One writing lesson I taught and designed during Student Teaching was in my Special Education placement, a 6th grade 12:1:1 setting, where we reviewed what personal narratives were and focused on the drafting stage. We identified topics we could write about, and what language to use and how to make it a story that followed a timeline from the begging/middle/end. This lesson was a week long, where we kept working towards drafting our own personal narratives. We talked about how to choose a topic and brainstormed ways to write in a personal form. What we did not do, or more specifically me as their teacher, as we jumped into the writing process after vocally brainstorming ideas, was "encouraging them to apply what they're learning in practice activities" (Tompkins, 2012, p. 68). Modeling and having conversations is not enough, as I now realize. I wish I would have taught the students about sentence fluency, an important craft lesson Tompkins shares, where we could have collected our "favorite sentences from... books they're reading on sentence strips and post them in the classroom... [or] sentence unscrambling: Teachers select a sentence and break it apart into phrases, and then students rearrange the phrases to build a sentence and compare their sentence with the original one" (Tompkins, 2012, p. 73). Being sixth graders, fluency is a very important skill in relation to reading, and I know that my students had trouble reading fluently with emotion and focusing on punctuation. I also should have dove deeper into teaching more explicitly about technology, as students wrote their stories on Google Docs. I could have had them learn about the digital presentation trait, where they would have created "a layout that enhances their message, align the text with images and sound, and add headings and other features to guide readers through the composition" (Tompkins, 2021, p. 78). I really like these craft lessons, and intend to use them in any classroom I teach. The beauty of these lessons is how now I can make learning about writing more interactive with activities that hold meaning and get students to think more critically, versus me providing most of the thinking.
When teaching personal narratives and drafting, I think the lesson had gone well, but it certainly had much room for improvement. I remember being nervous teaching a writing lesson, because writing has lots of parts and I was unsure of how to narrow down my ideas for teaching and managing our time together in class, all in one. If I were able to go back in time and adapt the lesson, I would bridge together multiple aspects of writing and not only what is commonly thought of for drafting. As Rickards and Hawkes (2006) detail how Mr. Baker merged a lesson on similes and a story's setting in which "He modeled adding a simile to a paragraph describing the setting... He prompted and reinforced students as they revised" (p. 372). I remember I had created my own personal narrative for the students to view on the Smart Board, in which I tried to model how I wrote using "I", in sequence, and with purpose. I also recall modeling how to draft my writing and calling on the students for help. Yet, if I had wrote in front of my students (not ahead of time), pulled together their ideas and even wrote some sentences with grammatical errors or ones which could have been enhanced, I think this would have served my students better as they would of had a more active role in the process of what it feels like to reflect on ones story and how to look at it critically. They would have looked at what the author (I, their teacher for that lesson) was trying to say and how. Before even jumping into personal narratives and drafting, I could have taught a mini lesson about topic development to focus on how "Authors often write about ordinary things. What ordinary things does the author write about in the text?" and word choice, "What words or phrases grab your attention?" (Rickards & Hawes, 2006, p. 371). Both of these topics would be great minilessons to teach! Topic development by exploring what authors write about in books/how any (appropriate) topic can be written about and word choice by looking at different forms of writing and how language is used for different purposes.
I feel my eyes have opened to the imperativeness of selecting texts based on their presentation style, written form, illustrations, and message. Mentor texts can be powerful tools, when selected with diligence, that now place learning in the hands of the students. This first takes place by the teacher "through the reading that students begin to value a book enough to be willing to look to its author as a writing mentor" (MacKay, Ricks & Young, 2017, p. 177). It will be important for me to not just have students start to draw their conclusions about text features and what they are understanding right away. Rather, I have to allow them time to connect with the authors work for them to even begin to "examine it through the eyes of a writer... and empower them to try something new" in their own writing (MacKay, Ricks & Young, 2017, p. 177, 185). Yet, I also have to allow my students power in the creation of their work, and this means reflecting back on how "students are [often] not involved with textual selections" which is a big problem (Muhammad, 2020, p. 139). I intend to have my classroom of writers partake in minilessons, where they can use a skill in another lesson and keep adding to their foundation of knowledge. I intend on having my students examine books and writing formats in multiple ways, to see how authors create connections and messages, to fully understand the purpose of what it means when we ask students to write something. I also intend to have my students be more active in their learning, by providing them with hands on writing activities that get them thinking. My students will be encouraged to express their input and to select materials for our classroom community that ties together their interests, cultures, and different styles of literacy to be empowering.
References
MacKay, K.L., Ricks, P.H., & Young, T.A. (2017). Supporting young writers with award- winning books. The Reading Teacher, 71(2), 177-187.
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating Genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Rickards, D. & Hawes, S. (2006). Connecting reading and writing through author’s craft. The Reading Teacher, 60(4), 370-373.
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