My March newsletter is available on Scribd. Click HERE to link directly.
“A shared vision is not an idea…it is rather, a force in people’s hearts…at its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question ‘What do we want to create?’” Peter Senge
“Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
Teachers worked on finishing up the lessons in this unit. They helped students put the essays together, and worked on revising, editing and publishing these pieces. Our goal was to have this unit finished in time to move into unit 4: Writing Fiction, next week.
Although this unit has been difficult to teach at times, I think our Staff Writing Celebration last week showed we are getting this. The rich, rich discussions between teachers working with 3, 4, and 5th graders are making this work rewarding. I’m sure, there are moments when each teacher questions our move to Units of Study and believes this is never going to work. However, at the end of the unit, after the planning, teaching and reflecting, we see growth. The students are stronger. The spiral is becoming more apparent. The teachers are seeing how to improve the work next year and taking good ideas/lessons learned from one unit to the next.
The best part? None of us is alone on this. Every teacher is taking this step, this risk really. WE are stronger than we would be if we were doing this independently and without the collaboration with our colleagues. There are moments when I’m jealous of these educators. I was very alone when I was teaching UOS in G. 3-5. Not only was I the only teacher at my level working through the units, I was also the only teacher in the building. I had no idea, and no right really to know what 2nd grade was doing or what 4th and 5th planned to do. When I think back on my own journey as a teacher I realize how ineffective this was. This is clearly the better model.
Step away and remember the big picture. For our school, that means that we have to remind ourselves our goal is to implement writing workshop this year. We have 3 simple agreements at this point:
These agreements have given us a plan for simple, effective collaboration. The time we spend reflecting on how the unit went is valuable professional development. It is at these times that we support each other on this journey. Thinking about next year I wonder… can I convince them to continue meeting? Communicating with parents about the work. This week teachers at the different levels I work with planned for their grade level celebrations. Third grade decided to invite parents in to hear the essays read aloud. While this idea seems simple, wonderful, and successful, I worried about the outcome. We have provided very little communication to parents about this implementation and I worried that inviting parents would in fact be inviting criticism of something simply because it wasn’t understood. Third grade held their celebration, and I attended as a parent. It was wonderful. Part of the success was due to how the teachers set the tone for parents as to what they were seeing/hearing from their children. As I reminded teachers at our celebration, our job is to make the work clear to both the children and the parents. We can and will get better at this. For now, I think knowing we need to scaffold for parents too will help us craft the right message and lead to increased parent-school collaboration. What a journey this continues to be!
Next week: I’ll post on our first week implementing the unit Writing Fiction: Big Dreams and Tall Ambitions
“This unit is a journey, and at every bend in the road you have extraordinary lessons to teach. The most important learning and teaching will happen as you and your students grapple with the complexities, and challenges of thinking and writing logically.” (Lucy Calkins, Breathing Life Into Essays p. 149)
Teachers worked on sessions 13-16 this week. Across grades 3-5 we had students writing supporting stories, angling their work, drafting the stories into supporting paragraphs, and working on introductions and conclusions.
This is by far my favorite unit to teach in the LC series. (Poetry in the K-2 series is my other favorite.) I spent some time this week listening to my colleagues talk about their kids and the work that was taking place. Over and over I heard the concern that the students weren’t “getting it” and I remembered feeling the same way. I was reminded today what it was that changed things for me: One day, a tenth grade teacher stopped by my room to ask me about the thesis topics I had posted. He was heading to his wife’s classroom and spotted a display I had made to simply show the different thesis topics my kids had committed to. He was amazed (and impressed, excited, and thankful) that we were beginning to teach students how to structure their thinking and their writing in the primary grades. He asked me if I had always taught essays in grade 3 and I told him no, this was my first attempt. His response to the work encouraged me to look at my students’ writing not as an END, but as a beginning. I was starting something. I was laying the foundation and that work would make a difference in their writing lives in middle and high school.
Remember: Writing is thinking. We are developing our students’ capacities to think about what they are doing just as much as we are teaching them how to structure a 5-paragraph essay. The quote above beautifully illustrates the emphasis and approach I believe we should be taking with this unit, especially on our first go of it. As we move away from the final product being the most important focus, and instead work on creating writers (and by that I mean thinkers…organizers…powerful communicators) we notice that children are learning how to do this work. They aren’t there yet. We aren’t there yet. However, they are taking the necessary step toward seeing writing as a powerful, necessary form of communication worth thinking about.
This week a colleague was describing how one of her students had a thesis that wasn’t working out as well as she had hoped. The good news is that the student realized the problem was with his thesis choice. It wasn’t something he really cared about or new extensively. Sure he is writing the essay, but it isn’t as powerful as both he and the teacher had hoped or expected. Trouble is, at this point in the unit it is too late for the student to start work on a new thesis. My advice? Celebrate the learning. Imagine if this student internalizes some of the strategies, which will lead him to better select, or better organize his essays in the future. What if he never forgets this first essay in Mrs. So-and-Sos 4th grade class and it changes the way he writes forever? Isn’t that the mark of good teaching? Celebrate it. Get him to articulate it. And praise him for learning it. Fitting it all in… We are battling to get this unit in and done. I realize teachers feel like we are pushing through this and it seems impossible. The pace is quick. However, at this point in our implementation and in our spiral development, we need to teach these units to know what we need to keep, add, and emphasize. The first year I taught this series I got bogged down in Unit 2, teaching and reteaching until everyone was there, on the same page, at the same spot. Four weeks of work and I was only 1/2 through the unit. I was burnt out and the students were heading toward frustration. Today, I understand that these units are to be taught each in about a month. For us that is roughly 20 days. The pace is quick. However, as Lucy says over and over, the minilessons mostly aren’t meant to be lessons every student works on that very day. Standing back from the unit, and getting the big picture forces you to make a plan to start and end. The pace is quick. Stay focused.
Consider your final product when you are thinking about time. There have been times when I taught this unit when I used a cut-and-paste method to put the final product together. Once students selected their mini-stories, (which I considered the most important part) I had them glue the stories on long sheets of paper in the correct order with the introduction and conclusion framing the work. Although this product looked exactly as it sounds… cut out and pasted together, it was a visual example of the thinking behind the placement and organization of text. That visual piece gave parents an opportunity to see the steps in this process and to celebrate them with their child.
Please see my coaching newsletter HERE. This newsletter is a way for me to connect with the teachers I work with at the American Community School of Abu Dhabi.
“Remember that our goals always extend beyond the reading and writing workshop. It is important to teach writing in part because writing is a powerful tool for thought. This session goes a long way towards helping children use writing as a tool for growing ideas on the page. We’re explicitly teaching children to say more and think more, to extend their first thoughts, and to know what it is to see new ideas emerge from the tips of their pens. This is important!” (Breathing Life Into Essays p. 47)
This was one of those amazingly busy weeks! However, teachers worked to move their students into sessions 8-12 which focus on selecting a thesis, refining it and making sure you really know enough to write about it, and moving into writing strong, personal narratives which support the essay points.
This was one of those weeks. You know what I mean… visiting authors, report cards were due, assemblies (you heard me… more than one!), and the kids collectively, were acting out (we had a fight, bullying issues, accidental falls, tears, etc.). In the midst of it all I had a meeting with the grade level writing team reps, which seemed like a bad idea… until we started talking about writing. The flood gates opened with all the ways this wasn’t working, but we moved into why we are moving our teaching this way, how much we value the vertical collaboration, ways we know we can improve this work today, in the next unit, and next year. The meeting was the highlight of my week.
Our main goal this year was for each grade (3-5) to work through every unit in the Units of Study series. To do that, we first created a year-long plan. We gave each unit roughly 20 days. Even with our holidays and breaks we were able to fit in all the units. The next step was to make monthly calendars for each unit. At first, I worked with a rep from each level to make these calendars. By Unit 3 however, we released the calendar creation to the teams so they could collaborate.
What we’ve learned, is teaching writing daily is critical to student success. However, realistically teachers need a buffer day in the week to catch up/reteach. Beginning with Unit 3, we have decided to provide for that. Interestingly, it doesn’t alter our month calendar much. What might need to be changed are the “product” days at the end. Which fits with what we are trying to do anyway- focus on the process and less on the pretty, perfect, final product. Regardless, teachers are finding ways to fit this in, try the units on, and learn from the process so we can improve our work next year.
What should a thesis look like in grade 3? Grade 4? Grade 5? I wrote about this last week in my weekly post, but it came up in our writing team meeting, so I’ll add some notes here. Basically, there is no right answer, no magic formula based on age or grade, and no way for me to outline a perfect scenario. What I can do is remind teachers that it will depend on two very important factors:
To me, a good thesis then, is one a student feels strongly about and can back up with writing from his own heart/mind.
Value the process. As Lucy describes on p. 110, “…hold to the principle that minilessons are occasions for teaching a strategy or an idea children can use often.” The work in this unit provides students with a voice they can use over and over again when they are taking a stance or giving their opinions. This unit also helps children understand the value of organizing thoughts and points, in order to select what is most powerful. How exciting to have an 8 or 10 year old considering his words and sifting through his thoughts to find those that are best suited for advancing his position on something!
The process of considering what you want to say and how best to say it is something students can use in many school subjects. Similarly, teaching children how to think about what they are saying (writing)- that evaluation- is something we hope they will do as adults.
In my last weekly write up I mentioned I would post one collection idea useful in session 9. (Click Here.) This is just one way children can collect and organize their ideas and thoughts. The goal of session 9, besides having them get organized is to teach them that organization leads to increased productivity and better writing. If you have a student who has been doing this kind of writing for years (your school is more secure in the spiral) then it might be appropriate for him to use a collection process, which works for him. However, if your children are new to this, asking them all to collect using the same strategies is a worthwhile, whole-class goal.
Watch Organizing for Essays. A short video detailing the organizational tool we used to help students during the unit: Breathing Life into Essays by Lucy Calkins. (It takes a minute for the movie to load, however it will begin playing automatically.)
