Blue Ribbon Writing Session

          I attended the Blue Ribbon Conference in our district last week. One session I especially enjoyed was the first session of the conference on Thursday afternoon. The title was Procedures and Protocols that Fast Track Argument Writing. It was led by Tricia Stodden, an elementary school teacher, and Laura Warren, a middle school teacher, both from Reading Public Schools. It was helpful to hear what this approach looks like with fifth graders compared to middle school students.

The Argument Talk Protocol was created by educators at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project/ Lucy Calkins. The first step is to name the argument. In this case, for simulation purposes, it was “Should there be competitive sports for children?” Laura Warren started by reading a piece of one of the articles to us and she modeled how to take notes with a t-chart with pros and cons. There was a third column for “other information.” I am not sure that would be necessary for my fifth graders. I want them to focus on the pros and cons and not misunderstand and fill in random facts in the third column. The students finish up reading the articles and writing their notes showing the pros and cons. We were given two New York Times articles to read. One was about how great competitive sports are in promoting healthy weight in teenagers. The other was about young children getting head injuries when playing competitive sports like football. They seemed appropriate to use with fifth graders, and I plan on using them after starting with easier articles first to get them used to the protocol.

Once the students have read the articles and taken their notes, they get with other students and discuss their notes, adding things they missed, finding good quotes and statistics for both sides. They should be able to argue either side after meeting with this group. Then the students find a partner, and one partner will be A and the other is B. The teacher then announces which side is A and which side is B. This forces students to sometimes argue the opposite side of what they believe.

Then all the As get together and form smaller groups to analyze their best evidence that supports their side. Same with the Bs. They also rehearse their argument out loud. After about ten minutes, it is time for the face off! The students stand in line across from their partner and present their argument. Then they listen as their partner presents. They each have a minute to state their side. A repeats back to B what the best part of their argument was and visa versa.

After this part of the protocol, students get back into their caucus groups to plan their rebuttal to what their partner said. The students need to analyze what was the opposition’s strongest argument/s and how can our side rebut? It is important for students to learn that a rebuttal is not just a restatement of your initial argument. Once ready, they line up again across from their partner and share their rebuttal for a minute each.

Finally, each student chooses a side and sits and writes a flash draft using all the notes and information gained from the protocol. Tricia Stodden said she was able to do one of these each day for a few days as a type of argument writing boot camp. That is my plan as well. Immersing them in the process and having them flash draft afterwards is extremely valuable. Built into this protocol is collaboration with peers which is vital to any workshop lesson. The presenters provided us with packets that they give the students with language for arguments: When you want to state a position…When you want to give reasons…When you want to offer evidence… etc. In addition, they gave us a “Boxes and Bullets Argument Essay Structure.” I will tweak this document to include some writing stems from the Empowering Writers persuasive unit for more guidance through the drafting process. When I am done with my informational writing unit in a few weeks, we will jump right into argument writing boot camp!

Writing workshop

Students have been working hard in writing workshop. They have created lists to generate topics for their personal narratives, written multiple rough drafts on different topics and have begun setting goals for their writing. They have successfully checked their writing for a few goals:

1. Small moment

2. In the moment

3. Staying within Narrator POV

They are eager to start revising their writing. We will start multiple rehearsals this week after they write their flash drafts. Lessons on finding the heart of their writing, story arc and many more are still to come.

I chose to share the pictures below because the students enjoy sharing their writing and the small celebrations that make workshop so rewarding. More posts to come all year about our writing workshop progress.

Weekly Blog Post Goal

Well, I have a lot of great classroom reflections to write about and no time to write! I will make it up by writing two blog posts this weekend! Here is a preview:

Writing Workshop:

Self-directed learning:

Learn how to draw/shade

Become faster runner for 5K in October

Research a gymnast

Create an original Lego structure with multiple parts (a town)

Teach Like a Pirate Part Two

So my first post about Dave Burgess' book, Teach Like a Pirate, was a reflection on the first part of the book only. Now that I have finished reading it, once again, I am inspired to share about how it is going to improve my teaching! 

In order to start incorporating the hook questions into my lesson planning, I took notes while I read all the great ideas. I will refer to them consistently while planning. There are some that I already do naturally, but plenty that I had never even thought of doing. So invigorating to my teaching!

So these notes are in a small spiral with my other notes and to do lists. In addition, I bought three spirals, one for each subject I teach: Reading Workshop, Math Workshop and Writing Workshop. Found cute ones at Ocean State Job Lot! I will brainstorm in these notebooks for each lesson I do. 

Part Three of the book was very motivational and it is so true that you can get started right away. All your ducks do not have to be in a row to try some of these ideas! It is also helpful to read the section on criticism. 

As the school year goes on, I will share my successes and failures here and on Twitter. Best PD ever!!

Writing Workshop: Planning

I took a fantastic week long Writing Workshop course this summer. I wrote a blog entry about it in July. As I started reading the lessons on my own to plan, I realized that I needed to rewrite them in a simpler way so that they would be at-a-glance lesson plans to be used year after year. When I was done teaching the lesson, I was then able to write notes on the lesson about how it went and what I will do differently next year. 

The easiest system for me was a spiral notebook with perforated pages. I wrote the abbreviated lessons then ripped the pages out and placed them in my Writing Workshop binder. I used the same spiral for my reading workshop lessons too, so ripping them out and placing them in their respective binders made sense. I have seen other teachers create a template with the lesson sections and use that for their at-a-glance lessons. I prefer the notebook for many reasons including the fact that I don't have to bother with making copies of the template. Using the notebook is easier for me because I am not locked into the way I designed the template. Different lessons warrant more writing for some things and less for others, etc. No matter what format is used, all the teachers I have worked with in our Writing Workshop P.L.C. (professional learning community) have felt the need to simplify the lessons. Reading the lessons in full is extremely valuable, but the book is not set up for quick glance teaching.

It takes time to read through the lesson and plan how you will attack it so that it fits what you are doing with the kids. This was not an issue with personal narrative, but with the information writing unit, my students are working on the Age of Exploration. The book gives examples and mentor texts related to Westward Expansion. Reading and planning a few lessons ahead at all times has been vital to the success of my lessons. For instance, there is a section about writing with the lens of geography. The book uses a map related to the Oregon Trail. I read the lesson about a week ahead and had time to find a map that was age appropriate and related to the Age of Exploration. I used a map of the Silk Road that showed the routes and the students were amazing in analyzing the map and making connections to what they had already researched. Their questions and ideas motivated me to find more maps of the Silk Road that would continue their analysis. There is a fantastic website devoted to the Silk Road and it had maps of the religions along the road, the geographical features, countries along the road, climate, etc. Students worked voraciously to answer the questions they had from that first map. I followed the original lesson, but made it work for my students. 

http://www.silkroadproject.org/

 

Another reason to be a few lessons ahead in planning is that you can prepare the charts that go with the lessons. The charts are a took and allow students more independence when they are stuck. They can look at the charts and try something.

Charts are a tool:

My at-a-glance lessons:

 Original map I gave classes to analyze:

Students had questions about weather and climate, so this is one of the additional maps I shared with students:

It's Been a While

Happy New Year!

Here I am finally catching up on some blog posts. It is the night before school is supposed to start up again after a lengthy winter break. I put in some time over the vacation to write thank you notes to my students, do some planning, and finally read a book having nothing to do with education. 

I sat here this afternoon all ready to return to school tomorrow, but sad that I didn't make the time to catch up on my blog writing. Then it happened...Winter Storm Hercules! The call, text and email arrived informing us that we will have no school the next two days! I plan to get caught up on what has been happening in room 16 since my last post on August 5th.

At the end of August, I started a blog entry about my classroom set up and then never finished it because I got all wrapped up in school beginning and learning and teaching three new curriculums (new math program, as well as Lucy Calkins' writing workshop and reading workshop). I will start by finishing that post including classroom pictures.

I also want to share our progress in writing workshop including personal narrative and informational writing. This will include at least two blog entries and an additional one just to share pictures of our two celebrations. This is my first year teaching writing strictly from the Lucy Calkins series of books. I am teaching writing to three classes of fifth graders and it allows me to engage in some collaboration with the Social Studies teacher.

Along with Writing Workshop, I want to blog about my Reading Workshop with my homeroom class and my first try at book clubs instead of the guided reading group structure. I will share what worked and what didn't for me in this process and what my next steps will be.

I may also have time to blog about the organizational structures I have put in place in my classroom and how they are going. I have never been a binder kind of person, but I will share what is working for me this year with binders. 

We'll see what else I decide to write about in the next two days. It will be a valuable self reflection for me. I may even make some New Year's resolutions for my teaching. 

It's good to be back!

Summer Professional Reading

1. Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement

By Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman

This book was a quick read and very helpful. In our district, we have been working with the Common Core for a while. This book clarified the ELA portion of the new standards and provided a clear game plan for writing instruction, especially. 

2. How's it Going? By Carl Anderson

After the weeklong institute a few weeks ago, I jumped on Amazon to purchase some recommended books. This fantastic, thorough book by Carl Anderson was highly praised by our presenter and after reading it, I understand. 

Anderson leaves no stone unturned when dealing with the subject of conferencing with students. He focuses on one on one conferences being a conversation. He goes through the teacher's and the student's role during conferencing. It is fascinating when he shares the mistakes he made and the justification for how he runs conferences now. He has excellent chapters on mentor texts, gathering information for minilessons and classroom management. Valuable read!

3. Narrative Craft Unit of Study by Lucy Calkins and Alexandra Marron

I am about halfway through this unit of study. It is slow going because it is very thorough and I am note-taking with post its for my lesson plans as I go.

Lofty, hopeful plans for professional reading in August, a.k.a. Books on Deck:

- Finish Narrative Craft Unit of Study

- Independent Writing M. Colleen Cruz

- A Quick Guide to Struggling Writers M. Colleen Cruz

- A Quick Guide to Reviving Disengaged Writers Christopher Lehman

- A Quick Guide to Making Your Teaching Stick Shanna Schwartz

- Mentor Authors, Mentor Texts Ralph Fletcher

- Launch an Intermediate Reading Workshop Lucy Calkins

- Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres Troy Hicks

Day Five: Professional Learning Community Starts

Today, teachers from North Andover and Reading public schools met to start our work together as a Professional Learning Community. Our focus is writing workshop and the Units of Study presented this week.

I feel very supported now and know I am not going it alone. I have the two other teachers in my school for support, the fifth grade teachers from my district that were at the training, and a fifth grade "buddy" from North Andover as well. 

I also have a fifth grade partner from my district as well. We decided what to tackle first and when we want to get it done. Our focus is preparing a binder to refer to while conferencing. For instance, one divider could be "staying in the moment" In that section would be possible lessons/strategies you could teach to the child and a mentor text listed with page number to provide an example. We each took four strategies to do and will share them with each other before school starts. Then we will tackle some more. This task is made easier by the fact that there is a book in the Units of Study collection that gives if/then ideas for conferring. If the child ______, then ________.

I am very excited to get going with this work. Many of my blog entries this school year will be about my work on developing my writing workshop.

Day Four: The Last Day with our Fearless Leader

Today we role played conferencing one on one. It wasn't too hard, but my more pressing concern is gathering and organizing all the mentor texts. I am going to spend a lot of time doing that this summer and other colleagues will do the same and then we can share our work. 

I love the idea of spending time during conferencing to research the child and come up with a theory and lesson on the fly. I trust I can do that once I have a strong conferring toolkit to support my decisions including mentor texts. The If/Then book that comes with the units of study has a lot already done for teachers in regards to teaching decisions on the fly during conferences.

Along with role playing, we talked about small group instruction and watched a great video of it in action. All the videos we watched this week are on the following site: 

readingandwritingproject.com

- Click on resources

- Click on Common Core resources

- Click on CCSS videos (left margin)

- Click the link in the middle of the page

An aha moment for me was the idea of grouping by need, not level. Writers at all levels may need a lesson on staying in the moment, whether they have one paragraph written or three pages. If our focus is teaching students strategies, they should be grouped by what strategies they need. Duh, right? 

Assessment was another important topic we learned about today. Writers workshop and the rubrics that are used lend themselves well to the common core and standards based report cards. The learning progression charts are a tool that I will use often in planning, conferencing and assessment. 

What a packed day! An overview of informational writing was also taught today and we walked through a few pages of a fabulous mentor text, Oh, Rats!

We ended the day by celebrating our revision/final drafts with a museum walk set up. It was great to walk around and read everyone's work. I liked that we wrote comments for them to see when the activity was over. The comments for my piece were encouraging and some of my writing strengths were affirmed. I still feel I need a lot more instruction about how to get my writing to the next level. I am a good writer, but want to become a great one. 

Sadly, today was the last day with our presenter, Maggie Roberts. We all were left wanting more of her help and guidance, but we will have to use twitter or email to get it. :-)

The message she left us with was to not try to be the expert. We can all help each other and learn together. 

Tomorrow we are meeting from 8:00-12:00 to start our professional learning community work(P.L.C.). I am really looking forward to working with my Reading and North Andover colleagues to improve my teaching of writing.

Day Two: Teaching Points and Minilessons

Today we got a lot done. We moved on to teaching points and minilessons. The modeling and practice was very helpful to see how this will be implemented in the classroom. Tomorrow we are presenting minilessons in groups. Valuable practice.

I am starting to get a better picture of how my writing workshop will run this year. I always did a form of workshop, but all I knew was what I read in books. The kind of learning we are doing this week is invaluable!

We went over multiple minilessons today and I have a better idea of how to generate learning points and develop the lessons.

Tomorrow we are moving on to editing/revision and conferencing. Looking forward to it!