Actionable Steps

My coteacher, Andrea, and I are wrapping up a literary analysis paper with our middle school kiddos. One of our colleagues shared an awesome organizer for analyzing quotes from a text... TIQA. Kids write a TOPIC, INTRODUCE the quote they found, include the QUOTE, then complete ANALYSIS on the meaning of the quote.

Meanwhile, one of the other coaches in our district asked me to deliver a brief PD on writing to her third year teachers. I got to reading the front of the Writing Strategies Book (Serravallo) and remembering listening to her speak at the Illinois Reading Council Conference - about actionable steps. And so, the writing PD became a session on creating actionable steps for writing tasks, and then my instruction was enhanced when I realized I wasn't doing awesome at this with my students.

You guys, EVERYTHING has to be broken down to a set of actionable steps. EVERY TASK. Telling students, "write a thesis" - that's not an actionable step, that's the goal. You have to show them how to do so. Let me elaborate a bit on goals vs. actionable steps with some examples:

Goal: Punctuate correctly.
Actionable steps: (1) Read your paper aloud, listening for the pauses you will naturally take. (2) When you find the pause, add punctuation. (3) Reread your work with punctuation and decide if if looks right and sounds right. 

Goal: Introduce the quote (for literary analysis)
Actionable steps: (1) Identify who spoke / thought the quote. (2) Think about the setting when the person spoke or thought the quote. (3) Write a sentence that shares the setting and/or action that had just happened prior to the quote. (4) Add that sentence before the quote in your draft.

Goal: Complete Analysis for your quote

So Andrea and I were extra prepared today for our mini-lesson, and we had modified one of Serravallo's strategies. We did a great job with mini-lesson, but then as I was conferring, and sitting with students attempting this, I saw HOW HARD ANALYSIS IS. Friends, so so hard...not impossible, but kids will have to sit and understand that ideas might not just pop up super fast. Analysis, like all the other things we ask our kids to do, would be taught best when we tell our kiddos the specific actions they should take to accomplish the task.

So to recap the big ideas I've learned this week:
1. You can't just tell kids what to do, you have to SHOW THEM. (I knew that, but am reminded again.)
2. Even when you write out great actionable steps, the task can still be super hard, and probably, your teaching can be revised further!

I already have evidence that the analysis our kiddos are doing are going to take them from basic to extra (as I told my kids today, which was met with some giggles and a few eye rolls.) The final drafts will tell it all...including how I can teach it even better next time.

Anyone have more ideas for actionable steps for Analysis? I'd love to hear them and enhance what I've got! We're always better when we're putting our heads together!

Happy Friday Eve! :-)

bigtime reflections

We just finished up a short week and I wanted to share and reflect on it with you!

Pineapple Chart
This has been a long time coming, but it finally launched this Wednesday!

The Pineapple Chart concept is from Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez who wrote Hacking Education. It's a way to invite teachers to your classroom in a space (our lounge) that everyone hangs out. Then, teachers can check out classes that are on the chart.

We just launched it on Wednesday, and there were four teachers to put up an invitation - to a band class (trumpets!), Math Class, to see a cool app called Class Kick, a Social Studies Class to see a learning platform called Summit, and my ELA class to see Quick Writing.

What's awesome about the Pineapple Chart is that there's no subs involved, no paperwork, no formal reflections - just teachers visiting one another's classrooms to learn and collaborate together.

I visited the math class to see Class Kick and the app was super cool, but it's also cool to just be in another teacher's room to see how the students interact, to see how they organize and structure their class, to talk to kids, and 100 more reasons!

I highly suggest this form of on-demand, personalized PD - check out Hacking Education for this great Hack, and so many others! (My next project is Teacher Quiet Zone!)

Quick Writing
I've been doing Quick Writing for about 6 weeks now and it's making such a difference in the kids stamina for writing. (Check out the details here.) We are about to launch our first writing unit, and I know the Quick Writing will lend itself to the writing they will do for me coming up! I'm just so proud to see kids really getting to business with their writing, this example was just about 7 minutes worth of writing! This strategy helps kids get out of their head, stop the writer's block, and just let thoughts flow on to paper, because we know that the real writing lies in revision.

Progress Reports
One area I've been struggling is communicating grades with parents. Like, I have grades in my book, but I am not super sure how to use our online management system and so until yesterday, I hadn't done much of that. I tell you this not so you'll be judgy, but because what I'm learning as a teacher and coach is that it's so hard to do everything. The last few years when I was just a coach, I would attend meetings, and to me, it seemed simple the plans that we would make for instruction. But then there's assemblies, and shortened schedules for PBIS kickoffs, and days off, and then there's a day or two when none of your students do their homework, so the plan that you've created, it doesn't go as you had envisioned.

But then something amazing happens anyways, and I'm so mad I didn't snap a picture of this - my kids doing self-reflection on their progress reports.

We have moved to Standards Based Grading. I like it. So I created progress reports for kids, where I had it broken down into seven categories, listing the scores I had recorded for kids. Then, I asked them to reflect on scores, share something they're doing well in each area, and also something they need to improve. And I had them spend about 20 minutes on self-reflection, using my notes and grading themselves. And it was amazing.

Kids made comments like,

• "I need to study my vocabulary more."
• "I need my handwriting to be neater."
• "I should share my ideas with people I sit with more."
• "I wasn't taking this seriously, but now I will."
• "I need to be kinder to others in my class."
• "I have a lot of tardies, I need to come on time." (Side note: yesterday this student *was on time!)

I have always been a reflective teacher (like, here on the blog) but I am going to make this self-reflection for students an ongoing process. Oh, and then my principal (who initiated this whole idea for me) shared how I could take it to the next level - have parents rate themselves for things at home like,

• My child gets 8 hours of sleep a night.
• My child eats a good breakfast each morning.
• My child reads 20 pages of their book each night at home.
• My child has routines and a quiet space to work on homework.
• Electronic devices are turned off at 9pm each night.
• Electronic devices are kept out of my child's bedroom, especially after 9pm.

This kind of rating and reflection on behalf of the family seems like a great reminder for all involved, and really creates that space for teachers, students, and families to do the work together!

Award Nomination

Finally, pretty cool that someone nominated me for a Golden Apple Award:

I got this last Friday and at first thought it was junk mail, but upon further examination and research, it is legit. This is an award for teachers in Illinois, in a few of the counties around where I live. This year, it's for 4th-8th grade teachers. Winners receive

• A paid spring quarter sabbatical to study tuition-free at Northwestern University
• Induction into the Golden Apple Academy of Educators
• A cash award of $5,000
• Recognition on an hour long Awards ceremony program on WTTW/Channel 11 in May 2017

I have no idea who nominated me - I asked some people at work and a friend who is a Golden Apple Scholar, but have not figured that out, but I am super thankful and honored someone thought of me!

That's about all for this week! I really enjoy sitting down to write and am so thankful blogging and writing is a consistent part of my life! Have a fab weekend, I'm off to the Apple Orchard and then will be watching the Sun Devils and Cubbies tonight!

Any thoughts on the Pineapple Chart, Quick Writing, Student Self-Assessment or your weekend? Keep the conversation going in the comments below!

best week ever

No, seriously. You guys, now I'm back in middle school and I have a few of my own classes to teach. It's been three years without! I'm so happy!

Here's my homeroom on the first day. We're already a little classroom family and I love it! I can't wait to share our homeroom theme with you, it's not ready yet, but hopefully in the next week or two!




They're super cute as they learn the big middle school systems. They've done so well this week, I can't wait to see what comes next for them!

I'm teaching two classes: Challenge Based Learning and English Language Arts. This week, I've been working on two big things: Quick Writing & teaching kids to talk to and listen to one another.

Quick Writing
I learned Quick Writing from Penny Kittle's book Write Beside Them. It's prompted writing that happens in three minute spurts. There are three rules:

Rule 1: Write for the whole three minutes. Give the kids a prompt and then tell them that when they run out of things to say, that they need to listen to the talking in their mind and just write whatever that is saying. Main goal, to write furiously and not quit till time is called. Tip: Don't ask a question when you prompt, instead, give a sentence stem. Here are a few I used this week:

• What I like/dislike about this classroom is...
• Poetry is different than fiction/nonfiction because...
• Something I'm looking forward to doing this weekend is...

Rule 2: Don't let your head tell you what you're writing is crap. We all have that critic inside, but writing is messy, thinking is messy! In quick writing, the idea is to get it all to come out, and it doesn't have to be organized or correct or perfect. When you can't think of the next work, put a line to save the spot and keep going! Just don't stop writing.

Rule 3: Relax, have fun, play. Quick writing is meant to be the writer's playground. It builds stamina and fluency for writing, and it also allows a writer's voice to come out. But it has to be done consistently. One other point to note, if a kid has a great thing going after prompt #1, they can skip prompt #2 and stick where the writing is hot. It's recommended!

Quick writing is not collected or graded. Kids do the work, not the teacher. Even if we're not checking it, kids are still reaping the benefits. This week, on an exit slip, one student said this:

That was after session 1 of quick writing. Imagine the confidence they will have after a month of it!

Speaking & Listening

In the three years when I didn't have my own classroom, I read a lot of stuff without a space for application. This week I finally put some of that information to use! I read somewhere that when a teacher repeats what a soft-spoken child says, the message it sends to the other kids is that they don't have to listen to the quiet kid, because the teacher will just repeat them.

I no longer repeat anyone.

If a child shares to the group and is too quiet, I turn to a student on the other side of the room and ask if they heard what the soft-spoken student said. If they say no, I ask the second student to ask the quiet student to repeat themselves. It forces kids to speak up.

I'm telling you, my Challenge Based Learning kids thought I was insane the first day. There were like 50 times when I had to facilitate them listening to one another, but the underlying message here is so powerful: Each person's voice is important and deserves to be heard. So we're going to speak up!

I'm also having them work on eye contact, that rather than having it go from students to teacher and then back from teacher to students, it's one person (student or teacher) to everyone else. So that feedback sounds like this: "You did an awesome job speaking loudly, but can you say it again, and this time, instead of just making eye contact with me, say what you're saying to everyone?"

We will just keep practicing, but I know that the conversations in my classes this year will be wonderful, from kid to kid to me to kid to all the other kids and on and on. I just love it!

Not ready

This is the first year I was not ready - like, I'm still waiting on furniture and my new rug, I didn't have my bulletin board stuff until after the first day, my plans were written on a day-by-day basis, my library wasn't totally unpacked (in fact, 2/3 of it is still in my basement in a storage closet I'm afraid to go in bc I'm sure there's 100s of spiders in there!) And you know what? It was all ok. It was okay that my first day was more about making sure I remembered their names than showing the perfect power point presentation about rules. It's okay that there's a huge empty spot where a rug will soon be, it's okay that I only had planned for the few hours ahead of me. Every kid knows they matter to me, and that's the most important thing.

That being said, I can't wait till my room is ready for the blog reveal! It's coming along, day by day. I'm hoping that in the next three weeks it will be ready for a photo shoot to share with all of you!

That's about all on my end. My heart is seriously so full, I'm so thankful for the opportunities I've been blessed with. Working with kids puts me in that state of flow - you know, where there's nothing else getting at you, you're not stressed about anything, you're not thinking about missing out on anything, you're just living every moment and enjoying the ride.

How was your first (or second) week of school?

book club day!

Hey all y'all! It's the BigTime Blogging Challenge. I'm writing every day in July to celebrate my blog's three year anniversary! Join me - write your post, link it up with mine, leave some love for blogging friends in the form of comments!

Hello, friends! It's the first of three book club days! Feel free to share about any book you happen to be reading. Or, maybe you're reading what I'm reading, which would be awesome. And, if you don't want to write about a book, link up any kind of writing you'd like :-)

I have been reading Live Writing by Fletcher. I love Ralph Fletcher, are you familiar with him? He was definitely someone who impacted my writing instruction in a profound way. He writes books about writing for kids, he writes fiction and poetry, and he writes teacher PD books.

Love all of these, especially Poetry Matters which is awesome to use with kids to show them the poetry ways!

Okay so Live Writing - it's all about breathing life into your words. He covers many different ways to do this: reading like a writer, building character, voice, conflict, setting, leads, endings...and more! I was particularly struck by voice - it's always been so hard for me to think about and to teach, so I was happy to pick up a few tips that I want to share with you about voice in writing.

On following your passions, Fletcher says, "If you're anything like me, you write with the most voice when you're writing about something you care a lot about." Truth, hands down. Like, if I tried to write a paper on, I don't know...UFOs (which I believe are a crock) then I'm not going to do so well with my voice. Actually, I kinda have this passion that doesn't believe in UFOs, so maybe this isn't a good example. Perhaps a better one would be physics. Not only do I know nothing about it, but I also don't care too much. So voice would be hard to come by on physics. It's so important we let kids write about what they want to, just like we all do here in the blogosphere!

When talking about developing voice, Fletcher reminds us that we have to study it and also write often. He suggests reading about one topic from a few different writers, and that will help you see how different writers bring their words to life differently. Also, when trying to find your own voice, it's helpful to write, and a lot. He says, "The more you write in the notebook, the more your true voice will appear, and the more you will get to know who the real you is. When you write in a notebook you can let go. You can let go of what others might think about your writing. You can let go of any worries about getting graded, and especially, you can let go of judging yourself."

The judging yourself - so so true. I've also been reading Use Your Words: A Myth-Busting No-fear Approach to Writing (book club on this later this month) and that's one of the three problems of writers - worrying about what others will think. Enter Writer's Notebook where you can play around with writing and try things out where no one will see. This is why I think quick writing with kids on a daily or pretty consistent basis is important - once kids (and us adults too) feel successful in our safe spot, we are then willing to try it out more publicly!

The rest of the book had lots of great ideas, but what I realized while I was reading the book was that I'm much more of a NF writer than a fiction writer. I can't recall too many times (if ever) I wrote fiction. I guess memoir, and some poetry, but mostly NF here. Live Writing has lots of tips in the way for fiction writers. But like I said before, all his books are great and I highly recommend them!

Okay so book club returns on the 20th and 30th with Selected Poems (Brooks) and Use Your Words (Deveny). Feel free though to share any books, but if we all do poetry on the 20th, that would be awesome!

What are you reading?

Did you pick up Live Writing?

Thoughts?

An InLinkz Link-up

sentence of the week

Hi all! I've been busy this month working on grammar stuff. After seeing my cousin Mike at Easter (he's a High School English Teacher) and talking to him about the papers he was grading (we're always grading, aren't we?) we got to talking about Kelly Gallagher's Sentence of the Week, which may or may not be like the Mentor Sentences I've seen around the teaching blogosphere. Since then, I've been busy trying this out with our third graders, and it's been awesome!

Sentence of the Week is a strategy used for the purpose of having students construct knowledge about grammar and mechanics. The principle behind this is that we want to show students correct sentences (rather than incorrect sentences that you might find with Daily Oral Language (DOL) activities). Don't use those crazy, error-ridden sentences with your kiddos!

If you teach with a Writing Workshop model, you might be wondering how to make Grammar a more consistent part of your writing instruction - and this is perfect for that. Sentence of the Week is a 5-10 minute bit of instruction that happens daily, whether you are in the editing phase of the writing process or not.

Sentence of the week works on a five day cycle - you will stick to the same grammar pattern for five days. Following this, you can find a brief explanation of the first two days of the cycle...I'll be back later this week with the rest.

Day 1: Notice
Begin with three sentences that use the pattern you hope to teach. In this case, we were working on Possessive Nouns, so we wrote three pairs of sentences:

My mom has a dog.
My mom's dog is a Pug.

Miss Amenta has a pineapple hat.
Miss Amenta's pineapple hat makes her happy.

Damian has a fake mustache.
Damian's mustache looks real.

We began with the blue, pink, and red sentences. We wrote them about our kids and this particular class so they were more meaningful. First thing I did was read them to the students. Then, we asked students to turn and talk about what they notice. After, students shared out and we charted what they said:

I notice...
the pairs are alike - they are about the same topic
Should there be more commas?
apostrophe
It says what they have

As you can see, students were able to compare and contrast the sentences (one of Marzano's high yield strategies!) to construct meaning - they found the pattern (apostrophe and possession) and even though they could not name it academically, they were most certainly able to find it!

This little bit concluded day one.

Day 2: Imitate
We continued by sharing the academic vocabulary & meaning for what we were working on and three more examples:

You can find the teacher work in black ink. Then, the sentence in blue is the demonstration I did with our classroom teacher to model for the students how to imitate sentences, which is the next step they will complete. You can find teacher think aloud coded {like this.}

I said, "If I wanted to write a sentence with a Possessive Noun, I would first ask myself, 'Who is this sentence about?' Miss, Kriegl, who should we write a sentence about?"

She replied, "Mrs. Maldonado."

Then I asked her, "What does she own or have?"

She said, "A school."

I demonstrated, "Okay, then, Mrs. Maldonado {students, I'm starting my sentence with my person} 's {remember, I have to put the apostrophe s} So, Mrs. Maldonado's school {and then I just finish the sentence} is the best. Let's read it together."

All, "Mrs. Maldonado's school is the best."

Then I directed students, "With your partner, please imitate me, write a Possessive noun sentence. When you finish, hold your index card up, and I'll take it from you, and you can do another."

In pairs, students went on their way writing sentences. I collected them, and then added them to our list. You can find the student sentences in the picture above in pink. We continued to look for the pattern, and were also able to clarify a misconception, where a pair of kiddos wrote, "Ms. Kriegl owns Zach." (Side note: Zach is her fiancé!) We just reminded them of the pattern and then revised the sentence to make it correct.

All of that in just 15 minutes. Great conversation, great learning, awesome way to find trouble spots where students have misconceptions about the lesson at hand.

Because I don't want this post to get so long you don't read it, I'll be back later this week with another post to finish up the five day cycle of Sentence of the Week.

Has anyone used this as a grammar strategy? Please share your thoughts in the comments below! And be sure to check out the grammar presentation my colleagues Jennie, Amanda, and I put on last week in our district!

flipping for fall blog hop: reading with a writer's eye

Hi and welcome to BigTime Literacy! If this is your first time landing here, I'm Michelle, a Literacy Coach, advocate for Reading and Writing Workshop, and a writer myself. I'm really excited to be joining a group of amazing Reading Specialists and Literacy Coaches to share some mentor texts for the fall season!

Do you love fall as much as I do? It's been beautiful here in Chicago - 60's and 70's and sunny even! The leaves aren't falling yet, but I'm excited for that, and cool nights sleeping with the windows open, college football with friends, watching the Bears lose every week (grrr!), and sweaters and boots. I actually moved back to Chicago from Phoenix in 2009 for this season, if that is any indication of how much I love it!

With fall on our minds, each blogger from our tribe, The Reading Crew, has chosen a favorite fall mentor text to share with you. I've chosen is Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant.

In this text, Rylant very thoughtfully and deliberately has described Scarecrow, and so it's the perfect mentor text to study with students who are working on personal narratives or fiction stories, so they can learn to craft characters just like she has. Rylant repeats one thing over and over, how even though the materials used to make Scarecrow are borrowed, it really is all about what is inside that counts.

Close Reading with a Writer's Eye
Many people often think of Close Reading as reading a passage or short text multiple times and annotating it. While those are some of the steps we go through as we close read, I believe it's more about looking through varying lenses to study what the author is saying. In the case of this text, as I kept reading, the word borrowed was repeated over and over, I began close reading to determine the significance of that word, which in the end, led me to theme. I was also looking closely for ways that Rylant revealed the Scarecrow, through his feelings, actions, physical traits, words, and thoughts. What close reading is really about is studying an author's craft and wondering she wrote in the way she did. This lesson, while about writing characters, is also naturally about close reading.

The Freebie!

Now that you have a fabulous recommendation for a Mentor Text, I have created a Characterization freebie for you to take and use with it! In this document, you can find the mini-lesson directions, the complete text of the book to use for close reading and study, a handout to model your anchor chart after, and a handout for students to sketch and rehearse ideas for the characters in their stories. I hope you will find it useful with your students!



If you like what you've read here at BigTime Literacy, be sure to keep in touch, here on the blog, or on any of my social media outlets! I love to collaborate with anyone who engages with my blog!

Did you find my secret word? If you missed it, it was the word in orange: borrowed. Be sure to record that to be eligible for our amazing prize package, copies of all the mentor texts we're sharing! You can find the details for the challenge and prizes on Gay's blog, The Book Units Teacher. Click over there if you want to go back to the beginning of the hop!

But, if you're ready for the next stop on the blog hop, it's time to head over to Pawsitively Teaching and see what Lisa has for you! 

Fall is my most favorite season, hope you enjoy yours this year!      

     

what I'm loving wednesday

Today's a great day friends, it's What I'm Loving Wednesday! Would you like to write with me? Just compose a list of all the things you love and then link up below!

❤ a Political Revolution
Who is Bernie Sanders?

• Never ran a negative political commercial.
• Raised 1 1/2 million dollars in the first 24 hours after announced he was running and has 175,000 people working for him on grassroots.
• Wants to make it a democracy again, rather than having all the billioinaires buy the elections (Supreme Court's ruling on Citizen's United)
• Too big to fail means too big to exist - Break up the banks.
• Wants to guarantee single-payer healthcare.
• Believes in quality education in America - affordable for all, no matter what your SES.
• He wants to beat the Koch brothers and billionaires.
• Stand together - all of us - all races, religions, genders - to make a political revolution happen.

Watch more below. Follow him, tweet him, publish him to facebook. Get registered to vote for him in the primary. Do your part to elect the man who speaks for all of us, not just the Billionaires!

LOVE LOVE LOVE

❤ Hand-Crafted Writers Notebooks
Make your own, friends. Make one for your self, make your students make their own. I love mine and want to fill it up! Love Jennie's, too!

Side note on my hypothetical dog: I asked my landlord if I can get a dog even though his policy is no dogs. He's solid on that no. So.... idk when Dudley is going to be a reality :-( Don't you love how Duds has his own category here on BigTime Literacy but he's not real? That pic is from Google!

❤ My funny new friend
I don't have a picture of her yet (Erika, I want one. I hope that's not creepy?!) But she's funny. Here's just a bit:

Principal of the elementary school we're working at stops by and was talking about his teachers observing each other. He tells us, "Yeah, so then I encourage them to go visit the reading specialists, too... watch them in action and the pacing and the program, it's amazing!"
Erika, in this voice she does, "Yeah, they are pretty great." (I can't do this justice without her tone, voice and body language, but it was hilarious!)

Erika on the cookies she baked: "Not only am I a fantastic Reading Specialist, but a great baker. These chocolate chip cookies, made with vanilla pudding power.........and love."

You need to go follow her blog. She's exploring writing with her funny voice in one of her upcoming posts, because, as she wondered aloud to us earlier, "I'm funny in person, and you all take me seriously...? Riiiiiight?" Yes, we do!

Love!

❤ Writing Blast (Rehearsal Strategy)
2 minutes at the beginning of workshop. Give your class a word. They write words and phrases about this word for two minutes. If and when they cannot think of another association, they rewrite the word until they get something new. Here's the one I just did:

Change

change - hard - takes time - change - change - change diapers - messy - smelly - then fresh - rebirth - alive - smiles - change - change happens - back and fourth - pendulum swings - change - change - change - change - cambiar - dual language - best for kids - enlightening - duality - good to great - Dr. Mary Howard - Twitter Chats - PD on Demand

Some tips:

1. Use a multiple meaning word (I didn't go to they money change, but others did!)
2. Make sure it's just free association words and phrases and don't stop!

I have lots of ideas of more stuff I can writing about, and some figurative language is percolating in there!

❤ Sleeping with the windows open
It's just blissful. Cool breeze blows through, sun seeps in when morning comes, leaves dance and cast calming shawdows in as I wake up, love, love, love it!

❤ this Swatch sprinkles watch
There's another girl in our class, Michelle (awesome name, right?), who has great style with this watch below. I want it. It's perfect for casual days and it's sprinkles! It's like calorie and toxin free cupcakes all day!!!

Get the details for this challenge here!

An InLinkz Link-up

there's no app for that

I was surfing my blog feed today and ran across a post, Motivate your kids to write with this app! Yesterday I saw a post about math Pinterest Fails - you know, those quick acronyms and tricks math teachers use to get kids to remember order of operations or division steps?

If you're a teacher and you're really interested in getting your kids to love to write and to deeply understand math concepts, you have to come to terms with the fact that there are no quick fixes.

I'm a writer, so let's go there...

If I want my kids to love to write, I have to be an authentic model of what that looks like. I have to make my writing life visible to kids. They need to see my writer's notebook:

They need to see inside, too, and see that it's messy and not perfect. I need to tell them about my writing process and my writing preferences - how I like to keep my notebook with me and in the instance I don't have it, I make lists on my phone of things I want to write about. They need to know about my obsession with writing utensils, including these new Ticonderoga pencils that are now in colors, colors people!

I need to "go there" in my own writing - you know, that scary place where we investigate tragedies and conflicts? Then, I need to let them see what that's like. I need to take the time to research mentor texts and show kids how I study writers so I can mimic what they do, so I can help myself find my own way as a writer. I have to let them in on my own writing insecurities (I'm not as eloquent as I'd like to be) and work to make my classroom a place where they feel safe enough to share theirs. I need to keep up with PD in writing to bring fresh strategies to my students so both they, and I, can write in newer and livelier ways. I need to take time to plan Marathon Writing days so we can marvel in and be inspired by our surroundings and facilitate their planning of Author's Chairs so they can share their best work to a real-life audience. 

Friends, there's no app for this.

While I totally appreciate all that technology does for us: lets us share, allows us to respond to others we normally wouldn't have the opportunity to, and publish our work in new and creative ways, I also understand that it takes more than that to put thoughtful, insightful, beautiful works out into the world.

It takes a writer.

written conversations

I'm at the Illinois Writing Project, friends! It's a 2 and a half week course all about Writing with a focus on teacher leadership the second week. Every day, we get this blissful Writing Workshop time to compose anything we want! Today, I'm sharing Written Conversations with you, a strategy we used earlier this morning!

What are Written Conversations?
They are just that - a silent activity where two participants each write a note (in our case, in response to a story we read). Then, when both finish, they pass their note to the other, then respond to their partner's thoughts.

How can you use them?

• Get to know someone! Introduce yourself ask a question to your partner, then respond.
• Build background knowledge: Share a topic, kids write what they know and then respond to one another.
• Response to Literature: Students write letters about their Just Right books, short stories, brief articles and teacher or a partnered peer responds
• Exit Slip (?): Maybe kids could write about something they learned at the end of a unit, then have a written conversation, and then teachers could collect?
• Staff Development: Share a teaching strategy by way of a short article and then have paired teachers engage in written response to one another about the article

What other ideas do you have for implementation?

After participating in this activity, we spent a good 30 minutes debriefing. (Think Share Time!) There was so much to learn! The ideas here represent the ideas of the participants of my group - so thank you to all my colleagues who shared! 

Side note: It was during this time that I thought I should get everyone's twitter handle so I could give credit where it's due! Unfortunately, for this activity, I wasn't tracking who said what! But appreciations to my class for sharing their ideas that are now shared here!

Benefits of Written Conversation

1. Honors 2 Voices: Many times, when we have a Turn and Talk, the conversation will go off on one person's response to the article. In this case, both partners started their response, so two conversations of different content were going simultaneously!
2. Focused Listening: In verbal conversation, we tend to listen long enough to then start figuring out our response. In Written Conversation, you can really hear what your partner has to say and then begin composing your response.
3. Less Daunting: When students are paired, everyone participates more often and the teacher doesn't have to respond to everyone. As a teacher who used to do this about Just Right books with ever kid in my class, I can tell you that this was a big undertaking. I would spend an hour - 1:15 minutes PER DAY responding to my kids letters about books. While it paved the way for exceptional, deep thinking, it was time consuming to say the least!
4. Awareness of Audience: Getting kids to think about audience for their writing is so abstract. When kids write for one another, they can really begin to understand what that means. I for example, was making jokes in some of my letters, while another participant might be more serious. If kids changed partners for this activity, they would definitely begin to see how audience plays a role in writing.
5. Special Record: You walk away with a record of your conversation, so make sure they're in a special notebook!

Teacher Tips for Implementation

1. Remind students to respond to what their partner says, not carry on the conversation they originally started in their own notebook. Asking students to include a question at the end (like us bloggers do) can help guide this!
2. If needed, remind kids that the conversation is about the content, not the grammar. No need to worry about conventions, just as long as your message is clear.
3. Teacher should float during this time to look onto conversations and perhaps, make some notes for debrief.
4. Want to do a shortened version? Have kids write on post-it's and then pass them!
5. Tech version? Could we use Twitter here somehow?

How have you used Written Conversation?

Do you have a great idea to Rev Up Writing? Share it with The Reading Crew!