• 

• 

• 

Burke’s readings make sense to me in that there are always forces in education that we cannot compete with. For example, I was looking over my new materials/requirements for 10th grade, and like many of you I discovered I am required to give a multiple choice/short answer final. I looked at a sample final a fellow teacher provided, and I was surprised to see the questions were all very basic. “Why does Othello kill Desdemona?” kind of basic. These kinds of questions are crafted so that students will remember the plot…why? What good will knowing the plot of Othello help us as we go through life? I believe there is a need to think about the kinds of questions we are crafting for our students. If it’s a question students can google, then we are useless in the classroom. However, if we are creating questions that ask students to think alongside the text, then we are pushing students to create their own experience with the text and think in unique ways. Burke calls teachers to make short answer questions something students have to think about (rather than Google), and that’s something that resonates with me.

As I’m thinking about what happens In My Classroom (both the assignment and in actuality), I can’t help but feel like I’ve already begun to rely on these ideas a bit. If we are required to give such assessments, how can we make them meaningful? I appreciate that Burke calls us to look at what we ask our students to write on demand, and as I move forward I want to ensure that those types of writing are there when necessary, but with plenty of opportunity for other writing. While Burke seems a little more interested in writing on demand for his students than I am, I can definitely see the value of the skill that he describes, and I think it is possible to take his ideas about writing on demand without giving in completely to all the assessments our students have to take.

I was initially drawn to this weeks book simply by the title. Admittedly, I am a victim of the 5 paragraph essay. When I first came to college, I truly struggled with writing anything more than a few pages because I had been raised on 5 paragraphs, and I felt trapped to that model. Even now, sometimes, I find myself thinking in a 3-point kind of essay, and that simply does not cut it for the thinking or writing asked of you in college.

Warner points to issues, like the 5 paragraph essay, that are leading our students astray in today’s English classroom. Though we’ve talked about some of the practices that aren’t great to use because they are actually quite limiting to writers, I never actually thought about those practices much in terms of standardization. It’s interesting that in a subject where supposedly you are able to think for yourself and asked to have original ideas we have created structures that students must follow. Even thesis statements, for example, are narrowed down to a science.

What I appreciate most about Warner’s book is that he offers his teaching experience and what he has seen in the classroom as a guide for moving away from such practices. In many ways, I think in our program we have encountered solutions that move away from standardization and assessment, and we have discussed the ways that we do assess writing.

Going into the classroom next year, I am interested to see what kinds of shifts I can make with my students’ writing. In some ways, it seems tempting to “un-teach” the 5 paragraph essay, but on the other hand, will that be setting students up for failure in their final two years of high school? Is there a happy compromise between what standardization wants and what real life wants? I’m hoping to see how the use of projects (like MGP, podcasts, etc.) can shift the way that students think about organizing thoughts.

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.

I feel like I’m at a point where anytime I read about teaching writing I am going to immediately feel that “WOW! Yes! Amazing!” feeling. Our teaching writing class of Spring 2018 feels light years away, and I feel like I lost a lot of focus and “joy of writing” and replaced that with reading in my student teaching experience. Last year, even while I was teaching, it felt like writing was a product we were simply expected to create and not something we were building toward and trying to improve. I tried a few different ideas that Kittle and Gallagher mention (multi-genre project, collage, digital writing), but there was not a cohesion to those pieces. That to say, I really love the idea of having a sequence of writing you want to accomplish and selecting that sequence purposefully. Drawing students in to writing, much like reading, is essential to the future of the work they produce.

What I’m wondering now is if in my next teaching experience I will be able to fully decide the sequence I want students to write in. I, again, really admire and appreciate the way Kittle ad Gallagher approach their plan, and even acknowledge that their plan is always met with students who do not seem to want to follow the same timeline as them. However, in my last experience, there were certain writing assignments that had to be accomplished at a certain time. Maybe in situations like that, that is where you turn to digital media. I’m interested to see your possible thoughts on this.

The way I have planned the writing my students do was fairly simple. I wanted them to write everyday (or almost every day), and we did that through journals and group activities. Now, I am thinking about ways to be more intentional with that writing. I think that first will require me to get a sample of student writing and see where they are at, what goals we can set for ourselves as writers, and then what the best sequence to follow is to get to those end goals.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton