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.