Ch 7, 8 and 19

Classroom management is one of my favorite topics to learn about in our education classes. The idea of setting up all of my own rules and techniques and skills we have learned throughout out college careers is really exciting to me. Maybe that's lame? Regardless, I like it. So naturally learning about how to manage your writers workshop was valuable information to me.

Technique #1 a strong teaching presence.

When I first read this heading I thought.. really? This is a technique that Katie Wood Ray thinks she can teach us? This makes me super nervous. Classroom presence seems like something so intangible to me. I guess maybe its just something you have to feel out and experiment with in practice. I definitely see where she's coming from in that its important, I only hope I will have it :) The ideas of space and materials flow right with everything else we've learned about classroom management. They seem doable, and easily so. Anyone can arrange desks in a certain way and buy plenty of folders but presenting yourself in a way that demands respect? That is a skill you must simply have or have not, and that's why not everyone can be a classroom teacher.

I'm really glad that Ray put chapter 8 in the book. I feel like when she was writing all the previous chapters it was floating in the back of her mind and then chapter 8 rolled around and everything just spilled over. But it is the perfect truth. Writing workshop is going to make you feel uneasy, out of control and uncomfortable.What Ray is saying is that if you can't handle this you can just get out. Not in a mean way, just that that's the way it is. My very favorite thing from this chapter was the following passage:

"it is our very job as teachers to know as much as we possibly can--using any means available, any means we can think of--to know as much as we can about the work students are doing in our writing workshops. But it is also true, at the very same time, that we can't possibly know all of that."

It's one of those things you really have to wrap your head around, but I completely agree and I think I will only more agree with her as I get actual experience in the classroom.

The last chapter was all about publishing. Publish or Perish as Ray liked to say. I think that publishing work has a lot of value in a classroom. It certainly teaches students what you expect there final product to be, allows them practice with actually finishing work and most importantly (for me) gives them a sense of pride from having followed a piece from start to polished finished. However, unlike Ray, deadlines do not exactly make my skirt fly up. In contrast they give me much anxiety. So I would just have to find a different way to get my students excited about publishing. Probably through the final production aspect. I would have the deadlines in place, but i don't know if I would want my students to know about them months and months in advance.

Chapters 14, 15, 17

Wow no post in a week and it feels kind of weird! I momentarily forgot how to use this thing :)

In the first chapter of this weeks reading we learned about conferencing. As a student and writer conferencing used to scare the bejezzus out of me. I tend to be a little self conscious and when it comes to something as personal as writing, the idea of showing everything to you teacher before its actually done would make me very nervous. However Katie Wood Ray's ideas about conferencing sound very comforting and I don't think they would put a shy student in an awkward place. For one Ray suggests is to conference everyday. Maybe you won't get to every student every day but just doing this with a few will take some of the stress off of it. I remember conferencing being something you had to prepare for and then when it happened the teacher would sit at her desk all day and call people up one by one. I also liked that Ray said that you "try to teach" during the conference. I also remember conferencing from my experience being a simple approve or disapprove if what you were working on... maybe I just didn't have good experiences though. I like that conferring the Ray way is a very deliberate act of teaching to students individually. I also really enjoyed the conference notes table, but then I'm just a fan of neatly organized tables.

In Chapter 15 about sharing I really enjoyed reading about the 4 different types of sharing. i never would have thought that there were so many ways you could do a simple thing like sharing. Survey sharing was particularly interesting to me because with it everyone gets a chance to share something meaningful but it is still a quick way to do so. I really think sharing is an extremely valuable time. I have seen students go up to the share chair and beam with pride and confidence as they read off what they've been laboring over and it's such a rewarding thing to seen.

Chapter 17 was about questioning. Something that, as teachers, we should know a lot about. I feel like asking questions is something that comes extremely naturally to teachers. We just want to know about the students, what they like, what they're doing, how we can help them. At least thats the way I am. I think it's nice that Katie Wood Ray attempts to teach us the right way to do this. Something this reading made me think about was the statement Ray said that the questions you ask are a part of the curriculum and assessment. Asking questions of a student is, kind of obviously, the best way to understand what they are doing. You can make assessments or inferences based on what you read but if you ask a child about his work it may help you read it with that certain lens that really helps you understand.