Chapters 14, 15, and 17

The Writing Workshop

Chapters 14, 15, 17

2/13/11

I never really experience conferring as a student. The only think I can think of is back in Kindergarten when our teachers reread our sentences out loud to us while they wrote the correct word below. The only thing that helped was for other people to actually be able to understand what I was saying.  Looking back, I feel like conferring would have been helpful. I am terrible with grammar and spelling and I wonder if conferring could have helped that. Obviously it would have helped with my thought process. Even in high school, I never had a conference about a paper. It was always structured the same: student turned in draft, teacher wrote comments and handed it back to student, student corrected mistakes. No learning really took place. It was all just for a grade. I am determined to change that process with my future students.

My mentor teacher does a great job with conferencing. The students write graphic organizers and then meet with her to talk about their organizer and correct mistakes or encourage their good ideas. Then they go write a paper based off of the organizer. After their draft is written, she encourages them to edit and revise before turning it in to be checked. She spends at least a week on each paper.

My favorite sharing time idea was the survey share. This is where they each stand up and read one line from their paper that they are proud of. This is a great was to get everybody to share and to keep the conversation light and entertaining.  The book was right about simple response share, it is boring and it ruins the excitement for the student who shared because everyone already knows what happens in her story before she has corrected it. I never thought about that until this book. I also liked the part where they mentioned learning communities. This is a time “where we learning together and where we support each other in that learning in important ways” (WW, 175).  I liked this because it is important to create a time where students feel comfortable with themselves and with their peers.  That way they are more willing to work and share their thoughts and experiences. 

Chapter seventeen was interesting to me. It provided me with a new way of thinking because I have never realize that 'questions' can be separated into genres: history, action, and process. For example, a history question is, "out of all the writing you've ever done, how is this piece similar or different?" (WW, 214). It makes sense because teachers do ask a lot of questions. I just never thought to actually "think" about the types of questions I'm asking students and why. This chapter also reminded me of another book I've read, Choice Words. It talked about developing students identities. The different genres of questions and the different ways teachers approach these question, help develop identities. We need to be careful in the way we word these questions.  We want to make sure we are encouraging and boosting their motivation, instead of hindering it. Lastly, I liked the idea of writing evaluations because it allows for a student to look back on his work and see if he is improving. I think it will promote motivation because they will probably want to keep improving from the last evaluation. I would have liked this see my improvement as a student.