thesisthoughts

The course at Z is going extremely well. I feel as though the 26 teachers participating are involved and eager to try to change things in their writing instruction and that many are thinking about their own learning and really taking ideas and thoughts back to their classrooms.

Last week we had a virtual session and the task I gave was to write a professional narrative connected to the teaching of writing and/or writing with students. Beforehand we discussed the rational of the task and I even brought an example from last year’s group. Many of the participants in this group are not too computer confident and I was worried that they wouldn’t manage finding the virtual campus, posting their stories and responding to others. All in all my worries were unwarranted and most of the teachers wrote and posted narratives. At the moment they are reading and responding to other stories.

The night before this week’s session, I was busy collecting the stories (for future use…) and responding. I respond to each and every narrative and try to be involved in the responses too. Many of my responses at this stage are questions which will help in the revision process to come.

One story made my heart race and brought tears to my eyes. I read it again and again before I wrote a detailed response. Immediately I wrote an email to the teacher author and asked her permission to bring her narrative to the group session. She readily agreed.

O wrote that at our last session she wasn’t able to concentrate – not in my lecture, not on the PowerPoint presentation that went with it and not on the workshop we did together. She said that concentrating on the writing process wasn’t possible for her. O told that that morning she had been on a hike with her class and that at one stage an eight year old boy fell off a cliff. He was extremely lucky that he wasn’t killed and that he was only injured fairly lightly. She told of her experience, of the phone call from the principal telling her that the incident was already reported on the Internet, of the terror, the helplessness and the frustration of not being able to protect her student.

O went home after our session and didn’t sleep all night. She was terrified of walking into the classroom the next morning and facing this reality. The injured child was in hospital and she had a whole classroom of traumatized children to deal with. After hours of deliberation, O remembered what we had been talking about in the course session and decided, at 4 am when she finally got out of bed, to devote the day to writing with her pupils. She decided to spend the day writing with her students to different audiences with different goals.

Lacking confidence, O entered the classroom and after a brief discussion, explained to the pupils what they could do. Some wrote to their injured friend in hospital, some wrote to the people responsible for the hiking trail, some wrote thank you letters to the parents who helped on the hike and helped deal with the complex situation and some wrote rules for behavior on trips outside school. During the writing time, O was free to move between the pupils and talk privately to each and every one of them. She could hear how they were coping and how they were feeling.

The pupils wrote and wrote. O was surprised that even her weakest students, those that usually refrain from writing, were creating important texts. She wrote that she sensed that the act of writing was helping these children process the experience and regain confidence and control. She admitted that the classroom interactions, the writing and the activity helped her regain her self confidence as a teacher. The pupils were so involved in this process that they asked to continue the next day, they had discovered that they enjoyed writing for real purposes and for real audiences. They had experienced writing as a means of sincere self expression.

A few days later O decided to tell this story as her narrative about writing. She told her story bravely and as a result received a lot of positive and supportive feedback from the other teachers. This event has changed the way O sees writing instruction and has changed the way many of her pupils view writing tasks.

One of the questions I asked O was whether she had told her principal about the way she decided to cope in the classroom. She replied that she hadn’t . I suggested she show the principal (if not all the other staff) her narrative – they can all learn from it as we did in the group.

Since reading  O’s story she is with me all the time. I am thinking about her terrifying experience, about her coming to my course after such a traumatic event and not telling anyone and about how she used writing to help her students recover.

Apart from receiving a lot of satisfaction that the materials we discuss in the course are making a real difference in the professional lives of teachers and their pupils, I was excited to see the process of writing itself encouraging the creation of new texts. O described how the writing done by her pupils encouraged her and stimulated her to write and I told her that her narrative had stimulated me to write a narrative of my own. I have no doubt that the writing of many teachers in the course will be enriched by the sharing of O’s story.

In a reflective discussion in her classroom, O told her pupils that she too had written a story after the traumatic event. Her pupils were very curious to hear that their teacher enjoyed the benefits of  writing too.

I still have a lot of thinking to do about the links between O’s story and the learning in our course and about professional narratives being links in a chain, a chain which strengthens and supports both writers and readers.

I am waiting to read the responses on the online forum, to see O’s text revised and to see the influence of O’s story on other narratives being created by teachers in the group.

The location of the hike.

Picture: http://tiyulim.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post_19.html

http://itec.macam.ac.il/portal/ArticlePage.aspx?id=1313

Source: Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Volume 15, Issue 2 (April 2009) , pages 305 – 318.

Building a 21st century schools system, UK white paper – http://publications.dcsf.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/21st_Century_Schools.pdf 

June 2009

ding a 21st century schools system, UK white paperour child,

building a 21st century

schools system

I have just finished reading one of the second hand books I bought from Better World Books.

15 minutes free writing:

I was surprised to find this book in the catalogue and even more surprised when I began reading it. This narrative was written ten years ago but very much reflects the type of work I am doing and the type of texts I am producing. 

Miller Power works (worked?) with students learning to be teachers and writing teachers and taught them methodology through writing. Her course was based on the students reflecting and writing narratives and on the author responding at length to the stories which appeared in journals and assignments.

I quickly connected to Miller Power’s style and chose to read this book without pencil in hand, something I rarely do. There was something about the name of the book and the opening texts which signalled to me that this short book would be read and reread by me.

There are a variety of texts in the book, many written by students.

Some of the important messages for me at this stage are:

• Somebody else wrote of her experiences teaching writing teachers to write. There are many more texts out there waiting for me to discover them.
• It is extremely interesting to read narratives of someone else’s work, somewhere else in a different context. Many details are different but many of the dilemmas, difficulties and triumphs are similar.
• Jumping to conclusions about students or teachers is a terrible mistake. listening is the only real way to avoid it. (It relates to my conclusion that I must spend much more time and effort getting to know the teachers and for them to gain trust in each other, early on in the course).
• Very often personal narratives which seem unrelated at first glance, turn out to be very relevant to teaching writing.
• The view that writing is a born trait is more common than I thought it was.
• A short course, CAN make a difference, though not always.
• Our own experiences can and should be utilized in our teaching.

I promise there will be more…

Miller Power, B. (1997). Long roads, short distances: Teaching writing and writing teachers.Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

At our last session at N we discussed revision, one of the more problematic stages of the writing process for primary school pupils and their teachers. Research says that most pupils at this age don’t do global revision, struggling writers do even less. The main questions were:

• Why is revision so important?
• What teaching methods are most effective? 
• How can we convince students to adopt revision strategies taught? 

In order to emphasize the importance of peer revision practices, I decided to model what the teachers can do in class. I handed each teacher her teaching narrative which she posted on the electronic discussion board a few weeks ago, together with all the comments she had received from me or from other participants. I asked her to read her story to a partner and together to go through the whole process we had discussed earlier. One teacher functioned as the writer, the other as the editor and then they changed roles. The notes the writer took during the discussion will help her to edit her narrative, the next task for the course portfolio. I will also ask for reflective comments about the peer revision process.

The participants reacted well to the lecture and the activity despite the fact that they are all exhausted by the time they get to the teachers’ centre. Now I have to see how it will work tomorrow in K. The group is much bigger there and it will be harder to manage.

This afternoon I drove two hoursto give session number 4 at K. I arrived and got myself organised and we even started on time. About two minutes after I put the title of our seminar on the screen, there was a power failure in the whole neighborhood. The next hour was spent in semi darkness. I gave the first part of the seminar as a lecture, doing quite well without my notes and my powerpoint presentation. When the teachers couldn’t see the whiteboard or their own notebooks any more I sent them home. To make up the rest of the hours they will write something reflective about the process they went through when they wrote their first narrative.

More reading and responding just around the corner…

Free Image: http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=264246

I have been back at school for four months now and my writing is definitely suffering from lack of time. I always have the feeling that I am doing what is urgent instead of what is important.

Last week I had my fourth meeting of my course at N. There are still few participants but I think those who are with me are happy with their learning and their feedback is definitely positive.

Over the school holiday week, most of the participants of my two courses wrote their first narratives. Many expressed difficulty with the task and some called me on the phone and asked for some encouragement. One waited for the next meeting to discuss ideas with me face to face. I was happy with the results for a first try.  Last year it took a lot longer for the first participant to post her narrative and a large percentage didn’t post at all.

In the meeting at N. I was able to bring many of the narratives as examples in my recent lecture on the writing process. This was important as again I was connecting the two levels of the course – the level of the teachers and their professional writing and the classroom level.

The combination of face to face meetings and written conversations on the course web site is perfect. The teachers are expected to write throughout the course and as they write they reflect on their writing pedagogy and on what their pupils experience in the classroom.

I was fairly disappointed in the amount of discussion between the participants so I will allow time for that in the meeting. I was also surprised that few of the participants related to the reflection questions. We will discuss them in the next face to face meeting and then I will post a similar question to allow discussion in writing.

I was happy to read that several participants have increased the time they allow for writing in their classroom. Some have even chosen to give writing with their students “another go” after not daring to deal with it in recent years.

My experience in the past three weeks has proven, yet again, that writing is extremely hard work. To read narratives from 20 or so teachers and plan and write a response to each is tiring and draining. Despite being overloaded I am very happy that I gave the task so early on in the course. The narratives really do give me a good peek into the world of each of the teachers and show me where she is in terms of teaching writing. Now I have to connect each narrative with the face of the teacher who wrote it.

It is very satisfying to hear that questions raised in the course have already triggered changes in some of the classrooms and that many of the ideas I have presented are being experimented with in the field.  We have a long way to go yet but I am enjoying my interaction with both groups. 

Last Sunday was the second meeting of the course at N. I began the meeting by requesting that the teachers write for five minutes about themselves as writers. I threw a few questions in the air like “What do you you write and when?” or “How do you feel about writing?” and left them to it. To my surprise, the few that arrived on time began writing without objection. Again I was aware of how long five minutes are when you are actually engaged in text composition. I stopped them before they finished and was sorry that I had not dared to ask for ten minutes. I wrote together with them.

The discussion afterwards centered around their reaction to the task, directions which emerged during writing and the place place of “real writing” in their lives. One of the teachers volunteered to read her piece to the group. One of the participants was surprised to realize that she hadn’t written anything personal for years. She said “I write all the time but it is only work related technical writing, nothing that is really personal”.

Afterwards I brought texts which grade six pupils had written on the same topic “I am a writer”. They were surprised to see that children can write reflective texts and that they know so much about what helps and hinders the writing process.

My lecture on “A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing” / Hayes* went well and lively discussion followed. Many questions were asked, some of them I promised would be answered in the next few meetings.

Towards the end of the session we talked about narrative and the benefits of writing and discussing teaching stories. I explained that our next meeting would not be face to face, it will be on the virtual campus. I presented the task that they will be required to fulfill there.

Yesterday I visited the classroom of one of the course participants. As we discussed her work she mentioned that the process she is undergoing with her pupils at the moment is the one she has chosen to write about in her narrative. I got the impression that the very fact that she knows that she will be writing about her work in this unit is influencing the way she works with her students and directs their learning. This is a question worth thinking and talking about.

 *Hayes, J. R. (2000). A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In R. Indrisano, & J. R. Squire (Eds.), Perspectives on writing: Research, theory, and practice (pp. 6-44). Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association.

My second narrative / article has been accepted by the English in Australia  journal and should appear early in 2009. I do need to do some alterations and they need to be in by mid – January. Once they are are in I will be able to say that my thesis is well and truly done.

In the meantime I need to make some changes to my blog – it will be developing from an MEd thesis blog into a PhD blog and I will have pages devoted to the professional learning courses I am leading. The only problem is finding time for everything. Working full time at school and planning lectures doesn’t leave too much writing time. I am waiting for the Channukah holidays, only three weeks to go…

I am happy to write that one of the articles I wrote out of my thesis has been accepted by a journal that I value, English Teaching: Practice and Critique. My narrative is supposed to appear in the December issue.

I have been thinking about how texts change, develop and transform. I see the effort I put into writing my thesis having extra benefits. I am aware that texts are very much influenced by the context and the time of writing. As I revised the narrative I asked myself often whether I would be able to write the text now, 3-4 months after leaving the uni framework and the intensive writing environment I was in.  

I am still waiting for feedback on the my second narrative…