More Authentic Communication, Less Make-Work
Teachers are doing so many things right in primary classrooms I’ve been in lately. Perhaps oddly for a literacy educator, what I like best is that almost all teachers in classrooms today interact with the children in a warm and respectful way and the kids are almost invariably well behaved. They listen, they do their work, they enjoy one another’s company, they like to chat in discussion and at recess or during nutrition break.
Teachers are reading wonderful stories and interesting factual books on topics that children need to know about. Teachers and students are reading and writing together, discussing ways to understand and create text. More often than in the past, teachers are guiding students’ reading and writing of text of appropriate level. And more children are comfortable inventing spellings and taking a stab at writing independently and finding just-right books that they can read independently. Teachers have clearly been working to implement the Early Reading Strategy of the Ontario Ministry of Education.
I wish more educators were replacing small-one-size-fits-all assignments—however clever—and running language arts periods more like production meetings or workshops. It’s not that language arts lessons don’t have a place. Teachers are powerfully assisting students when they teach brief lessons that help children learn skills or information they need to communicate. But the students learn best when they are engaged in talking and reading and writing for extended projects.
Writing short book reports is a common activity in third grade. Often times students create an illustration and write a short commentary. But consider how teachers could extend this to elicit more reading and writing. After the students have drafted reviews—and why not access a database and read professional reviews and download from Amazon a small graphic of the book cover as a part of the prewriting—they could type them into an Excel spreadsheet worksheet and submit them to an editor. The editor could post them to a master worksheet that students could read but not alter.
One advantage to a writing assignment bigger than work that can be started and concluded in a day is that little time need be spent explaining the work compared to how long the work persists. Consider the ongoing work required when older students help younger to produce a class newsletter with work edited to a polished level. Similarly, students who enjoy creating blogs to explore their thinking may read and write a lot. Students need little encouragement to write and read one another’s Another long term project can be guiding students to help create learning materials for their own classmates or students in another grade. There’s no reason students can divvy up projects and find relevant text and graphics and organize them into a presentation that can be saved as a starting point for the next students.
When students want to create high-quality materials that are personally interesting and will be read by other people, they are also more receptive to practical help to do their job better.
Teachers are reading wonderful stories and interesting factual books on topics that children need to know about. Teachers and students are reading and writing together, discussing ways to understand and create text. More often than in the past, teachers are guiding students’ reading and writing of text of appropriate level. And more children are comfortable inventing spellings and taking a stab at writing independently and finding just-right books that they can read independently. Teachers have clearly been working to implement the Early Reading Strategy of the Ontario Ministry of Education.
I wish more educators were replacing small-one-size-fits-all assignments—however clever—and running language arts periods more like production meetings or workshops. It’s not that language arts lessons don’t have a place. Teachers are powerfully assisting students when they teach brief lessons that help children learn skills or information they need to communicate. But the students learn best when they are engaged in talking and reading and writing for extended projects.
Writing short book reports is a common activity in third grade. Often times students create an illustration and write a short commentary. But consider how teachers could extend this to elicit more reading and writing. After the students have drafted reviews—and why not access a database and read professional reviews and download from Amazon a small graphic of the book cover as a part of the prewriting—they could type them into an Excel spreadsheet worksheet and submit them to an editor. The editor could post them to a master worksheet that students could read but not alter.
One advantage to a writing assignment bigger than work that can be started and concluded in a day is that little time need be spent explaining the work compared to how long the work persists. Consider the ongoing work required when older students help younger to produce a class newsletter with work edited to a polished level. Similarly, students who enjoy creating blogs to explore their thinking may read and write a lot. Students need little encouragement to write and read one another’s Another long term project can be guiding students to help create learning materials for their own classmates or students in another grade. There’s no reason students can divvy up projects and find relevant text and graphics and organize them into a presentation that can be saved as a starting point for the next students.
When students want to create high-quality materials that are personally interesting and will be read by other people, they are also more receptive to practical help to do their job better.
posted by Douglas at
9:29 PM
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