Dear Dr.Jones,
I'm happy to say that I've been really enjoying LTED 618. I think that with the primary focus so far around literacy being about the oral language that taking a deeper dive into the written language part has been a refreshing change. The structure of the course isn't anything I expected it to be, class seems to be more set up in a workshop way than the traditional lecture followed by assignment. I will say there are parts that it has taken me a minute to grasp, such as the tracking of the writing process. I find this particularly interesting, I wonder if it's because I don't have any memory of tracking my writing in elementary school, or have a harder time separating the different parts of the writing process. It's almost as if when I'm in class I'm back in the position of a student in elementary school completing a writing project. I personally like that we're relearning the writing process through the shoes of a student in grade school. I think it allows for me to gain perspective of what thoughts might be going through students head during this process that are going through mine. As well as the hands-on aspect, assist in figuring out what are strategies that I'm using that will be helpful to my students one day.
There are a couple of learning activities/instructional strategies that I've learned during this course already, that I can see will be beneficial to my work as a teacher of literacy. One of the biggest things I've learned is the importance of using mentor texts, and how helpful they can be to our students writing. When you start a new writing piece with your students in class, bringing mentor text in for your students to do a book walk with to look at how the writing is structured, or do 2-3 minute readings of, to listen to how that genre might sound like when written. This in my opinion provides students with a great example, and they can pick up on some of the important features and ideas of the genre. I also really have thought about and would like to include strategy's like the card strategy lesson. I've learned that using writing as a way to brainstorm is a really important part of writing. The card strategy allows for students to move their written brainstorms around to make sense to their thinking about how to write a piece, or what might be some great things to include. As a reader and writer myself, this course has let me learn that the writing process/reading process are parallel processes. I can now see when I'm reading how rereading a section of writing is like the editing stage of writing, because it's like you're rereading to see if the meaning makes sense to you, or clarify the big idea just like when you edit a written piece.
I think moving forward my biggest challenge is differentiating the genre pieces project from the teaching the genre. I think that my brain just combines the two together, and then I get confused on what I should be focusing on during the writing portion of the asynchronous time. I think I might be able to improve this if I start to print the Moodle page for the week with the agendas it might be helpful to be able to easily go back and reread for clarity then trying to find it on Moodle again.
Best Regards,
Marissa Towers
Marissa, I am very glad to hear you are finding the "experiential design" of this class helpful for you. I agree, I don't think there is any better way to learn how to teach writing than to be engaged in writing too.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to thinking through how to schedule your time in our R/W workshop...Given that your group is not presenting your workshop until Session 12. I would hope that you have had sufficient time during our first few weeks of class to get your group organized and you could even use some of the time during class simply to write for your own genre pieces project. I certainly would think that your group could use time outside of class to work on elements of your group presentation/workshop asynchronously. Let me know if I can be helpful to you or to your group as you continue to work together.