Major Coronary

(I got this picture by googling screaming at books. Pure. Gold.)

Okay guys. Here come the mini heart attacks again.  All of this reading for all of these classes is converging at once and I have so many conflicting ideas that it’s crazy.  We’ve been talking a lot about assessment and what matters when you assess and I’m not going to lie—I have never thought about assessment.  When I picture my classroom, I picture everything but assessment, in fact.  Now it’s all I can think about.  It consumes my mind.  Here is the big question—what is important to assess?  The content, the presentation, both? If both, at what proportions?

Before I freak out, though, I should probably explain what I got from the readings.  According to the Digital Writing Workshop, “what we’re really after is helping [students] compose more substantive texts, both individually and collaboratively” (page 35).  Okay, good. This is a concrete definition of what we are aiming for.  I feel like we haven’t had one in a long time.  All of these philosophical questions about our teaching, planning, and assessment styles are awesome, but not knowing the answers is killing me and what’s killing me even more is that I probably won’t know the answers to them until I’m actually in the classroom.  So of course when I read in Chapter 6 of Hicks that “instruction and assessment are intertwined and that digital writing makes that relationship even more complicated” (page 105), I don’t feel a million times better (can you blame me?).  

Aside from the assessment strategies of Hicks, which seem at the least to quicken my pulse to an nth degree, Pathways to the Common Core actually kind of calmed me.  (I’m about to quote a large piece of text, but it’s really important to me, so we’ll all just have to deal.)

The image of a routine for writing is not just about sitting down to write, however. A writing routine involved understanding what it means to work at your writing. Writing anchor 5 states that writers will “develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach” [18].  The CCSS are closely aligned, then, with the practices researched by Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Don Murray, documented in a Writer Teachers Writing (2003). Murray described how journalists learn, even when writing to deadline, to revise on the run, to try out different leads and endings, to consider and reconsider each word, comma, sentence structure in order to convey precise meaning: they know that writing is a process. (page 106) 

So what does this have to do with my assessment concerns? I’m so glad you asked! This is another clear example of what to assess.  Although I don’t see myself as the kind of teacher who fits a goal to a standard, I think that as a beginning teacher with so little definition of my philosophical views, it is important to have an idea of what other educators think is important.  As I was composing my goals/assessments chart for Peg, I would be happy with my goal and then panicked when I couldn’t find a standard to fit it.  Add in the digital component of goals and assessments and I’m a goner. 

Unfortunately, my mentor teacher does not use any form of digital literacy. As Hicks says on page 38, “’Couldn’t I do this with journals or writing folders?’ Indeed you could.”  This is my mentor teacher’s approach.  For his on-level classes we keep writing journals, including daily writing examples.  He does not seem though, to be “conferring outside of class time […] building relationships and responding to writers at their point of need” (page 38).  I know that he definitely does not confer outside of class time.  He may be building relationships based on the advice he’s given me about forming relationships with students.  As far as responding to writers at their point of need—he gives feedback on the journals every few weeks.  I think that he’s given feedback twice on the journals all semester when they write every day.  And these are struggling writers.  I have no idea what the students do with this feedback.  It makes me wonder if there’s something we can do to make the feedback more meaningful? Can we make revisions required? Or some reflection on the feedback? I’m not sure. More assessment to think about…and you know how excited I get about unsure assessments…

Where I'm From (Part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCUgN2V8hvI&feature=youtu.be

Stressin'

This isn’t the image I had in mind, but the one I wanted to use is a comic strip from a newspaper in the 90s and I don’t really have access to that right now so this’ll do. But! I’m going to explain to you the comic from the 90s because it’s really important to my thought process.  My dad posted it on my brother’s door when it was first in the paper.  It’s a drawing of these parents looking into their kid’s room and he’s got lines of cocaine and jars of weed and all of these other drugs overtaking his room.  His dad’s speech bubble simply says, “At least he’s not downloading music”.  This is how I view most adults’ stances on technology, which is why I suppose I chose the current visual. 

So why is this important?  I’m going to be honest.  I’ve been having a lot of trouble synthesizing all of the ideas from these various articles into one blog post.  It would be simple for me to write on just Atwell’s piece, but that’s not the assignment, is it? No. It is not.  The thing that drew all of these texts together for me was 1) the emphasis on organization and 2) the emphasis on new literacies as an ethos.  In Digital Writing Workshop, Hicks points out that “teachers could invite students to use a blog to post comments on a teacher-initiated discussion. Yet this would not be new, as it is simply using a traditional pedagogy (teacher-led discussion) with a new technology” (page 16).  So back to my thought process.  I chose the visuals because it seems to me that even when teachers understand how to work technology, they are still not understanding the culture of a new literacies stance; they are still not understanding how such a stance could benefit their kids.  All of these texts did a good job of including examples of a new literacies curriculum. 

Atwell describes the purposes of her writing workshop and goes into detail about the criteria.  She mentions one very important criterion in my mind:

Publication in a writing workshop must be a given: student writers need access to readers beyond the teacher if they're to understand what writing is good for, and if they're to write with care and conviction.

Smagorinsky chimes in:

When possible, teachers provide additional readerships for students’ writing, such as having students send their arguments about local policy issues to key stakeholders, enter their writing in competitions, send letters and other writing to newspapers, post their writing on the Internet, and otherwise use their writing for authentic communicative purposes (page 23).

I know that we have already discussed this qualification of a new literacies stance, but it has recently become much more important to me.  You see, as I’ve been researching this stance for this course, I’ve become paranoid that I’m not doing it correctly.  Technically, I haven’t done anything yet, but our discussion in Michelle’s class about the difference between a traditional classroom and a non-traditional classroom and how some of us have plans for our November Units that resemble a traditional classroom got me all worried.  This qualification of a new literacies stance makes me think that at least my students can get something out of the experience even if the feedback is not from me. Is this making any sense? I feel like this is the most disconnected blog post I’ve done.  Oh well…

Another of my concerns is the organization. When Atwell went into detail about the organization of her classroom, I’m quite sure I had approximately 40 heart attacks.  Her organization was so meticulous that it made me nervous.  I know that the reason she included such detail is so that other teachers could model her example, but dear lord! I am not an organized person…not like that, anyway.  Is it possible to have a successful writing workshop without that much organization? Is a writing workshop even something I would consider with my class?  I’m not sure.  Time will tell.