Response to WW Ch. 18 & Spelling and Other Writing "Skills"

As with every other topic in the classroom, it is important to help students see the meaning in spelling (and punctuation) in order to help them develop better grammar skills. If students see that learning to spell and punctuate their writing will help them better achieve their purposes as writers, they will develop a desire to learn to do these skills well. In order for this to work, of course, students have to understand that their writing has a purpose and they have to see that writing is an important part of their day to day life. The most interesting think about the reading on spelling instruction was that it discouraged the use of spelling tests and also discouraged teachers correcting their students' spelling in their writing. Both of these things are very common practices in schools, and I can see in my field placement that they are ineffective for the majority of students. The work that they do during centers, or "workstations," seems to be a lot more beneficial. During workstations, the students focus on word families and rhyming words as well as on letter blends and the sounds that they make. The discoveries that they make for themselves during workstations carry over in to all of their work in the classroom. They give the students in the class who are struggling with spelling the tools to invent their own spellings of unknown words. Another important activity to help students develop grammar skills is reading. Since I have begun my field placement, I have felt like the majority of the day is spent focusing on literacy (specifically, reading.) Until recently, I felt like this was a waste of time. Reading has so many purposes in the classroom other than just teaching students how to read, and this chapter definitely reinforced that fact.

Chapter 18 of The Writing Workshop focuses on worksheets. Honestly, this was a chapter that I was not expecting to see in the book. As a pre-service teacher, I have already developed the idea that worksheets are bad. I plan to use them in my future classroom as sparingly as possible, because I feel that students rarely take any meaning away from them. Because this book focuses on making sure that students see the meaning and purpose in writing, I didn't expect to encounter a whole chapter devoted to worksheets. The chapter, however, focuses on providing students with meaningful and purposeful worksheets to help them plan and organize their writing and to help them reflect on their work. The word "worksheet" has a negative connotation in the education world because worksheets are seen as busy-work. The worksheets proposed in this chapter, however, are not simply work to be completed. They are tools to help students progress in their writing. If students do not have a need for them, they do not have to use them. If students are stuck, however, the worksheets can give them the push that they need to get writing.

Response to WW Ch. 10 & 16 and Critical Literacy

While I understand the power of sharing your writing and receiving feedback from peers, I have had terrible experiences with sharing my work with classmates in the past. When I decided that I wanted to be a teacher, I also decided that I would never force my students to share their work with the class. I know that as a teacher of 30 or so students, I will never understand everything that is going on in my classroom. I know that there will be name-calling and teasing that I am not aware of, and this was a point that was reinforced in the chapter from Critical Literacy and Writer's Workshop. I know that sometimes knowing that you will be sharing your work changes the content of your writing. Instead of writing about something that is truly meaningful to them, students may choose to write about a more comfortable topic, rather than be criticized. While I agree that sharing is good in the writing workshop, I don't think that it should be forced by any means. If students choose not to share their work with the class, teachers need to trust that they have a reason not to want to share.

Chapter 10 in The Writing Workshop focuses on the actual content to be taught in the workshop. Writing workshop time should focus on grammar and conventions as well as teaching students to think and behave like writers. Teachers should encourage their students to find techniques and strategies that work well for them. Students should also learn to question themselves and their writing so that they are constantly growing. Chapter 16 focuses on planning for the writing workshop. For me, this is definitely scary. Coming up with a formal lesson plan for a time of the day that is full of so many unknowns is intimidating to say the least. Planning for a writing workshop has to be very extensive, and it includes setting out goals for your students, planning a space for them to accomplish those goals, and choosing units of study that will bring them closer to their goals before beginning daily lesson planning. The focus lesson plan is really the only part of the planning process that follows a traditional lesson plan format, because this is the only time during the writing workshop in which you are doing formal, stand-at-the-front-of-the-class-and-teach teaching. The rest of the time is dedicated to working with individual students on what they need that day and allowing students to share their work with the class. While I definitely think that planning for the writing workshop will be difficult my first year of teaching, I know that it is something that I will get more comfortable with over time.

Response to WW Ch. 11 & 12 and "Writing for Justice"

The first chapter focused on the most important component of the writing workshop, in my opinion: allowing each student to write about what is important to them. It is true that students can write a piece on a topic given by the teacher, but they are unlikely to find much, if any, meaning in it. Allowing students to write about something that they are interested in gives the assignment much more meaningful and allows them to take more away from the lesson. The teaching part of the writing workshop is not in assigning students a topic, it is in giving students techniques and strategies to use in their writing. This material may find its way in to students' work for that day, but if it does not, that has to be okay. The students will add the material in to their writing if and when they want to. The students in the writing workshop are their own guides in their writing, the teacher's job is just to provide them with a better set of tools.

As a person who appreciates structure and control, I really liked the chapter that focused on units of study. When we first started reading The Writing Workshop, I was stressed out by how small and disconnected the focus lessons seemed. After reading this chapter, I've been able to think of them as pieces of a larger lesson, which makes them much less intimidating to create. Instead of thinking that you have to effectively teach a large concept in less than 10 minutes, you can make that large concept your unit of study. Then, you can use your focus lessons to dive in to individual components of that concept. Units of study do give a seemingly unstructured writing workshop some structure in the long-term, and that makes it much more likely that I will include it in my classroom in the future.

In "Writing for Justice- Persuasion from the Inside Out" by Mark Hansen, the idea that students need to write about a topic that is important to them is highlighted. As Hansen pointed out, when students write about a topic that they perceived as meaningless, they begin to view writing as meaningless. When students write persuasive letters that do not produce any change, they begin to believe that writing can not lead to change, and this is absolutely NOT what we need to be teaching our students. Allowing students to write about important topics that they are passionate about allows them to see purpose in their persuasive writing. Instead of just writing to complete an assignment, they write because they want to persuade someone to share their views on the subject. This makes their writing powerful.

The Writing Workshop: Response to Ch. 14 & 15

The first thing that stood out to me while reading these chapters is that Katie Wood Ray mentioned that teachers often burn out quickly because they know what to expect going in to each school day and that the unknown of the writing workshop can help to prevent this burn-out. While I agree that conferences and sharing during the writing workshop allow teachers to learn important important and surprising things about their students, I don't really like that she implied that an elementary school teacher could ever know everything that was going to happen during a school day. No matter what your activities are, a school day will never go exactly as you have planned. I'm definitely not saying that I think having one-on-one conferences with students won't help teachers have good unplanned experiences with students, I'm just making the point that this isn't the only way that this can happen.

In my experiences so far with the writing workshop in my field placement, individual conferences and sharing have stood out as amazing ways to help students progress as writers. Conferences give teachers the unique opportunity to understand their students' thought processes about the writing they are working on. Sharing gives students the opportunity to show off what they have done to their classmates, and this motivates them to continue working hard to improve their writing. One particular experience in the writing workshop time in my field placement earlier this week stands out in my mind. One student who is an English language learner struggles with forming sentences to express his thoughts. During writing workshop, he had already drawn a picture of a penguin to illustrate his writing, but all he had written down were words describing penguins. My mentor teacher pulled him aside, and worked with him to build sentences around his words. At the end of the writing workshop, she got the attention of the class and explained that she was very proud of the hard work that he had done and that she wanted him to share his story with the class. He read the story out loud while he grinned from ear to ear. When he was finished reading, everyone applauded while he ran around the room with his "wings" stretched out, obviously extremely proud of himself. This experience embodied the power of the writing workshop to me, because I could see how excited he was about the improvements that he made and the informational piece that he had put together. The sharing time at the end also created a sense of family in the classroom, and I could tell that all of his classmates were just as proud of him as he was of himself.