Mentoring

Day 1: Introduction, read through writing examples

Today I met the student I would be working with for the next few weeks. His name is Alex and he is in grade 8. His class is categorized as gifted, but Alex didn’t really want to talk about that. We spent most of the period trying to get to know each other. We found out neither of us really have one specific hobby, just a bunch of different things we sometimes like to do. We talked about our reading and writing habits, both admitting we liked engaging in both, but never did it enough. Alex is part of a book club at his school and he says sometimes he enjoys the books, but hadn’t this week. I asked him to tell me what the book was about, where I made some anecdotal notes about his oral summarizing skills. I discovered that Alex had great summarizing skills, he was able to identify the important details and explain why they were important. His summary was concise and informative.

As part of this mentoring process, Alex had an essay ready for me to read. While I read the essay I asked him to make some point form notes on what he was most proud of about his writing, or what he thought his strengths were.  As I read his essay I also made anecdotal notes to keep track of the types of things I noticed. His essay was about the Fenian Raids. I asked Alex to tell me what type of essay it was, and talked a bit about types of writing. Next we focused on things he noticed in his essay that he wanted to work on for the following sessions. 

I noticed Alex wasn’t re-reading his work, he was missing simple errors such as capitalization and spelling. I also noticed his body was the strongest part of his essay, he has great attention to detail and the retelling of facts. This brought us into discussion about the introduction, thesis, and conclusion. We decided we wanted to make his writing more interesting by including some perspective, opinions and arguments to the essay. We also decided we wanted to work on the fluency of his writing, mostly looking at transition words and sentences.

Brainstorming for our next session:

Personal Writing Strengths ·         Attentive to detail ·         Good sentence structure ·         Good overall structure ·         Versatile vocabulary

Area for Improvement: ·          Introductions: How to start an essay/paragraph ·         Writing fluency, transition ·         Perspective-opinion ·         Structure- intro/concluding sentences

Day 2: Choose to work on scene summaries started writing

The second session with Alex started off a little bit slower than the first day. This time we were given the assignment and had to choose 8 tasks from a list of 16. Then, from the 8 we needed to narrow it down to something attainable within the time frame we had to work together. Since we had already talked about how great Alex’s writing reflected his attention to detail, we decided to work on scene summaries for the play. Before we started writing we brainstormed what were some key things to remember when writing summaries.

Here is the list we came up with:

·         Main idea

·         What happens- series of events

·         Characters

·         Introduction, body with details, conclusion

Alex started writing the first scene. He broke it up into two parts.  First he wanted to have the main idea of the scene, reduced to one sentence. The second part was the actual summary. Most of the period was spent with Alex and I talking through the scenes and deciding what were the important events he should include. I hadn’t read the play before so it made it harder to contribute, but also worked in Alex’s favour because he got a chance to summarize just by telling me what the chapter was about.

We talked about character development and how they should be introduced in summaries, always assuming the reader has not read the play. The class time ran out before we got to the editing process, but I wrote down some important things to bring in for our next session.

·         Graphic organizers for summaries- 5W’s, describing wheel, facts and opinion sheet

·         Transition words

·         Scene summaries to compare

Day 3: Continued to work on scene summaries, included graphic organizers

Today Alex and I were able to get right into working on the scene summaries. We read through the first scene and ran through basic editing, such as punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. After reading through it I asked Alex to put himself in the position of the reader. If he had never read the play before, would he know what the first scene was about just from reading the summary? His initial answer was yes. I pulled up a scene summary found online and asked Alex to read through it. I asked him to star anything he found that he had not included in his own summary.

From this process we came up with a list comparing his summary and the one online.

Here’s the list of similarities and difference we came up with:

Similarities	Differences
·         Character explanation ·         Revolves around main idea of scene ·         Important details only	·         A lot of details ·         References to the text- quotes ·         Deeper character development ·         Transitions ·         Opening and closing sentence

Once we came up with the list, Alex refocused his writing on some of the character development he was including as well as the important details. We continued to write the summaries and revise them as we went along. For the following session I planned on bringing a list of transition words and phrases to help the fluency of each paragraph.

Day 4:

The last week came by far too quickly.  I started off by reading over the summaries we had already corrected and continued to provide Alex with feedback. This week I brought alone a different type of worksheet, it was a list of transition words. We looked through them and tried to see where we could fit them into his writing. We worked on the summaries right through the end. By the end of the period I wanted to make sure Alex had actually gotten something out of these mentoring sessions so I asked him to look over his paragraphs from the beginning before the editing process. I wanted him to make notes of some of the differences he saw. We also talked about what sorts of things he was looking out for now when he started his writing process. He said he saw a lot more connections between paragraphs, better transitions, and more of an overall flow. I agreed with him.

Although I was skeptical at the beginning of this process, especially considering the short amount of time we had with the students, I felt it was both beneficial for him and myself. Writing is part of balanced literacy and ensuring all students are both readers and writers. It is a life skill and focusing on it within the classroom comes with great value. Being able to provide students with different ways to think about their writing, either by using comparison tools, graphic organizers for visually mapping their process, or jotting down some brainstorming notes. Sometimes even talking through a topic with another personal improves literacy. Seeing the changes in Alex’s writing also made it clear to see that it’s the small simple steps we take that make a difference. I was very glad I was able to build a rapport with Alex and establish a positive environment that would be beneficial to both to us. Overall, I am quite pleased with how the mentoring process worked out.

Rubrics, and Checklists, and Organizers, Oh My!