Write Like This

Kelly Gallagher's Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling & Mentor Texts made me even more excited to be going back to my 6-8 language arts classroom next fall. As with his other books I loved his voice and convictions related to teaching. This is a nice complementary text to Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them, one of my favorites. Both of the books heavily focus on the value of teachers writing with their students.

Gallagher organized Write Like This by starting with a rationale chapter highlighting the importance of writing instruction, followed by six chapters explaining how to scaffold specific writing purposes, a chapter about revision and editing, and a concluding chapter. Each of the writing purpose chapters provided multiple layers of support in order to familiarize students with writing related to the purpose that students would be able to connect to in their everyday lives (as well as in their future lives as productive citizens). I loved that the ideas will provide me with a lot of different ways to explore in my own writer's notebook over the summer.

The final chapter highlighted Gallagher's ten core values that have emerged over time throughout his teaching career. Gallagher stated, "If I sit and think about how daunting it is to walk into a classroom with the intention of teaching wave after wave of adolescents how to become better writers, it can be overwhelming. One way I avoid becoming overwhelmed is by consciously returning to my core beliefs--the philosophical underpinnings, if you will, of my approach to teaching writing," (p. 223). I agree with Gallagher, it is energizing as a teacher to return to core beliefs, to think about our convictions and our students and focus on what really matters in education. I continue to be inspired by Kelly Gallagher and am excited that I still have another one of his books, Teaching Adolescent Writers, on my TBR shelf.

Research Thoughts

Yesterday I posted about Living the Questions and about shifting a focus to view myself as a teacher-researcher. I have some ideas in mind about what I will research next year, and I look forward to mapping out my ideas into a more formal (yet tentative) plan during the summer. However, I know one thing for sure. One of my goals next year will be to capture and document more of the everyday life of my classroom.

In Living the Questions Shagoury and Power stated, "[...] much teacher research is rich in classroom anecdotes and personal stories," (p. 2). On my blog I often reflect about my students and my teaching, which I will continue to do, but I want to also focus on slice of life story style writing. I want to better capture book club conversations, casual conversations with students about books, read aloud discussions, conferences... Regardless of the research question, I agree with Shagoury and Powers, stories about teaching and my students will add so much.

I already participate in Two Writing Teachers' Slice of Life Story Tuesdays and the month long challenge on another blog, but I often focus more on my family. At times when I slice about school, I do not get as detailed with posts about individual students since it is so public. Instead, I will start a writer's notebook dedicated to classroom slices where I can candidly capture those moments and then later I can decide about sharing with student consent. I am excited to see what I will notice and discover in the years to come.

Another avenue that I am excited to mention to my colleagues is considering a staff research group. We already have a book club where we meet once a month at a local coffee shop. Some of my colleagues are approaching the point in their Master's programs where they will be conducting thesis research. If they are interested, I would love to grow together as researchers. Living the Questions would be a great resource to support us as we navigate the process together.

Living the Questions

"Asking questions of our classrooms is as natural as breathing. Teachers who conduct classroom-based research turn those wonderings into research questions they can systematically pursue," (p. 30). -JoAnn Portalupi in Living the Questions

This year has been a big year for me. I am in the last year of my doctoral program, finishing up my last classes and working on my dissertation (which I hope to defend in the summer or early fall). Another big shift was that I took a one-year-leave of absence from my 6th-8th grade dual immersion classroom where I taught reading and writing workshop. I have been thinking a lot about what I still want to do as an educator and what my dreams are after completing my doctoral program. Recently I decided that I will return to my classroom in the fall. This year I have discovered that I would have been happy in higher ed as well, but Kassia Wedekind summed it up well in her recent post reflecting on her own career related decision, "But the classroom is where I belong. For now."

It is often hard to pinpoint change over time, but I know for sure that one aspect that will be different is that I now view myself as a teacher-researcher and am excited to have a more intentional and focused research process throughout the year, in addition to observing and reflecting about various aspects as I have in other years. However, in my doctoral coursework, it seems that I hear more often about outside researchers. So much so that I almost sought a route to focus my dissertation on someone else's classroom. Thankfully, my committee guided me back to focusing on my teaching journey and my students, realizing that passions related to my topic were grounded in my experiences.

Knowing that I will be back in my classroom next year, it would only make sense that my research would center on self-study and practitioner research. As such, I was so excited to read Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Miller Power's Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers, second edition. I recognized Brenda Power's name from the Choice Literacy e-newsletter, so it was nice to learn more about teacher research from a voice I recognized, along with another colleague.

The book is organized into eight chapters, beginning with a rationale for teacher research, and then walking through various stages of the research process, including how to sustain research. I loved that the epilogue was titled "Why Not Teacher Research?", an invitation to get started. Each chapter had a balance of narrative from the authors mixed with features from other teacher-researchers, providing glimpses into many different ways to go about research within our classrooms. The appendix also had another set of sample research plans. I loved that I could connect to different plans in different ways, and thought of colleagues for others. It seems that the authors intentionally tried to have a nice balance of topics and methods.

Living the Questions will be a good resource to have and revisit throughout the research process. Tomorrow I will be posting about some of my thoughts on research for next year.

Becoming a Literacy Leader

When I read A Sense of Belonging back in 2009, I instantly loved Jennifer Allen's voice and learned so much from her book. I knew that eventually I would want to read her other Stenhouse book, Becoming a Literacy Teacher, and I finally did so. Just as with the first book of hers that I read, I found myself reading through multiple lenses.

I would love to have a position such as Allen's where my full time job was to support teachers and the culture of learning within the school. However, it is more likely that my career will continue to be 6-8 language arts and courses in higher education. Nonetheless, so much of what Allen talks about is relevant to my day-to-day life as an educator because Allen focuses on teachers as professionals and supportive communities in which colleagues collaborate and support each other.

I started to think about how I could make changes within my regular 6-8 position in order to strengthen the discussions between colleagues about practitioner research in our classrooms, as well as implications for practice in our K-8 dual immersion school. Along the same lines, I am excited to be reading the second edition of Living the Questions right now.

This year I took a leave of absence from my language arts classroom and have been teaching in a teacher preparation program, so I was also thinking about implications for that role as well. Of course, there is always so much to learn from Allen about mentoring and supporting teachers, so that was one automatic link to the relevance of her text. Then there were more subtle connections, such as a narrative describing how she worked alongside a teacher to regain control of the class that I will be reading aloud to my students in a course related to classroom management.

I think it is safe to say that wherever my journey as an educator leads me, Allen's thoughts and ideas will be relevant. I would love to see another book from her!

A New Blog & A New Genre

This winter I set up a new blog, Read, Discover, Grow to serve as a "mentor text" for my undergraduates who are taking a children's literature course in which they are required to blog about 30 children's books targeted at primary grades. Later in the spring they will blog about additional books for upper elementary students. Last spring I showed my personal book blog as an example, but this year I decided to complete the same requirements as the students and have been enjoying the process.

One of the requirements for this term is that at least one of the books must be a wordless book. This week I have been writing a series of posts about wordless books, a new genre for me. On my latest post about Bill Thomson's Chalk, I was reflecting on my experience reading the book with my girls earlier in the week. I especially loved considering the potential for wordless books to support reading and writing workshop (the last two paragraphs of the Chalk post).

I would love to hear how others have used wordless books or thoughts on potential uses, as well as any recommendations of other wordless books.

The Influence of Workshop Philosophy

I can feel workshop philosophy impacting more areas of my life than what I typically thought of as the reading and writing contexts in which I teach utilizing workshop. I have started to realize that I apply the concept of learning from mentors all over. Recently I posted on my other blog about mentors for a type of scrapbooking, Project Life, that I am doing for the first time this year. Of course, scrapbooking when viewed as a combination of pictures and text in order to preserve memories can be a writing genre; however, I did not always recognize it as such. Over the last year I have been reflecting more and more on the power of the process of scrapbooking as a valuable asset to writer's workshop.

One of my favorite workshop related phrases is, "Read like a writer, and write like a reader." Once I found out that I was going to teach university level courses, I started to view my college coursework from two lenses. On the one hand, I was paying attention to the content. On the other I was "learning like a teacher", noticing how various professors set up their courses and built a sense of community within the classroom. A couple of weeks ago was the first week of my spring semester class. As the professor was getting started, I was taking some notes of what he was doing on my computer. One of my classmates sitting next to me looked over and asked quietly, "What are you doing? Writing down everything we do?" I tried not to laugh, knowing he was a bit incredulous that I would be taking notes when we weren't really to the content yet.

Workshop philosophy prompts a powerful mindset of constantly viewing the world and experiences from multiple lenses - of being able to embrace and enjoy experiences, while also reflecting on how the experiences impact us in order to improve who we are in various capacities - as readers, writers, teachers, scrapbookers, mothers... The possibilities are endless.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

This week I was looking through a bin that a colleague left for me with writing samples to use this year in one of my literacy courses. I had noticed before that there were a lot of her kids' writing from their younger years in school; however, I did not realize that there were also some from when her daughter was in my class, especially from her 6th grade year.

Though the writing was not pertinent to the class that I was preparing for (emergent lit), and I had plenty of prep work to do, I just could not pull myself away from the writing. She even had the spiral bound dialogue journal. At first it felt almost like sneaking a peek at someone's diary, yet, that feeling quickly went away as I remembered that I was actually the original intended audience. I read over her thoughts that she had written in all different formats and once again found joy in all of her writing voice.

I also reflected back on those early days and months of what ended up being three years with those students (from 6th-8th grade). It was interesting to think about how I learned so much about her and her classmates through what they chose to write in their homework journals. I was also thinking about myself as a teacher.

Aside from the spiral notebook, there was also an informational picture book related to American History that the 6th graders read aloud to the younger grades. Then there was book responses and her update of a Cinderella story with a dog as the protagonist! So many artifacts providing glimpses into what was important in that first year and validating the importance of documenting life and learning.

I will probably be glimpsing back in that bin from time to time...