It's time to get started. The second week of school rushes on and I am running, trying to catch up. The kids jump into any task given them which makes me so very excited. Writing samples look good, lots of readers, oh my job is going to be so much easier this year.
We haven't done any revisions yet, but they will come soon. My 7th grade students will be writing a short character analysis this week. I will us my writing to model a reader/response group, select the groups for this first response, and see what happens. Throughout the year, as writing progresses, so will the response groups. I plan on observing three types of groups: teacher-selected, student-selected, and random selected.
Peer-selected groups could go in one of three ways: peers will offer sincere comments and questions about each other's work; peers will socialize more than work; or peers will like the writing just the way it is and not offer any suggestions. And so we shall see.
I've never used randomly-selected groups, thinking I knew how the groups should be formed to best fit the needs of my students (Ha!); I never got the results from all groups that I had planned. I am going to spend more time on protocol and questioning strategies this year before I turn them loose. Should be interesting.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
I wonder what would happen in my classroom if... And I know as teachers, we could fill up pages with multiple musings--thus the title of this blog.
This summer I'm participating in an Advanced Summer Institute hosted by the South MS Writing Project and one of our goals is to come up with an inquiry topic to research in our classrooms this school year. It sounded like an easy project until I started reshaping, restructuring, and refining the question I had chosen about the revision process in my classroom. I thought about how my students struggled with revising a piece of writing--more than struggled, they just plain out didn't want to do it. Then I thought about our teacher-writer conferences and the reader response groups and finally honed in on:
What role does the social dynamics of reader-response groups have on a writer's revisions?
Blogging is a new adventure for me, so if you decide to come along on my journey, please share your comments, especially if you're wondering something along the same lines about your students.
Hope to hear from y'all soon!
This summer I'm participating in an Advanced Summer Institute hosted by the South MS Writing Project and one of our goals is to come up with an inquiry topic to research in our classrooms this school year. It sounded like an easy project until I started reshaping, restructuring, and refining the question I had chosen about the revision process in my classroom. I thought about how my students struggled with revising a piece of writing--more than struggled, they just plain out didn't want to do it. Then I thought about our teacher-writer conferences and the reader response groups and finally honed in on:
What role does the social dynamics of reader-response groups have on a writer's revisions?
Blogging is a new adventure for me, so if you decide to come along on my journey, please share your comments, especially if you're wondering something along the same lines about your students.
Hope to hear from y'all soon!
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