When reading for today’s post about writing in the classroom and conferencing and how to go about it, I kept thinking back
to a date last year during my placement in a first grade classroom. My former
MT ran Writer’s Workshop every afternoon and it always worked out really well.
We would conduct roving conferences with the students, helping them out about
whatever their mini lesson was about that day. On one occasion, we had a
substitute and we tried to run the usual workshop. It was utter chaos. Our goal
was for the students to write and we were not even able to keep their attention
on that, let alone be able to talk and help individual students. Which is why I
thought of class management when asked what sort-of expertise we as teachers
would need to develop in order to follow Routman’s advice. When a teacher can
effectively manage students, then I think all of Routman’s ideas are possible.
I consider developing a trusting
classroom environment to be essential as well. Especially if the teacher wants
to run the whole-group conferencing, which Routman considers incredibly
important. In order for students to get up and read their work to their peers,
they need to be comfortable with both reading aloud and sharing their work with
others with the goal of improvement. With a trusting environment, students feel
comfortable taking risks without feeling afraid.
What do you guys think? What other
types of expertise would one need in order to run with Routman’s ideas?
So I thought it was really interesting that you went the route of classroom management. I think for the most part it seems obvious that a teacher needs editing knowledge and basic education to be able to help kids with their grammar and writing as a whole. But I never really stopped to think about the management.
ReplyDeleteWe have been doing conferencing in my classroom and the first day, there was no explicit instruction to the kids what was going on so the room and it was utter chaos! Creating this line for conferencing was necessary and being able to have that quite to hear the student I was conferencing with was key! Kids kept coming up to me in the middle asking for help, so rules had to be put in place and them implemented fully. Without the management during the conferencing, that part of the writing process would never have been able to occur. I also think next time explaining what was going on would have been way better, but it was a slip that happens when talking about prewriting, writing, editing, etc.
Management during the conference is important too though. Making sure you and the students are engaging together and that the proper language and communication is being used for improvement while still giving the students confidence.
I feel that the classroom management and conferencing go hand in hand. In the beginning it is important to set up the expectations for the students in the classroom during their writing time, or during a conference time, and even when you have a one-on-one conference.
ReplyDeleteWhat was really intriguing was attempting to set up a whole-group conference in the classroom. Depending on their previous classroom expectations in previous classes, students might have to have a lot of explicit instruction on what a whole-group conference would look like.
At the same time there needs to be a development of a comfortable learning community where students would be comfortable to share their writing in a whole-group conference. This could prove more challenging if the idea of making mistakes is very prevalent in their mind. That would be a big challenge in the upper elementary grades as many of them have started believing there is only right or wrong. Especially in the third grade class now, many of the students are afraid to start writing because they could make some errors right away. I feel that the classroom management would help to set up an environment for the students to be comfortable enough to share their writings with the class.
I definitely agree with you about the importance of classroom management within literacy education. For all of the innovative teaching techniques out their, effectiveness of a lesson is extremely dependent upon whether students are managed well enough to actually carry-out procedures. This is why there is such a profound emphasis on the first two weeks of school for establishing classroom procedures and expectations. In my current class, the teacher allows students the opportunity to collaborate upon multiple literacy activities. She often facilitates "think-pair-share" activities that allow students an opportunity to think critically, interact with each other, and articulate clearly and concisely. This activity would not be possible if my teacher was not able to bring students back to a whole-group setting without a disruptive transition and without following explicitly taught sharing and listening procedures.
ReplyDeleteI would also agree on the importance of classroom management and I think that it's a great issue to discuss. It's important to set the goals in the beginning of year and be very tight on the rules and expectations so that eventually you can loosen them up. I have heard my mentor teacher talk about how it's much easier to loosen up the rules than tighten the rules. During my literacy times in my class we have a silent read portion of the day where students read by themselves for 45 minutes. We then spend fifteen minutes doing buddy ready and both of them have proved to be very effective due to proper classroom management.
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