Immediately before Mark began writer's workshop on this day, visitors from the Carnegie Foundation asked him about what he anticipated covering with the students and about the emphasis of today's work.
What is Reflection?
(from Johns Hopkins University's statement on Professional Development)
Reflection has many definitions in the context of teacher cognition. Reflection involves "a state of doubt, hesitation, perplexity, or mental difficulty, in which thinking originates". This uncertainty is followed by the act of searching to find materials that will resolve this doubt and settle the perplexity (Dewey, 1933).
Reflection, however, is more that "just thinking hard about what you do" (Bullough and Gitlin,1995). Reflective practitioners give careful attention to their experiences and how meaning is made and justified. They analyze the influence of context and how they shape human behavior.
Critical reflection goes beyond the technical aspects of an experience to the personal, ethical, and political dimensions of teaching. Reflection is about social justice, equity, and change. Reflection is inquiry into pedagogy and curriculum, the underlying assumptions and consequences of these actions, and the moral implications of these actions in the structure of schooling (Liston & Zeichner, 1987).
Becoming reflective requires active engagement or consciousness in the experience, and in this case, the act of narrative writing. Reflection requires the ability to analyze and prioritize issues, to use tacit and resource-based knowledge, and to develop a feasible plan of action. Clarke (1995) suggests that reflection is not about a single event in time, but occurs over time as teachers begin to construct meaning for themselves.
| VISITOR: | So tell me a little bit about what's happening today in Writer's Workshop. |
| TEACHER: | So today we're going to reread a Touchstone text that we've read before, My Mama Had a Dancing Heart [by Libba Moore Gray], and we're going to be looking this time for beautiful language and the writing techniques that she uses to get her message across. And so we're just really going to be listening to the craft. And then I'm going to model how I'm going to take my writing and use that as a mentor text and try to take one of her ideas and put it into my own writing, because I'm struggling a little bit with how to write this piece about my mom. So I'm going to model that and then I'm going to have the students go back to their desks and try the same thing. They're going to try to use one of our Touchstone texts or one of the books we've read as a mentor text and try to either add the craft into their writing or to try something new with that. |
| VISITOR: | Connect that to me - connect that with this idea of significance. How are those connected? |
| TEACHER: | We've been talking a lot about significance. I've been giving the students a lot of freedom to choose their topic but I keep coming back to this idea that it's got to be significant, there's got to be something about it, a lesson, a theme, a big idea and we keep looking at all the books we've read and we try to go back to that idea of theme. So as they're deciding on their topic, I'm still asking them all the time, what's the significance? Think about the Touchstone text. Why did Patricia Polako write about her red headed rotten older brother? What was her lesson? So we've got some ideas up here too, about what significance is in these narratives. So, you know, it's definitely a big issue because some of the kids are still struggling with, they have a story but they don't know what the lesson is. |
| VISITOR: | Tell me a little bit about what you want them to come out from today's - like honing in on the particular. What do you want them to come away with at the end of today and how will you know if they-ve done it? |
| TEACHER: | I just want them today to come away with the idea that they can borrow somebody else's writing technique. They can look at a text and they can take one little snippet of it and apply it to their own writing and experiment with it and try to see if it helps their writing. They don't necessarily have to use it but just that experimentation of trying something new, trying something that a very experienced author has done successfully. And it doesn't matter whether they use it in writing they've already done or if they just experiment for the day, just trying something new. |
| VISITOR: | And so will you see evidence of that in them talking about their writing, in the writing itself? What will you be looking for? |
| TEACHER: | I think mostly I'll see it in the writing. There may be a little bit of discussion at the tables but I think most of it will just be in their own writing and then we'll have a few of the kids share at the end, who have specifically tried something new. |