Clip Description
Nam has offered to help Vincent with his writing in a response group during independent writing time. This clip happens toward the end of their conference when Nam has suggested that Vincent explain more about why he is scared in his story.
Commentary
Prior to this moment in the response group, Vincent read his piece out loud about jumping off the diving board for the first time. He told Nam he was trying to figure out what to put next. Nam asked Vincent what he wanted to say and Vincent explained that he wanted to tell the reader that he was scared of heights. Nam suggested that he write that down in a sentence.
Once Vincent had the idea of the sentence he wanted to write, Nam continued to help him as he moved into the mechanics of writing and spelling. In this case, students are helping each other with different aspects of the writing process - working through the complexity of taking expressive language and transferring it to written language both in terms of grammatical form and spelling. Nam's patience and desire to support Vincent again show how these students have developed as members of a writing community.
I knew that Vincent had many ideas for his writing and sometimes the mechanics of writing kept him from getting all of those ideas down on paper. I encouraged him to move beyond the mechanics to get his ideas down, but he was also receiving the help he was looking for from Nam in completing the thinking and writing work they had done together. I am always asking myself, "Should I have stepped in or should I have let the work go uninterrupted? When are they ready to go further in supporting each other, and what do they need from me to learn to help each other?"
Transcript
| TEACHER: | While you're sounding that out, Neil, could I just ask you, since I'm trying to find out how our response groups are going. Can I ask you how you guys decided on this part? What were you talking about? |
| STUDENT: | Well, talking about - we were talking about why he was scared. Scared of heights. |
| TEACHER: | So you asked him why he was scared and you said you were scared of heights? |
| STUDENT: | No, I'm talking to him already like this, "because he told me, oh, because I'm scared of heights." |
| TEACHER: | So he helped you get your words together to figure out how you wanted to write them down in you story? |
| STUDENT: | Uh, huh. |
| TEACHER: | Wow! That's so great. |
| STUDENT: | Thanks, man. |
