Five Ways of Looking at a Polar Bear -created by the NIWP Fellows 2009

Listening to him to hungrily suck in air
as he breaks the surface. Hearing his
paw gently pat the glass as he
wonders on our strange faces.

With powerful muscles
(well oiled machines), the Polar Bear
lumbers across a
frozen land like
albino locomotives

The Red-stained snout
of the boar reveals
its hunger

Shall I compare Thee to a snowy day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Terrible
Sweet

Writer’s Notebook Goodies to Remember!

They are a place to store ideas, brainstorm, work on poems or any type of writing.
To draft and edit/revise before final draft.
A safe place to be creative and experiment, doodle.
Free writes/quick writes.
Put favorite quotes, words, phrases.
Write questions for the instructor (for conferencing).
Journaling or reflecting after a paper is turned in.
Concrete concepts and strategies (like in a science classroom).
Record or reflect to world events (like 9/11).
Use for research data collection.
“Strategy Try Out Book” –Jill Diamond
Use in different content areas, not just writing.
Ownership of writing.
Organize by sections, use sticky notes to mark things they want to go back to and revisit.
Whatever the prompt on the board is has something to do with what you are teaching that day.
Use table of contents.
Don’t let them leave the classroom.
Use composition notebooks so the kids can’t tear out pages and reorganize them to get credit for pages they already got credit for.
Use prompts from stuff the kids are learning in their other classes, “What did you learn in science today?”

Things I learned from the AWESOME Workshops!

I can’t say thank you enough for all the hard work and effort you fellows all put into your workshops! I am so excited to go back through these when creating lesson plans in the future. I now have a large range of weapons under my belt to use for improving my lessons and teaching. You are all so talented and special I’m grateful for the wisdom, experience, and fun you have shared with me! You all ROCK!!
Some things I took away from the workshops:
1) The Waltons can be used in the grammar class (bet they never thought they would be used in such a way!)
2) The love of words and their power to move and inspire based off of sentence structure can be spread to the students.
3) Paradise Lost isn’t so bad after all!
4) Spanish is cool, and can be a great tool in the language section of the English classroom.
5) Memoir can be done by anyone at any age. Our students have life experience, lets help them record it.
6) There are good and bad reading logs out there.
7) Metaphors are powerful only if students have the background knowledge to understand them.
8) I learned what the heck the DWA and how to use list writing to help students get going on their masterpieces.
9) There are magazines that publish student work and I have a whole list of web sites to choose from! Perfect for my magazine unit!

NinjaPirate

Top 10 Most Important Things about Conferencing

1) The questions are key. What you ask and how you ask can totally help or ruin your conference.
2) Don’t Hold the Paper!!
3) Don’t bring out the evil red pen, just take notes about what you talk about and give the notes to the student at the end.
4) Meet in a comfy/special spot.
5) Conferencing should not be extra work, find ways to slip it into the workshop.
6) Focus on the writer not the writing.
7) Make the student feel as though you are just talking or having a normal conversation, not conferencing.
8) Remember they are human and to act real with them and what they have written about.
9) Conferencing doesn’t have to take forever.
10) Teach students how to do peer conferencing by modeling and implementing it slowly.

Portfolios

My ideas and thoughts on portfolios have changed drastically throughout my college career. I think the thing that is trickiest about portfolios is that they can serve multiple purposes and we are trying to tie a nice and neat single-track-definition to them. Portfolios can be used effectively many different ways. One way is to evaluate the progress of your student over a certain amount of time; another way is to showcase your very best work all in one concise spot; and still another purpose is somewhere out there I'm sure. Overall, portfolios are tricky, but can be helpful and should continue to be used in the classroom. I think one of the most important things is to keep your purpose in view at all times.
What I want to know:
Where is the research on portfolios?
How do we get administrators on board with portfolios?

In Response to Grading and Rubrics

I think the overall consensus is that we need to change something about the grading system in schools. However, just how we do that is the big scary question. Students need to be challenged and they need to be motivated to overcome those challenges, but how? We all have experienced the frustration of spending time grading and putting comments on a paper only to give the paper back to the student and he or she looks at the grade and ignores the comments.

One of the biggest problems is everything we do in our culture is by assessment and ultimately by grades. Dr. Jacque Leighty said it best, “To live is to assess.” Every waking moment of our day we are constantly assessing. I personally believe assessment is a good thing, without it we would end up with mediocre products that fall apart and have no value, we would be stuck with second rate when we could have better. Students should be assessed to see how much they have progressed, if they weren’t assessed there would be no point for them to be in school. Kids could be learning on their own at home or doing whatever they feel like, but because we are trained and have extra schooling we as teachers have the capability of assessing our students and helping them grow in their education. The big question still remains, what about grades? How do we assess without taking away the necessary work and effort that is needed from the student in order for him or her to feel like they have done something worth while?

I think rubrics are the answer. Because so many people think English is merely a subjective subject that relies on the whims and moods of the teacher, I would like to use rubrics as much as possible to make it more objective. The student should be able to give him or herself the same grade I give him or her based on the rubric.