Writer's Workshop.....How do you feel about lesson objectives?

There are times when I am convinced that there is no more subversive, no more revolutionary act, than to teach.  Especially in a public school, where your unending goal is to provide every child (no matter their race, language, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, citizenship status....I don't need to go on, right?) the experiences required to be literate...to be critical....to be informed. It is, at its core, anarchy and rebellion. Forget everything you've heard about the "factory model", too, because I see great teachers, every day, pushing themselves and their students way beyond the meager resources they've been allotted.

All that to say this:  I know it's de rigeur to require teachers to start every lesson with an "objective" or to even post them in your agenda, but I kinda don't get it. I think anything worth learning can't really be learned in 50 minutes, so to say "At the end of this lesson you will be able to say that you can (insert anything substantial here)" is absurd to me.

One thing that's been made clear, in the quest to implement the Common Core Standards (in Math and Language, as far as I can tell), is that we need to rethink "grain size". In other words, at what level are we attaching meaning in the curriculum? It's not at the lesson level... or even the chapter level...but at the unit level.


So why do administrators and policy makers insist on these "lesson objectives"? (Rhetorical, btw, I don't actually care haha) We were talking about this at our instructional leadership meeting, and we were trying to figure out how to have collaboration, and coherence, without lock-step lesson planning and without pretending that mastery occurs in 50 minutes.

Our district focus this year is Writing, so we came up with the idea that we could create posters of the standards for, say, opinion writing. Our grade levels would agree on the focus and content of the unit, down to which linking words and organizers we would use. Since we agree that these handful of items is what we will be working on for the next 5 to 6 weeks, with a unit objective of being able to write an opinion, then for any given lesson, in any given room, we could just highlight the one we are focusing on with today's lessons and workshop time. Knowing, full well, that we would be coming back to each one, repeatedly, over the course of the weeks. It gives us the room to attend to the needs of our individual groups of students (what does this class need more of, that that other class may not?) and still know that we have identified (and are providing) the core of the Core, if you will.

 The clothespin just moves to our current focus, which you can see, today, was "Writers tell what they think about many topics." We had already used books and the "things we do" (science experiments, recess, etc.) to mine for "what we think" and today, we added "places we go" to come up with our opinions. 

It was such a lovely lesson, can I suggest you try it? I found different pictures (using Google images, though I suppose I could have taken pictures with my phone) of things around our school...the cafeteria, office, library, PE yard, jungle gym, soccer field, trees they love to climb, the slide area, even a toilet to represent the bathrooms (ohhhhhh did they have opinions about the restrooms! Holy.) I placed them on a poster in their approximate relative locations, and we partner shared different places we go in school, and what our opinions are of each of those places.  "Soccer is my favorite sport" or "I think the bathrooms are disgusting" or "We should be allowed to climb the trees" or "I think it's not fair to play 'ropesies' in tetherball". They simply couldn't run out of things to say!

I made an 8.5 x 11 version (even invested in some color copies) and they pasted them into their writing journals. So just like they had "a heart map" to generate their small moments stories, they now have "an opinion map" to generate their opinion stories. {LOVE}
Click Opinion Map to download the map I made (how different can your school possibly be? Just drag the pics around or add/delete pictures).

Launching Writer's Workshop

My writing coach is aces! I wish I could keep her in my room all the time; she is so observant, so positive, so tuned in to what kids are doing (and not) in their writing. I learn so much watching her mellow, instant conferences as she moves effortlessly through the room. And when we meet after school, and talk about what we saw, she always has great ideas for where to go next. Really, I need to stop going on about her, or somebody will come take her away. I feel the same way about my principal, haha. Like, nothing to see here! Move along! But really, they are both fantastic and I live in fear that they will be whisked away for greater things. We already share Lisa the Writing Coach with another (huge) school, so I'm on eggshells with this one.

Anyway, we launch Writer's Workshop on the very first day of school, and by the 15th day we are doing our first publication. It's our way of introducing the whole writing process, beginning to end, before we go into our first full unit (Narrative, for us).

I also have this little area above my writing center, which needs to be populated with the different things students write ("things" is, obviously, a very technical term) but meaning letters, lists, stories, postcards, notes, etc.

 

The 15 days of launching lessons are pretty flexible. They're structured enough if you're just beginning to implement W/W in your classroom, it will support you in the day-to-day decision making that keeps the class moving. But there's definitely room for adjusting and making it your own if you've been implementing for years. I am going to say, no matter how long I've been doing this, I will always appreciate the road maps. I just don't have the band width to kill it for 7 subjects every day. I'll take all the help I can get!

And well...that's how I came to be doing a lesson on "lists" during the first day of school to launch W/W with my second graders. The launching lesson was to be for teaching the process of Think-Pair-Share, but, honestly, our kids have been doing a knee-to-knee T/P/S protocol with A/B partners and structured language support since Kindergarten. We can all do it with our eyes wide shut, so instead, I decided to link the writing to a shared experience.

First thing in the morning, to launch Daily 5/CAFE strategy (check for understanding), I had read the students the book "Friends" by Helme Heine. It's such a sweet story!

Later, when they came back from lunch recess, I read them the story of Mean Jean, The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neil

 

We had just had recess, then we read about recess, so it was time to talk about recess. They moved knee-to-knee to tell their partners what they liked to do at recess. They had plenty to talk about!

 (Writing Coach Lisa...down on the floor listening to kids! <3 her!)

After they had a chance to tell their ideas orally, I introduced the format of a list. They told me about where they had seen lists before (when they go grocery shopping, at Christmas time, etc.) We referred back to the "Friends" story (this was now the third time we'd used this story on that day, so they were very familiar with the characters and the plot). I opened the book to different pictures, and asked them to remember what the friends did on their adventure. As they remembered, I recorded them on our chart, and pointed out how I was making a list (the title, "Things the Friends Did Together", the numbered items, etc.). Then I gave them a piece of paper from a list notepad (long and skinny, with lines on it) and they went back to their desks to write a list of "Things To Do At Recess".

 What terrific little writers they were! They got right to work, and of the 30 students, 29 of them followed the list format I had modeled. Awesome! Lisa and I conferred with writers, mostly about stretching out words and writing what we hear...they were very hung up on "how do I spell..."  There's a place for that, but it gets in the way of getting our ideas down, so we will continue to develop our sound it/write it strategies. For our mid-workshop interruption, where you highlight some positive thing you see somebody doing, to help direct (or re-direct, as the case may be) any students who are having a hard time getting started or are confused about some aspect of the writing, we highlighted two students who had made a title and used numbers in their lists (most kids had done both without prompting, based on the modeled lesson) and two students who stretched their words and wrote what they heard.

The second day they wrote about a special object. We read Knuffle Bunny in the morning and Ira Sleeps Over in the afternoon.

 

I cannot be the only person who has used one or both of these texts to introduce writing about a special object, but I will go on record to say they work, alone and together, perfectly to inspire a full page of writing from Littles, which I for one, will be using as a baseline for their second grade writing.

It's Dew Moss

It was a long week in writing training, but I'm glad I went and, after several weeks of planning and giving math trainings, I was only too happy to kick back and gather from others for a change. Our training was put on by district colleagues, and they did a fantastic job. In between writing lesson plans in my head, I learned a few things.

One of the things they had us do was to spend an hour each day doing Adult Writing. It was run as a Writer's Workshop, so folks who weren't around when the Teacher's College came out from New York and spent a summer training us on the Lucy Caulkins Writer's Workshop (um...jeez....6 or 7  years ago?!? Really???) could see the general format, content, and structure of a typical lesson.

In our math trainings, we also ask participants to do adult level math. It's important, as teachers, to experience the content as learners, too. It changes the way we approach it with our students, as educators, when we've struggled with something first at our own level.

In that spirit, of being a learner and a teacher of writing, I pushed myself to participate in the share at the end of the week. Today, five of us stood up and read our opinion pieces in front of roughly 150 adults. The piece I shared was imperfect, and untitled, but I was trying a strategy I had learned during adult writing (specifically:  use mini stories as evidence for an opinion claim).

Here it is, as I shared it today. It's about my son Tommy, who turned 13 this week. And, I'm sorry to say, it is an entirely true story:

(This is an untitled opinion piece)

As both a teacher and a mother, I can say with conviction that helping a child develop their own sense of a moral compass is one of the most important jobs we have. Children, of all ages, must understand the importance of telling the truth, even when doing so means that there will be consequences.

When my son Tommy was in kindergarten, he fell off the jungle gym at school. The two bones in his arm snapped like twigs just above his wrist, and he wore a hard cast for five weeks on his left arm. That was a lesson in gravity he never forgot. It was also the year he learned the importance of telling the truth, even when doing so means that there will be consequences.

It all started on November 9^th, 2005, when he reluctantly shared a note from his teacher. “Tommy was very disruptive at lunch time today. He first told us he didn’t have one, and then we found it hidden in the closet. His response: “Darn it!” Then he was swinging his food around and holding his sandwich in his mouth while he flipped his head. Please talk to him. ~ Mrs. McCallum”

Well, I’m sure for many people this would be dismissed as less than a tragedy, but I wasn’t going to let this go without letting him know how important it is to always tell the truth. “Tommy,” I told him, “It is very important that you do not lie. It’s okay if you want hot lunch ~ just tell the teacher that you have a lunch, but you want hot lunch today.  You don’t have to eat the lunch mommy packed you…but it’s not okay to lie. It’s the one thing we will not tolerate!”

I was confident that I had done my duty as both a parent and a fellow teacher (I got your back, Mrs. McCallum!). That night on the way home from soccer practice, we had a conversation in the car that started with Tommy telling me that some kids were calling him a jerk and a dumb ass at school that day.

What?? I said

Yeah

Are those nice words, or are they bad words?

He said they were bad words. Bery, bery, bery bad words.

My teacher antennae went up, and I had to ask him…”hmmm….were you calling them names before they called you names?”

No, mommy.

Well…you don’t use those words, right?

Right, mommy.

On November 10^th, 2005, we got another note from Mrs. McCallum:

“At recess yesterday, Tommy was calling other children ‘dumb ass’. When we asked him why he was using such words, he said, ‘My mom and dad call me dumb ass all the time.’  Please talk to him. ~ Mrs. McCallum.”

Now, look. We had a wild-acting dog that we definitely called a dumb ass. And that guy who cut me off in traffic? Well, I’m going to call him a jackass. But I categorically deny ever calling any kid a dumb ass.  That right there? That was a lie, and we must always tell the truth, even when doing so means that there will be consequences.

“Tommy!!! Mommy and Daddy do not call you that! You lied to me yesterday! You said other kids were saying it, but it was you...then you told your teacher that we call you that at home, and you know that's not true. Just because you were trying not to get in trouble! Well, Tommy, you're in a lot more trouble for lying about it. It's better if you just tell the truth, son, even if it's uncomfortable or scary, because lying is so much worse.”

The rest of that week was very hard on little Tommy, but I was sure that when the weekend came, he had learned the importance of always telling the truth.  That Saturday, we went up to Sacramento to a small park with carnival rides for a family friend’s birthday party. Tommy was very excited to visit with Porter and go on all the rides. Unlimited rides! For two hours! Rides, mommy! There are going to be rides!

We went to the booth to get his hand stamped for the rides, and that’s when we were informed that, due to Tommy’s arm cast, he would not be allowed to ride any of the rides that day. I’m sorry, but it’s very clearly stated in the rules!

Oh dear. Without saying a word, he turned and leaned into my legs, and he cried. Not a temper tantrum, not a wailing cry. It wasn’t big crocodile tears, or the manufactured drama of a child who isn’t getting what he wants. It was just a very subtle, very heartbroken cry.

So I did what any mother would do.

I told him to lie.

And not just lie! I put his jacket on, and explained to him how to keep his left arm completely inside the arm of the jacket ~ “don’t let your fingers poke out!” I told him ~ and we practiced how he should hold his tickets with just the tips of fingers, in the most natural manner so as not to call attention to his injured arm. I went on every ride with him and I helped him lie his butt off to every teenager working in that park.

It was an emotional week for Tommy, but he learned some very big lessons.  Most importantly, he learned that you must always tell the truth, even when doing so means that there will be consequences…..except…well….sometimes, he learned….you can lie.

 I showed Tommy the actual notes from this incident. His response when he read the part that said, "He told us my mom and dad always call me dumb ass"? He gave me the most perplexed look and said, "Why did you call me names?"  Oh, for the.....we didn't! YOU LIED! He legit couldn't compute it haha! He just gave a little shake of his head and furrowed his brow like we were the worst parents ever. Too good!