Chapter 3's focus on helping students remember had a lot of information that affirmed what I am doing in my classroom. As a teacher, it is always nice to read what the "experts" suggest and know that you are right on track. However, here are a few reflections that I had after the reading:
- I LOVED the idea of the demonstration notebook for Writer's Workshop. I feel very comfortable conferencing with students, but when it comes to small groups, I feel as though I need something to help SHOW the students, exactly what the teaching point means. I think this is a great way to do this. My goal for this year, is to begin to develop a demonstration notebook, that will be able to be used in small groups for re-teaching/modeling.
- Going Digital- I love the idea of putting charts or tools online. Third grade at our school is the year in which the students begin to use Google Drive. We mostly use this for Writer's Workshop. So, what a better idea than to actually have my students access these teaching tools digitally, through Google Drive. We also use Schoology. This will be a great way to have our teaching tools available to students at home and for parents to see what we are learning and how to help their child at home!
- The authors quote some of my favorites in the educational field. Kylene Beers is phenomenal. I completely agree with her stance on rigor. I saw her speak in Columbus this past spring, where she said the same quote that I read in this book. "Rigor without relevance is simply hard". Relevance is vital. Making our curriculum relevant to our students is essential to their understanding. But to present difficult curriculum to students, they have to have an intrinsic desire to master those concepts, which means it has to have some relevance to their lives.
- This past year, my team focused on intrinsic motivation and developing students who are engaged in their own learning. It was amazing how work that seemed "simply hard" became the rigorous tasks that we were actually hoping for. This year, our goal is to begin some of these engagement strategies earlier in the year.
What stood out to you? How will you ensure that your classroom instruction is rigorous and one in which students are engaged, intrinsically motivated, and growing as learners?
I would love to hear more about how your team worked on intrinsic motivation. I agree with you about rigor.
ReplyDeleteI second this: "I would love to hear more about how your team worked on intrinsic motivation." This is an area that came to light as needing attention within my building last year and we have started some work on it, but will be continuing more heavily into it this year.
DeleteI am a firm believer in teaching students to feel proud of themselves. One of the things we do is let students know what pride means. I feel like so many students don't actually understand how pride feels and what it looks like when others are proud of you. When students understand this, they become motivated to feel this feeling consistently and to see this in those around them.
DeleteThis year we started using many of the engagement strategies in The Reading Strategies Book. This helped immensely. Students began to realize what it meant to be engaged in their learning and that once engaged, you could grow as a reader/writer, that much faster. They noticed that they were becoming better readers and writers. This then motivated them even more to continue to be engaged.
I think that while these strategies and ideas for engagement and motivation worked with that particular group of students, the method of carrying them out will change from year to year, group to group.
Like you, one of my goals from this year is to create a demonstration notebook for writing. Thinking I'd also like the students to have some kind of demonstration notebook (not sure I would call it that) of lessons we had done that they could refer to. I'm trying to decide whether that would be on Google Docs or whether it would be a physical notebook. I also loved Kylene Beer's comments on rigor. Too often, I think, we equate rigor with hard. Often it's also pretty boring, like asking kids to read texts like LITTLE WOMEN, that very few adults would want to read.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of having students have their own notebooks of sorts. I take pictures of my anchor charts and have these shrunken on the copier. I have the students glue them in their writer's workshop notebooks, so that as I change the posters hanging up, they still have access to them. I'd love to hear what you end up deciding to do!
DeleteI love your demonstration notebook goal! Having a tool handy when we need to give that quick mini-lesson or reteach time will be a "game changer"! One idea I'm exploring is merging what I am learning about demonstration notebooks with what I learned from reading "Flip your writing workshop". In that text, ideas for taking those lessons students need re-taught and repeated connect/complement the demonstration notebook idea. There are some lessons we would need to demonstrate "live" but there are many that we could record and let students access as they need the reminders. So many possibilities to put learning ownership in student's hands with DIY tools!
ReplyDeleteI I really like the idea of having pre-recorded lessons for students to use as they need them. I may have to read Flip your Writing Workshop, next.
DeleteWhat a beautiful blog! I agree with all of the comments about the content of your post. I have a design question.....how did you create this beautiful blog? I love it!
ReplyDeleteThanks Stephanie! My blog was designed by Megan at A Bird in Hand Designs. She is amazing!
DeleteI think many of us are planning on creating demonstration notebooks! I know that is one of my goals for the year. I like the idea of also making these virtually available to our students.
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