Jim Trelease

I hope you all enjoyed Jim Trelease as much as I did (even though he said I’m now classified as a stalker since it was my third time seeing him). One thing that really stood out for me that I haven’t heard Trelease mention before is that seven percent of incoming kindergarteners from poverty score the same on tests as students from high income families, and that is the exact same percentage of students from poverty who are graduating from college each year. I think we’ve all known that income level has a great impact on student achievement (hence the reason why a neighboring district always scores so well on standardized tests), but do you think there’s anything we can do to increase the number of poverty level students going on to college and graduating? What can we do at the high school level to promote lower income families to become more literate? For this post share any ideas you have to answer that question as well as one thing that you learned from Trelease or something that you found exceptionally interesting.

As a side note, if you look under the links on this blog page, you’ll find one to Jim Trelease’s website. He basically has his entire Read Aloud Handbook posted on it.

Content Area Writing: Chapter Three

There’s not really a quote for me to start off with from this chapter, since the chapter is made up of seven different quick writes that can be implemented in the classroom. As with Subjects Matter, I do like how Daniels and his colleagues set up the explanation of each strategy by giving a general description of it, when it can be used, how to use it, and telling the reader just what can go wrong. I think just about any student could easily use these strategies. I’m betting even those students who tend not to be visual (read: Claire and Pam) could successfully complete the one that seems to be more visually based (Drawing and Illustrating). Hmmm…perhaps that shall be an experiment for our next study group meeting! J

I’ve asked each of you to try one of these strategies with a class and to share with the rest of us how it went. I will share my comments about the Exit Slips I have y’all complete at the end of each class. The Exit Slip provides me some good feedback on the class. It’s always interesting to see that different parts of class and strategies strike a cord with different teachers. Sometimes one teacher will love a strategy and can’t wait to use it with his/her class while another didn’t like it at all. That just goes to show why we have to have a toolbox of strategies to use with kids because not all strategies will work well with all students. The Exit Slips are also helpful in letting me know when I haven’t done such a hot job of presenting something. (Can we say Britton’s Continuum?) By having y’all complete the Exit Slip, I realized that I needed to go back and revisit the Continuum (on more that one occasion!) so that y’all could have a better understanding of it. Had y’all not written about your confusion, I would have just gone on with other topics during the year, and there really would have been mass confusion when you had to turn in your portfolios at the end of the year that include writing samples from each end of the spectrum! So, please keep up the honest feedback…it helps me tremendously!

Content Area Writing: Chapter Two; Teaching Adolescent Writers: Chapter Two

Content Area Writing
(Page 24) “For now we’ll just tell you flatly: the intensive correction of student papers does not work; it has never worked and it never will work. Kids’ writing does not improve when teachers cover their papers with corrections, no matter how scrupulous and generous that kind of feedback may seem.”
It does seem like we, as teachers, would have figured this out a long time ago. I am just as guilty as the next teacher of collecting my students’ share of final drafts, making corrections on them, and giving them back, expecting that the students would improve their writing based on my comments. But let’s flashback to our own high school (or possibly even college) days and think about papers we turned in to the teacher. Upon getting the paper back with lovely marks all over it, did you ever once decide to take their suggestions and revise the paper, so that you’d have a better final draft? Did you make note of the grammatical corrections and from that point on never make that mistake again? Of course not! If you were like me, you just read through the comments and stuck the paper in your notebook, never to be looked at again. This idea of waiting until the final draft to give students feedback does seem a bit off base when you think about it. Wouldn’t it more beneficial for students to get extensive feedback after the first (and/or second) draft, so they can actually improve their writing? This is a concept we’re going to explore even more in the weeks ahead. I know this chapter is on writing to learn, but I just wanted to touch on this idea of making endless comments on student work that the authors write about in the shaded section…I know y’all will have lots to say about the idea of writing to learn.

Teaching Adolescent Writers
(Page 29) “What good is a curriculum that is a mile wide an inch deep?…Shouldn’t we concern ourselves a little less with getting students to recite facts and figures and concern ourselves more with helping them develop these cornerstone skills they will need to lead literate lives?”
Finally, a well-respected person puts this thought in writing! I think students are missing out on some great instructional opportunities because there’s so much material to cover that teachers feel like they don’t have time for some activities because they need to get to all of the standards. I think Gallagher brings up a really good point that reminds me of that “30 years from now no one will care what clothes you wore…” poster. We’ve got to make sure our students can read, write, and think, so they can be productive citizens in the world. One of the main things I remember Elin Keene (Mosaic of Thought) saying when I attended her best practices seminar was that kids who think well, test well. Maybe if we focus on teaching our kids to read, write and think, the test will just take care of itself!