everyone goes to, or a popular movie). Another way of using narrative is in Social Studies. The Social Studies curriculum often lacks primary sources. This is a great interactive way to get students to write their own. If you're discussing nature disasters, for example, have students write a personal narrative about a natural disaster their family may have gone through, or if the topic is Canadian History, have the students write a personal narrative of their own perspective of Canadian History. There are so many places where teachers can use narratives!

Mentor Text

What on earth is a non-narrative text? That was my first question when I was trying to find something to bring in as a mentor text. My subject area is English, so what could I possibly bring in that would be unique and interesting, and acceptable as per Peterson's suggestions of non-narratives. That't when it occurred to me!
During my practicum, my associate teacher and I were looking for resources the students could use to answer questions after creating an inquiry based lesson. The lesson was essentially just showing the students two pictures. They were to take a close look at the picture, followed by a think-pair-share. The students discussed what the picture was about, where it was taken, who took it, and why. The students were asked to come up with their own questions and post it to the picture on the Smartboard. After collecting the questions, we grouped them and asked the students to find the answers. The problem was, how do you get a class of grade 4/5 students to find anything on the internet? Google? Do they even know how to use Google when they're 8 or 9? That's when we decided to do exactly what Peterson suggests in Chapter 3. Provide keywords, giving them accessibility to find quality information. The key was to narrow down the information. Two websites my associate teacher seldom used are: Teaching Kids News and Newsela. Both sites provide students with news articles based on current events, but translated into child-friendly language. Newsela takes the articles one step further and breaks down the articles into different reading levels. (Side note- great resource for differentiated instruction!)

Anyhow, according to Peterson my non-narrative form is categorized as a news article, in the form that informs. I thought it was a great non-narrative because it's a way of taking abstract content that students do not identify with and give it meaning. The other great aspect about these two websites is that it is divided into different content areas. Which means it's cross-curricular! (Always a plus, no?)

Some of my fantastic classmates also suggested that with Newsela, you can even use the different reading levels/versions of the same article to dissect the key facts that are included in all versions. You can make an entire lesson based on the essential components to news articles or the writing conventions of media literacy. Using news articles opens up the possibility of learning about media literacy, writing conventions, current events in science, or social studies. These mentor texts can be guides to any cross-curricular lesson. I really do think articles like these emphasize the importance of literacy across the curriculum. All teachers teach writing!




http://teachingkidsnews.com/

https://newsela.com/

Week 2: Blog Response and Summary to Atwell

Nancie Atwells story reminds me of my first week of practicum. You go into a classroom with all these expectations, all these polished lesson plans that seem so perfect but as you walk into the classroom you realize they will never actually work  with the group of students you are given. I think what stuck with me most was the concept of adaptability. Teachers need to commit to being lifelong learners and show that to their students. Teachers need to learn how to communicate with students and take the time to conference with students to work on their writing with them. I like the idea of showing students your own work and showing that you have fears and insecurities the same way they may have them. Atwell makes a great point when she says to allow for freedom of writing and not criticizing but rather suggesting changes.

Teaching always changes and new theories and concepts will always arise and it’s important to adapt to them and have students understand that we are all adapting to the changes together. It is also important to highlight to both ourselves and to students that teaching and learning writing is not just in an English class, writing is about communication and should be an emphasis in all classes. Although some classes will not specifically be teaching conventions, teachers are still teaching communication and that’s something we learn how to do through writing. Learning through writing doesn’t just mean learning how to write, it also means taking information and processing it: making sense and meaning of new content.

There were many key points that Atwell points out, but what I loved most was the idea of letting students write in their own form or about things they care about. Real letters, real stories they want to submit. When doing this it is also important to allow students to continuously work on drafts and not worry about conventions right away but rather in later drafts. Writing will less likely cause stress and anxiety and will be more so about learning. As I’ve stated in previous blog posts, writing should be able learning, creativity and exploring new concepts.

Although I believe this to be true I also think Atwell’s journey is one all teachers are bound to face at some point in their careers, no matter how open minded or how committed we are to being life learners. They key is to remember that we are life-long learners and that’s what we are promoting and encouraging within our students as well. Atwell’s story helps us develop and reinforce our own pedagogies. 

What does writing mean to me?

When I think of writing I think of structured writing: essays, paragraphs, short answers, stories, poems, But very rarely do you think of free writing. Writing has always scared me. I always feared not being able to properly or rather effectively put the words from my head onto paper. I feared making mistakes, I feared not writing what I was supposed to write. Spelling, grammar, structure, these were all things I felt I had never learned properly. Therefore what does writing mean to me? Fear and anxiety. Ironically enough I chose languages, specifically English and Spanish to be my area of expertise in university. English being my teachable I knew I had to change my mindset about how I feel/felt about writing. I believe writing should be free and natural. It should be a form of empowerment, expression, and creativity. Students should feel confident in their writing without the worry of being criticized for getting conventions wrong or writing about the wrong subject matter. As a language teacher I believe it is ultimately important to have students recognize that any writing is good writing. Writing is a form of expression, a form of learning, not something to be afraid of. Writing should however have purpose and meaning. Writing should be a process of learning, communicating, teaching, expression, and exploring.