Keeping Black Students in Schools & How to Keep Rewriting Alive in Schools (4/18)

Hello all. I hope you're having a good day. I'm glad you found your way onto my blog. Take a seat, pour yourself a cup of matcha tea, and read on. For this week we scavenged the internet to find posts from educational blogs that we found interesting. I found two articles, Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School and How to Keep Rewriting Alive in the Classroom. Both articles stood out to me by having significance for future teachers.

Having Just One Black Teacher was an important read. I fully realize that I don't fall under the category of black teacher. Nonetheless some stats found in the article stood out to me. "Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys' probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found." I believe that is a very significant percentage. The main idea of the article was that black students need role models in school.

Another important idea was "If a low-income black boy never sees anyone in the classroom who looks like him, Papageorge [researcher] says he might conclude, 'Hey, college is just not for me'. And then why would you work hard in school?'" I think that this is a terrible thing for a young student to say to themselves. I didn't realize how important it was for students to have a role model. By having more teachers of color in the classroom, we will have more students of color crossing the stage.

The second article was related to many concepts we've brought up in class. It focused on the concept of writing and rewriting. The article states that students are trained to create writing on the spot because of high-stakes testing. They are forced into conventional writing that produces poor results. The article includes a quote from Roald Dahl, "good writing is essentially rewriting." The article also included an activity that allows students to see how time affects their writing. Some students are given clay and are told to make something with limited time, while other students are allowed unlimited time. This is related to the writing process and how different the end product is with restricted time.

Both articles were enlightening and fun to read.

Here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids In School: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/10/522909090/having-just-one-black-teacher-can-keep-black-kids-in-school

How to Keep Rewriting Alive in the Classroom: http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2017/01/23/how-to-keep-rewriting-alive-in-the-classroom.html?qs=writing

Assessing Student Writing (4/11)

This week we read selections from Gallagher and Christiansen along with an article by Patricia Dunn. All readings focused on a theme of instead of correcting everything students do wrong it's more effective to show them what they're doing correctly. There was a chapter in Teaching for Joy and Justice in which Christiansen mentions she doesn't even grade papers! Our classroom discussion today focused on these issues with everyone sharing great points of view on how they feel about grading.

Gallagher wrote about his Ten Tenets of Teaching Editing Skills. One Tenet that I focused on for a quickwrite question was the tenth- Repeat After Me: "I Am Not Superman. I Am Not Superman. I Am Not..." This stuck with me because it is a good practice for a teacher to be in. Learning from what people shared in class today, teachers have a lot on their plates at all times. It is good to remind yourself that you can't do everything all the time.

Christensen wrote about how she also focuses on giving students constructive feedback. She does this by not grading her students' papers. They either pass the assignment or have to rewrite. I believe this is a very effective way of getting students to complete their work with more creativity. They are less held down to the idea of receiving a grade allowing them to work more extensively. Without a grade holding them down they can write how they truly feel.

The article that compared teaching new drivers to new writers included many similarities. You can not force good driving or good writing down anyone's throat. While some people should be told how to drive with immediate instruction, "Stop now!" "Speed up!" most writers don't function this way. All of these readings helped me understand that there are multiple ways for students to improve their writing.

Rhode Island Writing Project

On Saturday I attended the Rhode Island Writing Project at Roger Williams University with some awesome people.

See:

The talk itself was informative and interesting. Linda Christensen, the author of Teaching for Joy and Justice was the keynote speaker. Other speakers were Aimee Marsland, an excellent English teacher at North Providence High School and Brittany Richter, an equally excellent middle school teacher.

Linda touched on many subjects including teaching students with different backgrounds and understanding where different vernaculars come from. She broke the speech up with things like a video of a slam poet defending her mother's accent and an activity in which we would take on a role of a person whose language was silenced.

I learned a lot from the speech including how to reach students of many different backgrounds. The speech was ended by an incredible performance by Brittany's students. They all worked for hours on several slam poems. Each one focused on different topics such as how the military is viewed and how they themselves are viewed in society. Each poem gave me goosebumps. 😊

Sarah, Kelli, and I attended The Importance of Putting Down Roots: Greek and Latin Roots Studies. This was an interesting talk held my Mary Rafferty and Kimberly Reynolds. It focused on a small lecture followed by a few literacy games. One involved creating new words using roots such as pre- and anti-, base words, and suffixes such as -ology and -able.

The conference was a great and fun experience overall, I plan on returning next year! 😁