Immediately before Rachel began her writer's workshop on this day, visitors from the Carnegie Foundation asked her about what she anticipated covering with the students and about the emphasis of today's work.
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 the first question is, what is your plan for writing workshop today? |
| TEACHER: | Okay. Today I'm going to introduce the students to visualizing as a strategy for writing. We've been doing that during reading time and we've talked a little bit about visualizing to help us with writing but today we're going to make it very explicit, that while they're thinking about creating a picture in the mind of the reader and helping the reader understand their really important parts of their story, they can use visualizing as a strategy to really envision the actions that are happening in their experience and put that into their story. So that's my goal today. |
| VISITOR: | How will you know if they've learned what you're looking for then? How will you know that they've learned to visualize the events taking place? |
| TEACHER: | I'm hoping that I'll be able to look at their writing and see action developed, beyond just the basic sequence of events, and we've talked a lot about focusing on stretching out the important parts. And so I think that they have a better understanding than they did at the beginning, about really focusing on important parts. And so I'm hoping now to take them to the next level of being able to then once they've identified parts that are important for the reader and then stretching them outside, hopefully will feed more actions. |
| VISITOR: | And you did mention that this is something you have been working on in reading time. The next question is, what have you been doing in your reading time that has prepared your students for what you're working on today in writer's workshop? |
| TEACHER: | Well, during reader's workshop we started last week learning about visualization, learning how we visualize scenes in stories that we read, how we visualize the characters and the setting and specifically, this morning we investigated how one author really broke down one neat action, an important action, into smaller actions to give the reader a clearer picture. |
| VISITOR: | Which book was - |
| TEACHER: | We used Poppleton, which is not necessarily one of the books we've been investigating for our immersion and for writer's workshop, but it is at a level that a lot of the students are reading is a picture book, so I want to show them when they were doing home reading, how they can use this strategy of visualizing actions to help them. But outside of reader's workshops for the read alouds, we've been focusing on, Too Many Tamales [by Gary Soto] and Shortcut [by Donald Crews], to practice this and investigating the actions that the author uses in those, as well as some other read aloud books. |
| VISITOR: | What have you been doing in your writing time to prepare your students for what you are working on today? |
| TEACHER: |
Well, as I said, we spent a lot of time focusing on importance and finding important hearts and moments in our stories, and that was all last week. We did a lot of investigation into importance in our lives, how things are important to us, how people are important to us and how the stories we tell are important and then how we need to really find those key moments to show other people why these experiences are important to us. So after we discovered different experiences that we want to share, we chose one. This week we started planning out how our stories would go. And so they've made story trails, where we began with the middle, which was our important part and then we backed up and decided where we wanted our stories to begin, staying very close to the important parts and then where we want our stories to end, so that they're constantly focusing on the main idea of their story and what their purpose is and what they wanted to share with their audience.
And then they sketched their story out on pages of their books, they have about four to six page booklets they're using, and then yesterday was our first day of drafting and they set the scene and most of them wrote leads. And now they're ready to move the story along. |
| VISITOR: | How have you introduced the idea of significance in personal narrative writing today and in the larger unit? You talked about some of the texts. Is there anything else you'd like to add? |
| TEACHER: | Well, we began by thinking about how objects are important to us and how all of us see objects and people in different ways. Things and people in our lives are important to us for different reasons. And so we just talked a lot about that, and we had our own shared experience, that we had a field trip, and we started story telling that and talking a lot about which part we wanted to focus on, which was really important to us as a class. And then we started - at the same time. This is all happening at the same time, during the week, last week. We also were investigating significance in books. They read a lot of books. And we really focused on thinking about our feelings during these experiences and in the books that we're reading. And thinking about how feelings help us to identify really important parts of our stories, and also identifying when feelings change, because that usually is a point of realization for the persons having the experience and it's usually very important. So that was - we really focused on feelings. We feel like the kids can really understand that and have a strong feeling about something that you want to connect to it and then convey the significance of it. |
| VISITOR: | How have you been modeling these ideas for the students in your own writing? |
| TEACHER: | I've been working through the process with them the whole time. So they've known about my ideas that I've been generating and whatever they're working on, I worked on my own writing either in front of them or I would do it after school and then show them the next day. So I generated ideas with them, I explored my feelings and tried to find important parts in my stories and I chose an idea and have been storytelling it. So they're very familiar with my story, and I have a story trail and I'm pretty much at the stage where most of them are right now in the process. |
| VISITOR: | What have you seen in the student work that has informed your mini lessons plan and conferences for today? |
| TEACHER: |
Well, I was looking through and I noticed that a lot of them have some sort of lead and I'm real confident that looking at their story trails and their sketches that they have a good understanding of sequence for their story and the idea that they're building up to an important part. So given that a lot of them are trying to focus on stretching out on focus, on stretching out their lead, I want to move them forward and tell them once they've set the scene, you know, now it's time to start building up and getting to those important parts and really help give them a strategy to be able to think through their writing as they go because I think it can be very overwhelming. And so I can see - I'm anticipating some of them getting a little stuck on, you know, at what point do I stretch out the action or - I guess I see some of them as going very slowly and maybe they're losing momentum in their writing. And so I want to give them the strategy to encourage them that this is what you can do to really paint that picture for the reader. That's your job, is to really show that reader what's important to you. So you need to really stop and think before you're writing. At the same time I have children who I've noticed are really at these important parts. They're zooming through and I want to show them that they do need to really think about their reader and it's okay to take time to stop and think and visualize their story in mind so that they can convey the message to the readers.
So I was trying to find something that could meet most of their needs right now and I think that this is something they can use now, for the whole unit, and in other units as well. |
| VISITOR: | What have you learned in your conferences that has informed your minilessons? There's the student work and then I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about the conferences that you've had with students that's also informed your plan for today. |
| TEACHER: | Well, I definitely know, as I said, that they have a much better understanding of importance. I can see that they're really motivated to write for a purpose. They sense that there's an audience, they know that they are writing for an audience and a lot of them have worked on really narrowing down their focus. And so now I want to help them in developing that focus because I think they have the basic idea of the structure of their story and I think that because it's so complex that they need a tool to be able to keep working thoughtfully, carefully within that structure. |