July+16

July 16, 2010 Reported by Lisa

We convened at 8:30 with Rod reading an excerpt from //The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid//. We laughed as we discovered how to get a teacher to lick pee-soaked Lincoln logs.

We discussed/shared articles we read, focusing on how they relate to the climate of the classroom. Katie and Lisa had shared their articles yesterday, but they gave a brief recap.

Korey and Jane also read “The Tyranny of the Thesis” as well as Ted and Erin shared their articles.
 * “Ways to Unintentionally Make Writing Difficult” by Linda Labbo
 * There are six thing that teachers often do that actually discourage students from writing: Focusing on what you want to teach instead of what the students need, expecting everyone to do the writing process in the same way, making the author’s chair a hot seat, making the author’s chair the teacher’s choice instead of the student’s choice, expecting final drafts to be near letter-perfect, and treating the process as more important than content.
 * “The Tyranny of the Thesis” by Alex Duxbury
 * He argues that making students start with a thesis statement causes students to write what they think the teacher wants them to write instead of actually thinking about what they read. This article incited much discussion yesterday, but we passed over it quickly today.
 * “Life Ain’t No Crystal Stair” by Susan Danoff
 * This teacher used storytelling to reach students who struggled with reading and writing. She also had students imitate Langston Hughes’s “Life Ain’t No Crystal Stair,” and the students produced poems high above her expectations.
 * “Essays of the Act of the Mind: Authentic Voices in Student Writing” by Brian Ford
 * Formal essays restrict students. They learn that “good” writing is formal and that their natural and informal ways of expressing themselves isn’t good writing.
 * “Unloading the Excess Baggage: A Teacher’s Story” by Beth Halbert.
 * A student used profanity in a piece about gang violence, but the teacher didn’t know what to do about it. She was afraid of what administrators or other teachers might think if they discovered that he had written a piece like that and she had allowed him to do it. She wished that she had taken the opportunity to talk to the student to about writing for an audience.
 * “A Writing Teacher Risks Writing” by Jeanne Bordstien
 * Writing the assignments along with your students and sharing your writing with them will help build rapport with your students. They will see your struggles with writing and learn what you do to overcome those struggles. You can discover when assignments aren’t working or if part of the assignment needs to be changed.
 * “Jason’s Story: Motivating the Reluctant Student to Write” by Lynne Carignan-Belleville
 * Jason had a learning disability, so writing was difficult for him. Instead of marking up every paper with red, which would discourage him from writing, the teacher created assignments for him early in the year that she knew would bring him success. This method not only built his confidence as a writer, but it also improved his social skills.
 * “All Writing is Autobiography” by Donald Murray
 * Students often feel as though they don’t have anything to say, but everything students write has them in it. We don’t have to have experienced something to write about it.

While discussing these articles, several other questions and topics of discussion emerged. When we wrapped up our discussion, Rod gave us some directions for the rest of the morning and told use what to expect on Monday. We dispersed at 9:45 to read more about climate. We will each write a reflection on the issues revolving around climate and post it on the wiki.
 * Is there a difference between confidence and self-esteem? Yes. Confidence is about building skills. Self-esteem can just be “blowing out sunshine” (Ted).
 * A key to climate is establishing with the students that you are a person, not just an extension of the system. Show students that you are human.
 * Help students see the value in writing. Give them real-world writing experiences.
 * To build climate with students, you have to know what they need. If a student can’t spell “said,” she’s not ready for you to tell her that she needs a comma between two independent clauses connected by a coordinating conjunction.
 * Make your classroom a writing community.
 * Jane came up with a great idea for an assignment. Have student print off their facebook profile page. Then, using a template, have students create their profile page so that it would be what they’d want an employer to see.
 * The two major creators of climate are the relationship between the teacher and students and the directives of the school district.
 * Profanity is appropriate sometimes, and allowing students to use profanity in their writing can help build rapport with students.

The next group of articles that we will be reading is about writing to learn (the goldenrod section). As we read articles from this section, we are to think of ourselves as a resource for one of our colleagues. We will think of a specific person or department. By 10:30 on Monday, we should be able to speak to the rest of the class as if they were the other person, sharing with them what we want them to know about teaching writing.

On Monday afternoon we will be performing some of our pieces in the theater.

PM We had the afternoon free to write.