Wednesday, July 22, 2009 from Heather

This morning as we assembled, you could hear the gentle click of cameras as everyone attempted to catch our fellowship digitally before Ronnie left us this afternoon. It seems strange to think that we only have a few days left before we return to our daily lives. Coming into our little basement icebox every morning instead of my dark, cave of an office has begun to feel like normal.
Paige started us off today with a workshop lesson that she called a “potpourri” of writing ideas that can easily be used in the classroom. They were the real-life applications of the research that we have been learning from Ruie and Ron.
She shared a number of engaging and flexible activities for teaching writing concepts and stretching student’s thinking. We described, compared, and explained plates in order to learn about different types of writing. We played with the Stick Man and Visual Character Representation to develop characterization. Could you have scanned that student’s character drawing into Voice Thread or a Wiki and have kids leave their comments/feedback on that? We received a number of other highly useful strategies such as Descriptive Writing for Poetry, bio-poem, newspaper poetry, analogies framework, evaluating reasoning worksheet, Survival Kit, and Learning Product cycle. Finally, we had a great discussion about assessment, the different types and purposes for it as well as system constraints.
After a short break in our intensely packed day, we were treated to a 2-in-1 presentation from Amy K and Karen. Their topic was called Mood Swings—Teaching the Same Concepts Different Ways. Amy K started by sharing research about how to teach tone and mood in different ways, especially when the goal is writing to learn. She focused on a finding by G. Wiggins that audience and purpose matter considerably more in real-world writing. We, as teachers, need to make sure that we teach this explicitly in our classrooms, but do it with authentic, meaningful writing activities with genuine audiences. We practiced this by temporarily revisiting 10th grade while voicing our opinions on a Wake Count policy. Karen then shared a lesson that focuses on developing mood in narrative writing. She began by explaining how she builds background knowledge on memory writing and then shared a creative way to use visual, auditory and multimedia to feel, describe and analyze mood orally first. The lesson would culminate in writing a reminiscence themselves.
Hungry, we devoured the Louisiana redbeans and rice that we had been salivating over all morning. Thank you Tanya for bringing such a scrumptious lunch! All the cameras came out again as we continued to take pictures!
After lunch, Ron gave a presentation regarding writing across the curriculum. He shared research on writing across the curriculum, NAEP results, reasons why students have difficulty writing to learn and how the writing process can improve someone’s writing. Finally, he shared the 6 Research Based Strategies that have been proven to be effective:
1. Focused Freewriting (Peter Elbow)
2. Entry/Exit Slips or Quick Writes (Martha Ruddell)
3. Author’s Prejudices/My Prejudices (Axlerod & Cooper)
--more of a middle/secondary level activity, below 5th grade students are not really cognitively ready
4. Sentence/Passage Springboard
5. Concept Exploration (adaptation from Xiufeng & Ebenezer)
6. Microthemes (Bean, Drenk, & Lee)

The last activity of the day was Group 3’s presentation onWriter’s are Continually Growing and Changing. They did a fantastic job by having a movie about the different stages growing writers go through. Richard read quotations from different authors on the topic. Julie used the 4 A’s Protocol to show a way for a group of people to discuss an idea in a format that ensures that everyone can be heard. Melissa took us back to thinking about our own metaphor for continually growing and changing as writers and set us working together as groups to draw and described our metaphor for the journey and what we would need to take with us.
We ended our last day with Ronnie with a special ceremony to show her how much we appreciated her contribution to our fellowship and learning. As a group, we gave her handmade jandals, a guide to southern English, orange coffee, warm thoughts, a book to inspire writing, a Wordle, and a Native American medicine bag. Megan contributed two scrumptious cakes in absentia, leaving little else for us to do this afternoon but hug Ronnie goodbye and walk off the shared calories.