Final Project

Here is  my final project: a video about my hometown, Kennedy, MN.

Classroom Blogs

I found this week’s reading on using blogs in the classroom in chapter 5 of the Herrington text, “Social Networking in the Classroom” by Paul Allison to slightly contradict itself. Allison made a point throughout the chapter that blogging allows students a chance to write about things that they are passionate about or are naturally curious about and then to find an audience who is just as passionate or curious about the student’s chosen topic. However, while doing this, he kept advocating for the use of the “Be a Blogger!” matrix that lays out in great detail every single step that he expects his students complete while writing their blogs. Everything that his students need to do, from pre-writing to publishing and responding to their peers, is laid out step by step in the matrix. Allison even made a very detailed template for his students to use when responding to their peers’ blog posts. Thus, I think that Allison greatly contradicts himself when he says that blogs allow students to take control of their learning and to become self-guided learners. If his students still need these step-by-step instructions on how to write a blog post, then I don’t think that they are becoming self-guided learners. 

Because of this, I feel that when blogs are used in the classroom for the purposes Allison was promoting, there cannot be quite so many guidelines or steps to follow. I don’t think that blogs are formal writing spaces, and as such, they shouldn’t be restricted with so many steps and guidelines. I feel that giving students the matrix that Allison included in his chapter and requiring students to cross off each box when they complete that step would only make the blogging feel like another homework assignment, something that students were forced to do, which would only decrease their motivation and passion for writing. If our goal for using blogs in the classroom is to get students passionate about writing and learning, then I think that we need to allow them to take ownership not only of the topic and their thoughts, but we also need to allow them to take ownership of the writing process itself.

My resource link is an article that gives advice and tips for how to grade students’ blogs. It also has a few links to articles that focus more generally on using blogs in the classroom.

Technology Again

While I was reading the Kadjer text for this week, I kept thinking that the stories sounded awfully familiar. And by the time that I got to the third page I realized that Kristen had assigned this chapter for us to read last semester. So after looking for the notes I took on the reading when I read it the first time (and not finding them) I skimmed through the rest of the chapter, remembering each classroom activity presented and the implications Kadjer states for using technology in the classroom and being slightly annoyed that I had to read the article again. However, this got me thinking about how we are being taught to use technology in our own classroom. What does it mean when we are assigned in two different classes to read the exact same article touting the benefits of using technology in the classroom? I decided that it seems that all of the instruction that we have had on using technology has projected it as a sort of “cure-all” for everything that could go wrong in the classroom. Technology will make kids engaged in their coursework; bring out struggling students’ hidden strengths; give students purpose for their work, etc, etc. And I do agree that technology has the possibility of doing this. However, it seems that every article we have read doesn’t want to admit that there are schools that don’t even come close to having the equipment or the funds available to incorporate this type of technology into their classroom. Nor do they give alternatives to how schools could incorporate these technology-based ideas into the classroom in the absence of some of the technological tools.

For my summative assessment on Romeo and Juliet, I had planned on giving my students the option of shooting a short commercial to sell the reading of Romeo and Juliet to other students. However, when I told my coordinating teacher about the project, she encouraged me to just have the students make posters as the school doesn’t have adequate equipment for students to effectively shoot and edit a commercial, which surprised me. North High School isn’t exactly a poor school, so for them not to have the equipment to do such a project was shocking. But then I realized that I was most likely so shocked because I had read so many articles and sat through so many classes that made the assumption that schools will have this technology at their fingertips and all that teachers will need to do is utilize it. Thus, I feel that although it is important for us to learn how to incorporate technology into the classroom and teach students to live in the “21^st century,” I also think that it is important to consider other options. It seems as though we are so focused on the end goal of incorporating technology into lessons that we have forgotten the more practical concerns of actually getting these technologies in the schools in the first place.

Here is my resource link from the NCTE on “Writing in the 21^st Century.” I also found a critique of this report on a blog. I thought it was interesting to have both sides as they seem to sum up the argument between the practical and the theoretical side of using technology in the classroom.

Peer Response

Throughout reading Nancie Atwell’s guidelines for conducting conferences, I kept thinking to myself that so much of her advice seemed to be common sense information. However, after thinking about it a little more, I realized that although it is common sense, they are all things that teachers probably would not do. For example, the piece of advice that I thought about the most was asking for permission to write on a student’s paper. I realized that I would probably take writing on a student’s paper as something that I was simply entitled to do, because I am the teacher. However, I would never just take anyone else’s paper and write on it so why does it make sense for me to do that to a student? I think that many times teachers have a tendency to forget that their students are also people and as a result, they treat them differently than they do anyone else in their lives. This same idea is evident in when Atwell said to avoid generalized praise. She went on to explain that no where outside of the classroom would it be acceptable for us to tell someone “very good!” and not elaborate any more. Instead, we would have a real conversation with that person and treat that person like a “human being.” I guess teachers do have a tendency to look at their students as students and not realize that they are people who happen to be students, which I think sets both the teacher and the students up for failure. If the teacher can’t see her students as humans, they will never respect her and she will never be able to form a relationship with them. Anyway, since this is a little off the topic of writing instruction, I will move on . . . 

I love the idea of using peer response in the classroom. Throughout high school, I think that almost every single paper I wrote went through some sort of peer response session. However, with all of this peer responding, I don’t ever recall being explicitly taught how to respond to a peer’s writing. Because of this, I remember a lot of peer review sessions being really unproductive. Everyone read their paper out loud and the other people in the group just said the first thing that came to mind in order to be done with the session as soon as possible. I don’t ever remember getting writing advice from a fellow classmate that I actually used (and to be fair, I don’t ever remember giving a fellow classmate any advice I would have used either). So I definitely agree that responding to peers’ writing on a higher level needs to be taught; it’s not a skill that students will simply pick up, even if they can read and write well. I really like the idea of bringing in a piece of your own writing and using it as a model to teach your students how to respond. Not only does it serve as a good model for responding to writing, it also helps to validate students’ ideas, especially if you follow-up on the lesson and show your students how you revised it taking in to account their suggestions. 

My link for the week is actually a list of guidelines for conducting peer response sessions from the University’s Writing Center. Of course, it is geared for a University writing class, but I think that many of the guidelines could directly transfer to high school. What I thought was particularly helpful was the section titled “What will make peer response workshops fail?” that brings up a lot of considerations that teachers might overlook when planning a peer response workshop.

Teaching Grammar

Throughout this week’s readings, I found myself agreeing almost completely with the idea of teaching grammar during the writing process. This probably comes from my own experiences with learning specific grammatical rules in middle and high school. When I was in seventh grade, I had an English teacher who taught using only worksheets. This teacher had us complete gigantic packets of worksheets in which we labeled pages after pages of pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc. Most of the class just mindlessly filled out the worksheets and never learned a single concept about the correct ways to use grammar. Later on in high school, I had a couple teachers that had us correct an error-filled sentence every day and one error-filled paragraph every week. While I think that this helped me learn some of the finer aspects of grammar, I remember becoming extremely frustrated with these exercises as they seemed very disconnected from what I was writing. I could pick out an error in the sentences that the teacher gave us, but I’m not sure I could find the same error in my own writing. 

Because of this, I definitely agree that grammar needs to be taught as an essential part of the writing process. If students are only taught how to correct single sentences on a worksheet, then they will only be able to see mistakes on a worksheet; they will never be able to make the connection and find errors in their own writing. To me, this is the ultimate example of being able to embed your teaching in a real-life situation. As teachers, we are always looking for ways to allow our students to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to the outside world. When students are out of the classroom, we will expect them to edit and use correct grammar in their writing. So why don’t we teach editing and grammar while writing? Why do some teachers insist on isolating grammar from writing to teach it and then later expect students to simply reapply it to their writing when outside of the classroom? It seems that this isolation causes a lot of unnecessary work for both students and teachers. If students are taught how to correctly use grammar while writing, using correct grammar will become more natural for students, and it will be easier for them to apply it to their writing outside of the classroom.

Here is my resource link for the week. It's a blog post that I found on The Write Source's website. I think it serves as a really good example of many of the points made in the readings about teaching grammar within the larger context of writing.

The Five Paragraph Essay

I feel that I have the ultimate love/hate relationship with the five paragraph essay. I first learned the format from one of my favorite teachers, Mrs. Mattson, who taught me language arts in the 8^th, 10^th, and 11^th grades. Mrs. Mattson was extremely strict with the writing process. To write an essay, she first had us freewrite or research our topic, depending on the type of essay we were writing. Once researching was done, we could begin writing thesis statements. She drilled into us that the thesis statement was the most important part of the paper and if it was weak, then the entire paper would be weak. Because of this belief, she made us write, rewrite, and revise thesis statements multiple times. After this, we made outlines. The thesis statement was put at the top of the outline. Then the outline mapped out the introduction, three body paragraphs and three supporting points for each paragraph, and then the conclusion. Each section of the outline that represented the body paragraphs needed to relate directly back to the thesis statement. If they didn’t, that section needed to be deleted and rewritten so that it would relate to the thesis. Mrs. Mattson stressed the outline just as much as the thesis statement. I remember spending days in class just revising outlines. Only after the outline was perfect could the actual essay be written; and then of course, we needed to go through at least two drafts of the essay. Everything was handed in to Mrs. Mattson at the end, and if I remember right, the outline and thesis statement revisions were worth significantly more than the final essay. 

While this probably sounds like torture to most students, I actually really liked writing 5 paragraph essays in this way. It gave me a structure and direction. There was no way that I could get lost in what I was trying to say because it was all mapped out for me beforehand. And I loved how neatly my paper was always tied together. Overall, the five paragraph essay taught me organization skills that served me well throughout my college career. However, this being said, it also limited me in some ways. I was never taught a structure beyond the five paragraph essay. When I was assigned an eight-page paper my freshman year of college, I couldn’t figure out how to format a paper longer than five paragraphs and ended up getting points taken off for making all of my paragraphs roughly two pages in length. I’m still terrified of a paper that has an “implied thesis.” And I’m wary of adding a counter-argument at the end of a paper because I can still hear Mrs. Mattson telling me that absolutely everything in my paper needs to relate directly back to and support my thesis statement. 

Given my experiences, I think that the five paragraph essay definitely has a place in English education. It serves as an excellent, straight-forward, non-intimidating introduction into essay writing. But it needs to remain just that: an introduction. It is when teachers stick with the five paragraph format well into 10^th or 11^th grades that the five paragraph essay becomes a problem. Teachers at these levels need to expose their students to different ways and forms of essay writing. As Wesley said, they need to show them that each writing assignment warrants a different format or structure instead of trying to squeeze every assignment into five paragraphs. Hopefully doing so will eliminate the confusion for college freshmen like me who try to format eight pages of writing into five neat paragraphs. 

Here is my resource link that discusses the place of the five paragraph essay in high school and in college.

Multigenre Writing

Even though I found all of the readings this week interesting, I am going to focus my reflection for this week on Romano’s work, mainly because before reading Romano’s book, I had never heard of a “multigenre paper.” To be honest, I was initially intimidated by the idea of a multigenre paper. It seemed to have absolutely no structure at all: just random snippets of writing jumbled together. However, after reading a few examples from Romano’s book, specifically the first full example he shared titled “Cosmetic Clips,” I became intrigued with the idea. The idea of writing many short pieces in different genres makes composing a while story seem easy. I think that this stems from the fact that in multigenre writing, a lot of the content of the story comes from the reader. The writer provides a sort of path for the reader to follow, but the reader has to read between the pieces to see what is happening and truly understand the story. Combining so many different pieces of writing together makes the story seem real, like the reader is going through someone else’s scrapbook or sifting through a collection of miscellaneous papers that a person has collected about their life. I especially like this idea because it not only gives the writer a chance to experiment, but the reader can also experiment with meaning. The spaces left between pieces give the reader room to invent his own stories or scenarios and make his own personal meaning out of the writing.  

 

I think that it would be really fun to have my students experiment with multigenre writing in my classroom.  It is a really good way for young writers to not only experiment with many different genres, but because each piece is quite short, it gives them an opportunity to produce really polished writing with less of a chance of getting them bored from working on the same piece for too long. Being able to experiment with many different genres of writing will also keep students motivated to keep working on their papers. In addition, it would be fun to see how many different genres students could come up with, which could also help to motivate students. 

 

Despite this, I don’t necessarily agree with using a multigenre format for a research paper. I know that Romano had addressed this in the book by talking about the guilt he felt in not having students write essays, reports, and term papers. He went on to say that multigenre writing can enhance expository writing. But students still need to be explicitly taught how to write a formal research paper, or how to format an essay. Simply saying that multigenre writing will enhance students’ other writing skills does not detract from the fact that students need to be taught these constructions. Colleges will expect that students know how to write an essay or research paper; all of students’ work cannot be turned into a multigenre writing project. In addition to this, I felt that the examples that Romano included in the text that were research based felt almost heavy and clumsy. Putting a lot of research-based facts into the multigenre piece detracted a lot from the writing and the piece as a whole and I found myself not as engaged with those pieces than the ones that were based purely on personal experiences of the writer. So, I think that I would only teach multigenre writing to my students as a form of purely creative writing and self expression, not as format for a research paper.

Here's my resource link for the week: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~WAC/page.jsp?id=62&c_type=category&c_id=37
(My blog is not letting me set up a link to it, so you'll have to copy and paste. Sorry!)
It is a set of instructions and advice for conducting student-teacher conferences on writing. It deviates from Atwell's suggestions for conferences some -- specifically in the length of conferences and the frequency -- but I thought that it offered some good advice on what to do and think about before, during, and after conferences.