Music To The Rescue

In a past life I was a musician and a music teacher.  While I lacked the talent and drive to become a professional musician, music has always been something I've enjoyed.In our classroom, when students need to complete a transition from one activity to the other - for example, universal breakfast clean up to Morning Meeting - we play music. We began the year with Pachelbel and are working on Bach at the moment.My students love to talk - usually to me and all at once -  they talk a LOT. And while I understand and encourage this as part of their processing and language acquisition, it can get pretty loud. When we're in Writing Workshop, there are definitely times I want them talking out loud, but there are times when I'd like them "talking" with their pencils and pens.One day this week, as I was preparing to release my students to their writing tasks, I started explaining to them that I would like to begin experimenting with background music during Writing Workshop.  As I write - even now - we have classical music playing in the background so why not?  This was, as many things about teaching are, unplanned.It was not an instant success -- it took a couple of starts before I could convince my students that they didn't need to try to talk over the music. But over the course of the last three days, the background conversations - the ones that were not about writing - have been replaced so that Writing Workshop is most definitely a more focused work period.Yesterday, one of my friends approached me in amazement saying "we wrote quietly the whole time!" And so they did.  Music to the rescue.

With An Apology to My Students.....

This is a tumultuous time to be a teacher - many, many new mandates are arriving this year making for a lot of teacher discomfort as we try to make sense of things.My own personality is that I am an early adopter - not always a good thing I'm sure, but I do tend to try new methods and materials out fairly readily. We have been struggling with Interactive Read Alouds (IRA) and Writing About Reading (with the unfortunate code name WAR in this district - just saying).  The changeover to a more strategically envisioned IRA lesson seemed like a natural extension of the Making Meaning  program we've used in our district for about 10 years.Writing About Reading (sorry, can't say WAR - I grew up in the 60s) also feels like what our students need. But the message we're getting, whether intended or not, is that we need to have our students up and proficient for their grade level expectations nearly immediately.In the rush to get our students performing at higher levels, it is far too easy to forget that the students may not be prepared to be successful. So sometimes they are not. Even with pressure on educators, whether perceived or real, can make for a tricky mix - we want our students to do well, we want them prepared for the new and increased demands on them, and we feel like it should happen NOW.Last week, I needed to submit an independently produced written response so my grade level could practice applying the district rubric with consistency. So I did and the writing was AWFUL. I had been explicit with students about how to plan for the writing and then set them loose. Bad!What I didn't do was about as devastating as what I did do. I didn't gradually release the responsibility for writing to my students who had not had this writing experience before.So I did what most teachers do - I backed up, apologized that I hadn't shown them or given them what they needed and started over.  We took a short text from Gouvdis and Harvey about animal adaptations, posed the essential question ("How do different animals adapt to hear in their environments?"), and went to work with a shared modeling. We talked - this is a 75% ELL classroom so we talk first - we made notes together on our planners, we shared our ideas for a topic sentence and a closing sentence, we found the (required) 3 pieces of evidence supporting the topic and then we turned our notes into sentences and paragraphs.The take-away from this is that asking kids to do something for which they are unprepared is wrong. I now realize that I had been asking my students to do something they didn't yet know how to do; something we needed to work on so that gradually the responsibility could be released to them.Sorry kids. I promise to do a better job of teaching you from now on!

A (Non)-Writer Discovers Notebooks

A while ago, our Literacy Coach began talking to us about revisiting notebooks as a means to developing writers and authors.  I'm possibly the last person in education to discover Aimee Buckner and Notebook Know-How, but I am so glad I have made that connection.Not being a writer myself or at least not a disciplined one, I found notebooks and their use just one more thing to do with kids. Our school-wide writing calendars, focused on responses and one new genre of writing every two months was quite time-consuming. I couldn't imagine when we would fit in using notebooks.And then I read this

-- we shouldn't write for significance, but rather that we should write as a habit. Sometimes we'll write something significant and sometimes we won't. It's the act of writing -- the practice of generating text and building fluency--that leads writers to significance.

Wow! Did those words speak to me! What I had been doing "wrong" all this time, both as a non-writer and a teacher of writing, was expecting each morsel to be significant. The notebook is a place to practice, to try out, to experiment. Not only in writing, but in any endeavor, a learner needs a safe place to practice without worry as to the significance of the outcome.This is a discovery that I can relate to. As an amateur photographer, I've been reticent to take my camera with me because I would not have anything worthwhile to show for it.My students are starting to use notebooks now. And while they are not yet a habit, we are learning together to find a safe place to experiment with some of the strategies that professional writers and authors use.We are learning to be learners through our experimentation.