Expected, Inspected, & Respected.
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
For the past 5 weeks, I've been teaching English to a Grade 8 class at General Wolfe School in Winnipeg. I loosely based my class format on Penny Kittle's recommendations in her book Write Beside Them. Her format looks like this:
She had 83 minutes to work with while I only had around 55 minutes, so my modified format looked like this:
Here's a more detailed breakdown of each segment: 1. Silent reading (10 minutes) - The purpose of this segment of class was to build stamina and speed. I encouraged them to explore different genres, subjects, and authors to expand their literary horizons. Every day, the students kept track of how many pages they had read. At the end of the week, they took their highest number of pages read in 10 minutes, multiplied it by 6 to find their total pages read per hour, and recorded that number on the class sheet. In order to avoid competitive comparisons, I always reminded them that comparisons between classmates were meaningless because if one person was reading a graphic novel and another person was reading War and Peace, their speeds would be vastly different but wouldn't say anything about their abilities as a reader. The purpose of charting these numbers was to see an improvement in aggregate. I put their numbers into a spreadsheet so that they could see their progress, on average, over time. Ideally, this would be done over an entire school year.
While the rest of the class was reading, I had 3-4 one-on-one conferences with students, discussing what they were reading, their reading habits, and what they planned to read next.
2. Poem of the day (~5 minutes) - I read a poem to the class, usually related to our theme of heroes or personal narrative. We would then go over difficult vocabulary and briefly discuss the poem as a whole.
3. Quick write (10 minutes) - There are three rules of quick write:
4. Mini-lesson (~10 minutes) - I created these lessons based on the research showing that isolated grammar instruction and diagramming sentences does not work to improve student writing, but sentence imitation does. I used Don and Jenny Killgallon's book, Sentence Composing for Middle School to create my mini-lessons. Because I have a lot of basketball fans and players in my class, I used a basketball analogy. I told them that if you had to perform a jump shot without ever having seen it done before, it would be pretty hard. Lebron James has a great jump shot because he saw Michael Jordan do it and was able to create his own style by first imitating him. I explained that we would use a similar process with writing, spending time every day copying the sentence structures of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, E.B. White, Michael Crichton, Louis Sachar, Lois Duncan, and J.K. Rowling through sentence unscrambling, combining, and imitation.
5. Writer's workshop (10 minutes) - This is where students developed ideas generated during the quick writes into coherent, polished pieces. Students worked on their prewrites, drafts, revisions, peer edits, and final drafts. During my English classes, I would often compare myself to a coach that was running drills in order to improve player performance, and the buy-in from students seemed genuine to me. I would tell them of all the spillover benefits brought by improved skills in reading and writing, from better grades in other subjects, to success later in life. I talked about how the only way to gain that improvement was through consistent effort towards a goal. I told them that people tend to overestimate the gains they are capable of making in a day through monumental effort and underestimate the progress that can be made in a year through small consistent habits. I would always emphasize the importance of finding books that interested them. Building strong reading muscles doesn't have to be a slog! ![]()
Two things I would do differently next time would be to include more sharing of student work during class and to take the advice of the title of Penny Kittle's book and actually write beside them during the quick writes. She recommends writing beside them to stay in touch with what we are asking of our students and to practice our craft as their writing teachers. It benefits students to see that writing does not spring fully formed onto the page, but is a messy process that takes time. I always had other minor tasks to attend to while they were scribbling away in their journals, but I could have done those things at another time. I think I was reluctant because writing is vunleralbe; what if I made mistakes and someone noticed? :-)
1 Comment
I used to be a big reader. This is where my friend Sean would say, "But Dave, you're the biggest reader I know! 'Cause you're so tall." This is true, but the fact is that I haven't been making a habit of reading. I've been neglecting literature because of disc golf and Netflix and I have to thank Penny Kittle for reminding me that reading is so great and that, as an educator, I need to model good reading habits and be able to recommend good books for my students. ![]() I can't believe I didn't read Penny Kittle's Book Love immediately after my friend Tanya raved to me about it back in June. Thankfully, I got a second recommendation from my cooperating teacher at General Wolfe school and I can't thank her enough for lending me her copy. It has rekindled my love of reading and given me direction for how to effectively teach ELA. I would recommend this beautifully written book to any ELA educator looking for inspiration and a metaphorical north star. ![]() After speeding through Book Love, I picked up The Fault in our Stars by John Green because the Grade 8 class I'm with at General Wolfe will be reading it. I couldn't put it down. I thought it wouldn't be for me because I'm not an adolescent girl but I absolutely loved it. I was weeping and laughing and feeling all the feels. Thanks John Green. |
David Wiebe
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