I really enjoyed reading Kittle and Gallagher’s take on “essential discourses”–Georgia’s ELA writing standards pretty much revolve around those three forms of writing. As I read, my interest was sparked in several places.
I think the first thing I noticed in the reading is that in my own teaching of writing, I have limited myself. Kittle and Gallagher have so many awesome ideas about ways to bring students into different forms of writing, and I was really inspired by the different journal writing/flash drafts/quick writes they included in each unit. While I used journals in my student teaching to bring my students into the day’s activity, K&G (testing out a cool acronym, let me know how you feel) use those small pieces of writing to inform a larger piece of writing. For example, I thought the scar maps that were then used to pinpoint beliefs/think about a specific moment to zoom in on is an awesome activity for narrative writing. This aligns pretty closely with one of my non-negotiables–each piece of writing informing the next. This is something that I really want to focus on this next year, and I was happy to see ideas that can help me get that started in my classroom.
Another component that I really enjoyed about the plans included are laps 1-4. This seems to be an organized way of chunking each unit, which if you’re someone trying to implement a similar plan is a useful visual. I found it helpful to see what K&G wanted to see their students to accomplish before they moved on to the next “lap”, and I’m pondering over a way you can create a visual for students to see their progress towards a writing goal with these laps in mind.
As a whole, K&G’s ideas fit pretty closely to my list of non-negotiables. I discussed in my previous post about being unsure of being able to implement something like this into a classroom, but I’ve heard from many of you brilliant people and continued looking into these ideas, and there are many ideas I am excited about! One thing I am interested from you all about, and something that K&G briefly addressed, is student resistance. Even when I came up with journal topics (with choice!) that students were interested in, I felt like I always had a few students who wrote two sentences and said they were done. I could ask them to tell me a little bit more about a sentence they wrote, and they would add another sentence and say they were done again. K&G mentioned that they conference with the student about that kind of writing. Anything you all have done either in writing conferences or just during your writing time to encourage students to write? One size never fits all, but I’d love to hear some strategies that have worked for you all.
Thanks for your thoughts, and I hope you all are enjoying being excited about writing and getting a break from Burke’s theory readings.
Emily's Blog 
Hey Emily! I’m glad you also liked these chapters, especially how they broke down their larger units. It made it easier to visualize the smaller goals and made the unit as a whole easier to swallow, both from a teacher and student perspective. By looking at it that way, it is also conducive to taking out or adding laps, as well as changing what the final end project is.
I’ve done an activity similar to the “Scars” one they mention called “Leaves and Roots.” In it, a person draws a tree with leaves and roots, and then labels the leaves with things that can easily be seen about them or anyone would describe them as (ex. brown hair, generous, quiet, etc.) However, the roots are the things about us that exist below the surface and what truly anchor us and determine how we grow (ex. our values, more meaningful experiences).
LikeLike
Hey, Emily!
In your post, you mentioned that you were wondering about how to create a visual way for students to see and track their progress as they move through each writing lap. This is something I hadn’t thought about, but something that I would also love to implement into my classroom. I think that if students were able to literally see how their writing was progressing, they would be inspired in a completely new way.
Also, when you talked about resistance and students only writing two sentences and then saying they’re done, I knew exactly what you were talking about. I also faced this problem a lot during my student teaching, but one thing I found that actually did help was I would tell students that we were going to write for 5 minutes straight without stopping. I would tell students to just keep writing for the whole time, and if they felt like they didn’t know what to write or their writing wasn’t good, that it was okay, and I just wanted to know what came to their minds. I would “start the timer” and hover around the classroom, sometimes helping students who got stuck (although I usually would actually let the timer go for 10 minutes instead of 5). This actually proved to be really effective for my students, and it helped a lot of them get over the whole “two sentences and then done” mindset. Although I don’t think this strategy would work every single time if used too often, it definitely helps sometimes!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Becca
LikeLike
Hey Emily,
I did the scar story as the first assignment of the year last year, and I loved it. It is a great way to get to know the students, and it gives them so many ways to be creative. They get to draw, color, share, glue and cut, and the best part was reading their stories.
If you decide to do this, you might want to speak to your counselor ahead of time. Since these are scare stories, physical and emotional, a lot of students chose to write about things that are considered mandatory reporting information. I would remind your students that you are a mandatory reporter, so they need to be careful what they share but also not to let that steer them away from their creativity.
LikeLike