Week 2 Reflection

• • What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.  
• • What are alternate interpretations of your students’ performance or products? 
• • What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
• • When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support? 
• • If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning? 

My unit plan required my students to work with their partners a lot.  So, I chose to focus on shared writing as my core practice. However, I felt that the more we started to work with the same partner, the worse the workshops went. All of my students started with great small moment stories, once we began to introduce their blue writing pens, and the red editing pens, their stories began to take a turn for the worst. Students began crossing off every part of their story, adding in words, punctuation, and random things that did not go along with their story. 

The first unit of Writer's Workshop has students writing small moment stories, and then towards the end (the lessons I taught) had the students editing their pieces. We have been editing everything from spelling, punctuation, readability, capital and lower case letters, spaces, etc. However, many students who really didn't have problems with their stories ended up assuming they needed to be fixing something in their story and ended up ruining it.  There were very few students who did not completely destroy their stories. I think many of them got excited about the blue pens and red editing pens that they wanted a chance to use them any way they could. 

After looking back at the last few lessons as a whole, I am starting to think that the students should have only been given one story booklet to write on and edit. I think having multiple stories distracted them, and didn't give them the opportunity to focus on perfecting one. They almost seemed to race each other to see who had the most stories written. 

I was very frustrated because I felt that my teaching was the problem. However, my MT kept reminding me that they wont always get the concept the first time around. They are very young and very immature. 

Another thing I would like to change if I were to re-teach this lesson again, is to change partners every day. I know that they want students to get comfortable working with the same partner, but many students complained every day saying "I've already read their story so many times" or "I don't like hearing their story anymore." The students began to get too comfortable with one another and instead of giving compliments and positive suggestions they were giving rude comments. It was very upsetting and it was difficult to keep everyone positive. However, I asked my MT about switching partners and she didn't seem to agree with me. 

My lessons weren't ALL bad. I had a few students who wrote very detailed stories and seemed to understand the objective everyday. These students worked well with the blue pens and red editing pens because they have worked with them before. However, I think we should introduce the pens before the students even begin writing. I think this will allow them to grow comfortable with them and not be so distracted by them by the time editing comes around. 

I would like to look more into mini lessons for editing. I don't really like the writer's workshop lessons very much and would like to research different ideas for implementing these concepts into younger classrooms.