Thinking About Body Language and Instructional Coaching

On Tuesdays, the writing community at Two Writing Teachers hosts the Slice of Life. Everyone is welcome to join in by writing, commenting, or just reading slices from around the world! 

Throughout the fall, I attended a series of three workshops on instructional coaching. Today was our final session, and one of the topics we studied today had to do with body language. Our presenter is a fabulous facilitator, and she began the discussion with a Tedtalk by Amy Cuddy about how your body language shapes who you are. If you haven't seen this one, I highly recommend it. While power poses may not be the ones we want to reach for during coaching conversations, it was interesting to think about how we use (or don't use) body language.

We went on to watch videos of ourselves having conversations with teachers, but watching the videos with no sound, just watching with the lens of the body language. It was really interesting to think about how we use body language as a tool. I watched myself lean forward, cross my legs, tap my fingers, use my hands for expression? What does it all mean? Maybe not too much, but maybe more than we realize. I don't know that I can change all that I do with my body language, but it does help to think of this as another tool that we have as coaches and facilitators of learning regardless of who we are learning with.

Jessica Kazigian, our facilitator, also shared an on-line article about 10 key concepts about body language. It's an easy read, and I recommend keeping it in your coaching toolkit. :)
http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/10-Powerful-Body-Language-Tips.aspx

Happy Slicing!

The Dove Identity Sketches and Their Importance in Coaching Work

On Tuesdays, the writing community at Two Writing Teachers hosts the Slice of Life. Everyone is welcome to join in by writing, commenting, or just reading slices from around the world! For the month of October, I am also participating in the #Educoach Blogging Challenge. This is a post that relates to coaching as well as daily slicing. 

Somehow I missed the viral spread of Dove's Identity Sketches when they first were released a couple of years ago. I was at an instructional coach workshop last week, and our presenter shared the video and the concept with us insofar as it relates to the work we do as coaches.

If you also missed it, the concept involves the theory that we see ourselves much more critically than the rest of the world. An artist sketched women first based on their own descriptions, and then again based on someone else's description. Here is an example of the discrepancies between a set of sketches.

I can imagine the woman describing her own face as fat with small eyes and thin lips. Some of the other sketches in the video are more dramatic in terms of how personalities are suggested. Sketches described by women themselves create meaner or angrier looking people. If you have three minutes I highly recommend watching the video.

So what does this mean for coaching? I think it means that we have to remember that we are our own worst critics, and we criticize ourselves even when we are good. Many people we are coaching might benefit first from authentic and specific compliments and validation that the work we are doing is important and hard.

Happy Slicing and Coaching,

Thinking about the Partnership Principles

I spent today at an advanced coaching workshop, and much of the conversation centered on the work of Jim Knight. If you haven't visited his website at Instructional Coach, then I highly recommend allotting a fair amount of time to exploring the resources at this website, as well as purchasing a book or two that he's written about instructional coaching.

I had many take-aways from the day--I am still processing, reflecting, and percolating, but I have to say right now, the six Principles of Partnership are getting the most thought in my post-workshop brain. In a jigsaw activity, I created a visual for equality, and I love the ideas behind the quote from Peter Bloch:

Sometimes, inherent in coaching is the concept that the coach has more power  than the coachee, and maybe the coach does have more knowledge and experience. But, what if the balance scale was even in terms of rights, responsibilities, opinions, ideas, and voice? Maybe in some coaching experiences the balance scale is even, but if it isn't, then are we all missing learning opportunities?

The other principles include voice, choice, reflection, dialogue, and praxis.  I will save my thoughts about these other five for a later post, but for now, I am grappling with some questions:

• Do I see the people I work with as equals? I'd like to believe I do, in which case:
• Do they see themselves as my equals, and do they feel valued and respected?
• Do I communicate in my comments, actions, or behaviors anything to the contrary? 

In my work as an instructional coach and curriculum coordinator, I work with many people across many domains. People remember more about how we make them feel than exact words we say. I know that I will be striving to answer these questions honestly and reflectively yes, yes, and no.

Thank you to the leaders at #educoach for hosting the October blogging challenge.

Respectfully,

Slice #26 of 31: Thoughts on Working With Fragile Writers

For the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by the community of writers at Two Writing Teachers. Many of my slices are at my personal blog, Just Write, Melanie, but ones that deal specifically with education appear here. All are welcome to join the slicing party by reading and commenting. People write amazing posts.

Over the past few months, I have been working a lot with some of the more fragile writers in our elementary schools. I have been thinking a lot about best practices in working with those students who "just won't write." I'm sure that many of you know the ones. Here are some of my developing tenets in working with children who don't yet see themselves as writers:

• Help them see themselves as writers. Listen to their ideas, even if their only way of communicating those ideas is with their spoken language. If you believe that they have a story to tell, then they will begin to believe it also.

• Give them only one or two teaching points at once. With these writers, especially, it is critical to remember to teach the writer and not the writing. No, their writing will not be perfect. Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.

• Ask them what they meant to say or what they would say or want they might want to say. Don't tell them what to say. Let their story be their story. 

• Recognize that when they create a super complicated story, it is frequently a costume for not knowing how to tell the story. Help them boil down their epic to a beginning, middle, and end. Less is more.

• Speaking of end, help the fragile writers recognize and get to the end of a piece. Sometimes writing feels like a brambly pathway with lots of twists and turns and not a single trail-marker in sight. Help these writers know their destination. Experienced writers can use their writing in order to discover a story. I have yet to see a fragile writer discover a story by writing and writing and writing. Instead, they get lost and so do we, their teachers, in a complicated story that makes no sense. 

• Did I already say stick to one teaching point? I'm saying it again. And don't let someone else work with them and give them more. As a writer, I can't integrate a bunch of new ideas and I love writing. Fragile writers don't love writing, and it's easy to overwhelm them. Let them experience and enjoy some mastery. 

• Do not write on their writing. Don't do it. Have Post-its on hand. Write conference notes. Accept that you might not be able to know exactly what was on that page tomorrow. That's okay. 

• Make sure that the paper choice matches the writer's capacity. Too many lines are overwhelming. There's nothing like a giant blank paper to freeze every good idea I have. Fragile writers will have more success if they feel like they can fill the lines. Don't give them too many. You will get better writing if you spread it out across pages than if all of the writing is crammed onto one page of more lines than the writer can handle. 

• Recognize the task avoidance signs. The bathroom need, the erasing obsession, the "I can't find my work in progress" syndrome. If these signs are in place, address them and work together to help.

• Make the work easier for the time being. Writing requires confidence. We build confidence by creating competence. I promise that if you make it easier for a while, you will be able to make it more complex later. 

This post is longer than I had planned, but took me less time to write than you'd think. Some of these need a lot more elaboration--it may be that this post inspires other posts about specific bullet points. If you didn't get through all of them, here are the ideas, boiled way down:  build confidence, value voice, and balance the need to teach with the capacity to learn. 

Happy Slicing,

Tweetdeck--So Simple and So Helpful

We had a coaching meeting in our district on Friday. Our agenda included sharing successes, as well as sharing challenges. We were also asked to bring an artifact of a tool that we had been using. I brought the chartbook where I keep all of my mentor charts for teachers, and I shared that. But, when one of the technology specialist shared an app for reading QR codes, it occurred to me that I should have shared my tweetdeck. While twitter has become my go-to resource for inspiration about any aspect of education, tweetdeck is incredible for helping to manage it. Even as I shared it, there was a series of tweets on my #educoach column about helping literacy coaches (from Choice Literacy, linked here), prompts to use when coaching teachers from Shira Leibowitz, an article about setting goals with teachers from Jim Knight,  and a wonderful graphic of a pencil representing technology integration:

A screen shot of my tweetdeck looks something like this:

I can slide the columns up and down to see more and less recent tweets, but I can also adjust the order that my columns are in, which I've explained later in the post.

In order to use tweetdeck, go to tweetdeck.com and then hit the "sign in on the web" button:

From there, you can use your twitter id and password and then customize the screen to be the chats and hashtags that you want to follow. When there's a chat or hashtag that you want to follow, add that column and you see all of the activity about it right there in one place. You can tweet right from tweetdeck, adding an image if you care to.  Sometimes, when I am participating in a chat, I put the notifications column next to the chat, so that I can pay attention to the comments back to me. You can move the columns around by using the grey column on the far left, adjusting to have various ones side by side in what ever way helps you to pay attention to the incoming information. 

If you are already on twitter, I highly recommend tweetdeck--add a few columns with some favorite hashtags. Given the fact that you are reading this post, I recommend #tcrwp, #twtblog, #educoach, #engchat, and #elachat, but sky's the limit--there's no shortage of information out there. 

So much to learn!

Why I Love Charts...And I Do!

I have now been in my role as the district's Writing and Social Studies Coordinator for a year and a half and I have learned so much in this position. One of the most important lessons for me has been about the importance of charts in classrooms at all levels. Yesterday, Melanie Swider wrote an amazing post about how her students use the charts in her classroom, demonstrating the importance and power of the charts. While I knew that charts were important from working so closely with Melanie for two years, I had not given as much thought about why they are so important.

I started to think about why when Emily Smith, a TC staff developer worked with some of our teachers and rattled off the words independence and repertoire in the same sentence. I loved those words and have held on to them, as my goal for all writers in our district is to have pathways that lead to independence and repertoire. A chart is an important place to pause on that pathway.

I'm going to pause and state some of the assumptions that I am making about charts in the classroom that serve as tools for students:

• They are co-created with students, meaning that students in the room have been a part of or have directly watched them being developed. Therefore, the charts are not laminated or pulled from a cabinet of saved resources from past years of teaching. They represent the tracks of the teaching and learning that has happened within the room in front of the current students.

• There are designated anchor charts and process charts. An anchor chart develops throughout the unit and contains the necessary skills for a particular unit of study. For example, Mel posted a picture of her literary essay chart on her last post about how her students use the charts in her room and it looks like this:
  

This chart is one that I would envision being created over the course of several days, or being created as students are about to begin drafting literary essays, but may be at different stages in their growing of ideas.

• A process chart reflects the work of a much shorter time period, maybe even just one day. For example, a teacher may create a process chart to show students how to make sure that their story is focused:

• The charts retire after a unit and are therefore representative of the unit and lessons that are going on at that time in the classroom.

Given that these assumptions are true, then I love charts because students can use them in order to be independent and develop repertoire. I loved when I was working in Melanie's classroom and students would look at the wall during a workshop. "What are you doing?" I'd ask. "I'm checking on that chart to see if there is a way that I could start my story," a student might say. Or, "I'm stuck and I know that there is a chart that will help me get un-stuck," another student might say. If we think about the gradual release model, this is exactly what we want to have happen. First, students receive explicit instruction. Then, they have the opportunities to practice the skills and use as much scaffolding as they need, provided by the charts on the wall. Eventually, they get to the point where they own the skills and strategies and they don't need the visual reminders in order to demonstrate their knowledge. 

Selfishly, as a coach, I love charts because I can tell exactly where a class is in a unit when I walk into a classroom if teachers are creating charts with fidelity. This helps me to coach both the teachers and the students-- I can see if students are practicing a skill that has been taught, which shows me that there has been effective instruction, and I can point to the chart and say to students, "It looks like you have had lessons on this--why don't you try..."

While there is more to love about charts than what I have written, I am sure, I also love charts because they focus the work for teachers. I would never say that a chart should be perfect; in fact, I would say exactly the opposite--a chart should NOT be perfect. Mel's charts tend to look perfect, even when she is making them with students. I am including here a chart that I made with a teacher spontaneously that is way less than perfect, but the students all find it helpful as they have been working on varying their introductions. In the case of this chart, I was writing students' responses on post-its as the classroom teacher was asking them about what introductions should include and they LOVED having their contributions publicly acknowledged on the chart--each post-it has a student's name on it. When you look at many of Mel's charts, as well as this one, you will notice that students' names are all over them and I think that this creates such a strong sense of ownership and pride that students are more apt to use the charts.

So, if you haven't checked out Mel's post about how much her students use her classroom charts, be sure to, and if you have any additional ideas and thoughts about charts, please share. Chartchums.wordpress.com is also a wonderful resource for learning about the importance of charts, especially for the younger grades.

Happy charting,

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Thank you Jen and Kellee for hosting this weekly!  To see what others are reading and recommending, or to participate, be sure to check out their blog Teach Mentor Texts. Some of my favorite reading recommendations come from #IMWAYR! 

While I was waiting for a teacher to return from walking her students to lunch, I started reading the book that she had been sharing with her class. "You'll love that book," she had said to me when she saw me pick it up.  She was right.  Small Beauties by Elvira Woodruff is an absolutely beautiful book about an Irish family struggling during the potato famine. The story weaves in history as well as a personal struggle to find and appreciate beauty. The main character, Darcy Heart O'Hara, is a collector and a noticer so this book is a great mentor text for writing details and sensory images. At times, Small Beauties reminded me of Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox because of the emphasis on the things that remind us of times and places in our lives. However, there is a much larger story and conflict that is going on for Darcy's family as they are forced to leave Ireland and come to the America. Because it is out of print, Small Beauties is expensive to purchase, but if you ever run across it in a library or used book store, don't miss it. What a treasure of a book!

On a much different note, I have been reading High Impact Teaching by Jim Knight over the last few weeks as part of an #educoach twitterchat. This book is packed full of immediately useful strategies for teachers, coaches, students, and principals. Throughout the book, Knight includes URL codes and links to watch specific strategies in action and to listen to teachers talk about the instruction he describes. There are checklists, charts, and stories to help make his messages easy to implement and memorable. Between the discussions that Shira Leibowitz, Jessica Johnson, and Kathy Perret have led on twitter (you can tune in on Wednesday nights at ten using the #educoach hashtag) and Jim Knight's clear writing, this book has undoubtedly changed some of the ways I think about curriculum, learning and teaching.

Happy reading,

#Slice 2013: 10 of 31- The TCWRP Saturday Reunion

I have a post ready to go that is more of a story for my daily writing on the #Slice Challenge 2013, hosted by Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres at twowritingteachers.wordpress.org. However, the Saturday Reunion at Teachers College gave (I do mean gave) me way too much learning to not do some sharing. Teachers College hosts these reunions twice a year and if you ever have a chance to be in New York for one, don't miss it! With over 140 literacy-oriented workshops and inspiring key-note speakers, hundreds--maybe thousands-- of teachers from near and far learn together.

Cornelius Minor ‏@MisterMinor

The @teachkate keynote at #TCRWP is more packed than a Prince concert. Amazing!

 Retweeted by Christopher Lehman

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 Oh, and it's free with no need for pre-registration. Just come!

I apologize for not doing a better job with pictures of the day, but I did bullet the information to try to make it easier to read and think about. Beware: there's a lot of information in this post, as there was a LOT of information given throughout the day.

Katherine Paterson was one of the three key-note speakers. Kate Roberts and Alyssa Capucilli were the other two speakers in different venues. Sadly, I could not clone myself, although I did pay attention to some of the twitterfeeds as they came through. Here are some of my favorites--you can check out more on twitter, using the #TCWRP hashtag.

1. Celena Larkey ‏@celenula

   To our youngest, who are the most fluent at moving fluidly between the real and unreal world, wondering is critical. #TCRWP @TCRWP

    Retweeted by Christopher Lehman

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2. 23 hrsZoe Ryder White ‏@ZoeRyderWhite

   When you make people feel things they remember what you say@teachkate #tcrwp

    Retweeted by Christopher Lehman

1. Maggie B. Roberts ‏@MaggieBRoberts

   We need to teach with love, humor, kindness, and compassion. That's what makes the standards come alive. @teachkate #TCRWP

    Retweeted by Christopher Lehman

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   23 hrsMonique Knight ‏@monique_knight

   #TCRWP sat reunion- Alyssa capucilli. Playful joyful brave atmosphere in writing workshop! Sums it all up!

    Retweeted by Christopher Lehman

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Katherine reminded us of what we remember most clearly from our elementary education, stating that most people remember one of three things: a horribly humiliating experience, a book read aloud, or a play that they acted in. Some of my other favorite parts of Katherine's talk included:

• her sharing of the granddaughter's writing to frame her message of the importance of creativity in our world. Her 11 year-old granddaughter coined the phrase, "the richness of creation."
• that only the truly imaginative person will be successful in the 21st century.
• the research that she shared about the role of the arts--"to awaken the imagination, revealing the unseen, unheard of and unexpected..."
• the truth that we want beauty for our beautiful children. Katherine read an excerpt from Bread and Roses, Too, where she gives this message through her characters, as well. (I'll be reading this one soon.)
• the importance of the movie Chekhov for Children (I'll be watching this one soon) in that it documents what happens to children when they are exposed to great art--in this case, a play.
• that books and beauty can save your life. She read a beautiful letter from a soldier in Afghanistan who read A Bridge to Terabithia. Trent Reedy has since come home and written Words in the Dust. (I'll be reading this one, soon.)
• the statement that imagination is more important than knowledge. Ah. I need to repeat that one. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Loved her, loved her.

I'm going to write about one more workshop and then save the other two for tomorrow's post because they were all so good. The first workshop that I attended (and it was really hard to decide) was about Information Writing and Lucy Calkins presented. Some of the information and key points that she packed into the fifty minutes included:

• "Everyone has stories to tell and everyone has something to teach."
• You have to get to the guts of Informational Writing, just like you do with narrative.
• The easiest way to teach IW is through a subject that students know and care about.
• Children need to learn about structures for Informational Writing, but those should be taught AS kids are writing, and not before. They can go back and revise previous work or try out newly learned concepts in future work.
• Teach students that sometimes you write with hot air and sometimes you put in information.
• With your own writing, show students what you are doing badly, and then how to fix it.
• Throughout the process of writing an informational text, you're doing little bits of research.
• If you have too much information, then the information overwhelms you.
• Learn the acronym MECE--mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive.This is a big idea, but can lead to amazing elaboration if you linger on it. Do chapters/stories have MECE.
• You can differentiate for students by having research be more focused.
• When students figure out the important ideas, then they should use structures to accentuate them.
• Teach students to ask questions when they are doing their informational writing.

Fifty minutes flew by for me in Lucy's workshop, since within all of these points, she was having us think about what our mentor text would be and how we would structure it. What would we accentuate and how would we balance our chapters...

Tomorrow, I will post about the other two workshops that I attended. 

Enjoy the day,

It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Thank you Jen and Kellee for hosting this weekly!  To see what others are reading and recommending, or to participate, be sure to check out their blog Teach Mentor Texts :)

One of my students this year loves the Theodore Boone series by John Grisham and recommended it to me last week.  He is an avid reader and I highly value his recommendations so I took Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, the first book in the series,  home with me over the weekend and devoured it!  I sat in my favorite chair and did not put the book down because the mystery hooked me right in and I couldn't wait to find out what happened next.  If you haven't picked up this series yet, like I hadn't, I highly recommend that you add it to the top of your TBR stack.  I have been snowed in this weekend, like everyone else in my area, and book 2 and 3 are in my classroom...ugh!  So I've had to be patient and wait...but we have no school again so I will have to either continue to wait or take a trip to a nearby bookstore today to find out what happens next with Theo! Thank you Ryan for recommending this series to me!

One professional book that I read this past weekend and loved was Student Centered Coaching: A Guide for K-8 Coaches and Principals by Diane Sweeney.  I loved her book Learning Along the Way which I read years ago so I was very excited to see that she published a new book.  This is an excellent resource for all coaches and principals and I highly recommend it.  It is an easy read that gives you practical ideas of how you can make coaching more student centered, which I love!  It includes coaching scenarios, coaching tools and techniques, and visual planning charts used in coaching cycles.  Thank you Diane Sweeney for writing another great resource for coaches!


Happy Reading!

Power of Peer Observation

Peer observation is a powerful and helpful learning tool that provides learners with a clear visual.  Personally, I am a visual learner so it always helps me to "see" it instead of solely listening or reading about what I am trying to learn or strengthen/improve.  Since I am a visual learner myself, I tend to naturally include interactive modeling, visuals, charts, and peer observation within my teaching in our classroom.  I always notice that when students see what it is supposed to look like and sound like, they usually rise up to the expectations and lift the level of their work.

Just like it is powerful for classmates to observe and learn from one another, it is equally as powerful for teachers to observe their colleagues and learn from and with one another.    In our school, it is the norm for teachers to visit one another's classrooms to observe a mini-lesson, read aloud, or small group instruction.  This year, there is a new teacher on our grade level team so we have opened our classroom to her anytime she finds it helpful to come in and observe.  One day, instead of only the teacher coming in to observe read aloud, she brought her whole class with her.  As the teacher observed me and noticed my modeling, questioning, and charting, her students observed my students.  It was one of the most powerful learning experiences!  When they came in, I spoke to her class for a couple minutes and set up the purpose for their visit by asking them to pay close attention to my students' actions and interactions during our read aloud.  I invited them to walk around and see how students were using their reader's notebook and listen in to the students' conversations when they turned and talked during read aloud.  At the end of read aloud, I paused and asked her students to share some of their noticings.  They shared how they noticed students using colored pencils to color code their thinking in their reader's notebooks, how they were using thinking stems when they turned and talked, how they were using different strategies to write and talk about the read aloud, and more.

I highly encourage and recommend teachers to try this out with a colleague because it is so powerful to have students observe one another across classrooms.  I will definitely work with this teacher to set up more times for this kind of peer observation with one another as well as with our students.  I would love to hear how you use peer observation in your classroom and school so please share!

My Non-Technological Chart Notebook

Thursday is usually our technology day. Today, I am going to write ironically and share my coaching tool that is the antithesis of technology. At this time, my most useful coaching tool is my chart notebook, pictured below. I think that the most technological aspect of my notebook is the different colored sharpies that I use in it!


I have been using this notebook to collect charts to support writers across grades K-6 in all units. I have collected the charts from various places. Sometimes, I take a picture of a chart I like and want to share in a classroom. Then, when I have time, I copy it into my book. I have also copied charts from Pinterest if I have liked them. Whenever I read a curriculum document, I have my bag of sharpies open and a clean notebook page because I construct charts as I envision the units.

Since this is my first year as the Writing Coordinator, this is the first year that I have used this tool and when I make another book of charts, I will do it differently and I hope a little better. If anyone decides to try starting a chart notebook, you might benefit from my mistakes and reflections. In any case,  here are some of my thoughts.

What I like:

• I like having sections for various grade levels. The divisions of K-1, 2-3, 3-4, and 5-6 worked well for me.
• I like using many different colors. I keep all of my sharpies in a ziploc bag and my husband knew to buy me more for Christmas. 
• I like  having left a blank page at the beginning so that I can create a table of contents for all of the charts
• I like having the spiral bound pages since I have pulled a couple of the charts out when I didn't like them.

What I wish I had done differently:

• I wish that I had created sections within the grade levels for specific types of writing; informational, narrative, and persuasive sections would have served me well and would make it easier to find the chart I'm looking for!
• I wish that I had a section that was for all grades. Writing partnerships would be one that I'd consider non-grade-specific. Why We Write is another chart that I'd consider to be universal.
• I wish that I had made sections for grammar and editing. I think that I would try tucking these into the sections for designated grades since the skills and expectations change.
• I made some of the charts really fancy, spending a long time on the drawings. I wish I hadn't because I want the message to be that charts are to be created in real time as tools for students to use and not as classroom decoration.

When I share my chart notebook with teachers, they usually ask for copies of pages and I am happy to give them out. I have also taken pictures of all of the pages and have created boards on Pinterest. (Okay, we get some credit for staying true to Technology Thursdays :) ) However, I try hard to emphasize that my charts are prototypes and they are only examples of what teachers can make with their students as they teach. I really don't want people to replicate the chart I give them and hang it on a wall because I want the students to feel like they own it, a feeling that they get when they help to create the chart. That way, students understand the purpose of the chart and are much more apt to refer to them and use them as tools for independence.

Happy charting!

Writing Workshop Essentials

When I started my new position in August as our district's Writing and Social Studies Coordinator, I began to look for a one page document that listed the important components of a writing workshop. Since I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, I consolidated several into the following list. I'm still not sure that this is complete and I'm open to feedback, but this is the combination of some of the lists in Lucy Calkins' books, conversations with colleagues, and observations of powerful classrooms. I envision using this as a checklist for setting standards, expectations, and goals for workshop instruction.

Writing Workshop Essentials

o   Environment

o   Writing supplies area includes:

§  Pencils, markers, erasers

§  Post-its, index cards, envelopes

§  Spell-check machines, dictionaries, thesauruses

§  Mentor texts

§  Staplers, paper clips, tape, push-pins

§  Evidence of demonstration texts and teacher writing

o   Meeting area includes:

§  Chart paper

§  Author’s chair

o   Mini-lessons:

o   Link to the unit of study

o   Contain a clear and concise teaching point

o   Include active engagement

o   Link to independent work

o   Stay within the 10-minute guideline

o   Workshop routines are evident through:

o   Writer’s notebooks for grades 3 and up with appropriate quality/quantity

o   Writing folders for grades K-2 with appropriate quality/quantity

o   Writing folders for work in progress for Grades 3-up

o   Charts on the wall that serve as instructional tools and are evidence of strategy instruction

o   Solid 35 minutes of writing block to allow for conferring and small group work

o   Writing partnerships

o   Students’ understanding and use of mentor texts

o   Mid-workshop teaching point

o   Evidence of publication and movement through the writing process

o   Daily end of workshop shares:

§  Occur in the last 5 minutes

§  Provide evidence of the mini-lesson teaching point

o   Conferring includes:

o   A system of note-taking

o   Management that supports a no-interruption policy

o   Evidence of Compliment-Research-Teach-Challenge strategy

o   A balance of individual, partner and small group conferences



This is what I have so far and I am really interested in feedback, as well as ideas on how to use it.

Happy writing,
Melanie