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I am guilty of thinking of teenagers in the way Stevens describes needing to change, I have always thought of them as "frenetic, moody, and altogether unreliable" (Stevens p. 268). I think I felt viewed upon this way when I was their age as well. My students think of school as boring; they are subjected to a strict English curriculum that doesn't allow a lot of room for literacy as exploration of the self. They do not read whole books (except for the high achievers).

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When I was student teaching, I spent the first two to three weeks of school teaching students in constructing their own memoirs. I did this as an icebreaker activity so I could get to know their personalities, experiences, writing styles, and work ethics. Through this experience, I helped one student eventually publish his memoir, even though in the beginning, he didn't think of himself as a good writer. Through conferencing and encouragement, I helped him to think of himself as a writer rather than just a student.

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"I hope to enfranchise the students into my ways of thinking about English class and disarm their traditional, commonsense notions about 'what we are supposed to be doing here.'" (Bomer 1995, p. 23)

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I'll share a bad example, one that I am not proud of, but one that has led me to where I am now!
In my first year of teaching I will admit I was very draw in and obsessed with standardized FAST results. I got so caught up in showing improvement in my students words per minute scores. I remember telling a student if he made a mistake to just keep going rather than go back and fix it, he just needed to read quickly. To this day I still feel haunted by this memory thinking that this student only thinks he is a good reader if he reads quickly. I've spent every year since then trying to reverse that thinking for my other students. Now, I tell my students the opposite.

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I don't have any pictures of my entire room, but this corner is the heart of my classroom. This is our classroom library. I allow the kids choice in picking their independent reading books (ILA, 2019). They keep their books in their "book box" on the shelf to the left and read from those books for a week or so. When they're ready to trade they "book shop" through our classroom library. (Bomer 1995) talks about students accessing materials independently. The routines we have established with independent reading help students do exactly that. We have a similar system set up in our writing center at the other corner of the room.

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"Given the constraints imposed by high-stakes tests, writing as a way to study, learn, and go beyond - as a way to construct knowledge or generate new networks of understandings - is rare.” (Applebee, Langer, 2011, p.26)

Writing instruction is a passion of mine and one thing that I have strived to improve over the last year. I have grown to know and love Lucy Calkins. It saddens me to see that not much is changing in the middle and upper grades, despite the growth in knowledge.

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Now that I have a one year old son, the idea of learning language has become more clear to me. As Johnston, Woodside-Jiron, and Day point out (2001), "Students don't just do literate activities, they are in the process of becoming literate as well" (p.223). From birth, we are emerged in a world of literacy. As a first grade teacher, I have learned reading is more than just the letters and sounds strung together, it also includes the meaning and context behind the words and sentences. What we choose to focus on in reading with our students is how they will view reading, and themselves as readers. Instead of just focusing on reading the words correctly, let's focus on reading to make meaning.

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I guess I should write about one of the recent experiences I had.  This was from this past 2019/2020 school year, and was with one of my 8th grade students.  I had her as a 7th grade student, and she had always been an great student, but was a reluctant writer.  She could easily grasp the deeper layers of texts in our discussions, but struggled with her identity as a writer.  Over the course of her 8th grade year, since there are a few more intense writing projects for her to engage in, she was able to understand writer's "voice" and to write an amazing thematic analysis of "Flowers for Algernon".  Most of her issues were with self confidence as a writer, and she really just needed that authentic feedback that supported her ideas.

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My career has been engrossed in middle school teens for almost 10 years; 7 as a substance abuse educator, and 3 as 7/8 grade ELA teacher.  From what I have noticed, the students innately know what is authentic and what isn't.  They crave that genuine connection to their world.  According to "Engagement and Adolescent Literacy", "mediated choice that is connected to adolescents’ lived experiences is central to ensuring that adolescents participate
meaningfully in literacy events and activities" (p. 4). I feel that my time with adolescents has shown that the connection is most important to them. Both in academics and social interactions.

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One quote really stood out to me from the Davis-Forbes article "Doing the Impossible..."  They talked about the energy it takes to teach middles by saying, "Viewing students as energy givers rather than energy-drains is part of the approach to conserving energy" (p. 17). It makes me think of the "great days" I had in class. When I felt excited even when the day was over. Finding ways to create energy, instead of exhausting myself by always being "on".

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I don't have any pictures of my new classroom, but I have a idea about how I want to set it up. My new room is smaller than my old middle school room, but I have the privilege of actually having an old "lab" attached to the main room. This secondary room I plan on using as a group work space and for one-one writing/reading conferences with my students. It has large open windows that will allow me to still monitor the main classroom, but also the privacy needed to meet with students on a more condensed level. I hope this helps me establish some of those connections that are so important to literacy instruction, and give the students a space to feel less restricted.

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Last school year, my most successful writing unit was the narrative chunk at the beginning of the year. We implemented narrative because my team realized our kids hardly wrote (!!!), so we adopted Gallagher and Kittle's 180 Days model. I'm so thankful we did because the most enjoyable/insightful writing from my students came from narrative prompts, especially ones about their lives. Of course, we were all banging our heads asking why we, as LA8 teachers, didn't do this sooner! I don't have an example for a specific student, BUT I will attest to the high engagement I saw when I offered students a variety of choices to write their final narrative piece. Since this type of writing is a bit "easier" (they're experts in their own lives), it was a great way to transition those same skills to writing like argument and informative where they might not have been as confident. For a lot of students, this transition was not as rocky as it would've been if I had started with a different type of writing. So, confidence in writing identities was greater this year than my previous years of teaching!

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I had a big "aha moment" last week after reading the article that describes how the author sees a so-called distracted student deeply engaged in an African drum performance outside of class. Maybe this is more of a "duh moment" but I made a goal to learn my students' strengths right away at the beginning of the year, so I can play off them in the classroom. I tend to think of my kids as full off 7th grade knowledge but empty of 8th. Instead, I really liked Bomer's point of "The students are far from empty, bringing with them funds of knowledge, memory, and experience that we need to learn to draw upon" (1995,p.18). The idea that students are coming into the classroom not as empty vessels but as valuable resources to a literate community was a common theme in the readings.

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I'm proud of how my team set a solid foundation for Readers Workshop in the classroom- we read every day for 10 minutes (we have a 42(ish) minute periods). However, as I mentioned in the first post, we struggle with consistent writing. Bomer brought up a possible solution of "wherein we write every day of the week or read every day of the week" (1995, p.35). I've been toying with this idea for awhile but I've guarded the reading time so closely. However, my kids aren't writing enough (and based on the readings, this isn't new), so something needs to change.

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I don't have any pictures, but Anna's picture is similar to my room! Students are at skinny tables that can be pushed together to create pods. My desk is off in the corner, buried in clutter. On the back wall, I print out the Slides kids create when they give a book talk (every kid gives one), so that takes up most of the wall. My library isn't as extensive as I'd like, but my classroom isn't too far from our amazing school library, and students can leave their library books on my bookshelf. I also have crates where kids can leave their notebooks for class. I'm definitely taking Bomer's idea of a "process-folio president" and appointing a student to organize the crates everyday (1995, p.30).

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Years ago before I changed my writing instruction, it was the worst part of the day.  I have my own history and ideas of writing and I honestly didn't think littles could be writers.  Students would end up in tears and I would be frustrated.  Now my experiences are totally different.  Every year my goal is to have kindergarten see themselves as writers (no matter what it looked like).  One experience that stands out to me is a little girl that really struggled getting over the idea that it didn't have to be conventionally perfect, but to get her ideas and thoughts down on paper anyway she possibly could.  It took awhile with a lot of encouragement and quick support but not enough that she would rely on me.  The best moment was when I picked my students up from Library and they were working on a book response activity.  The librarian told the class that she would walk around while they were drawing and write their answer on the page.  This little girl who had struggled to see that she could do it and was a writer spoke up to the librarian saying "You don't need to write for us.  We all are writers!"  She put her in her place.  The librarian told me this when I picked them up and said that made her think and realize her limiting thoughts of kindergartens and that she needed to expand her expectations in what kindergartners could do!

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Thinking back when I was a student and what stood out to me and what I still remember to this day was that I wasn't that great at writing.  I would continue to get papers back that were covered in red.  My conventions were horrible.  As hard as I tried, I felt like I never improved.  I left high school feeling that I just wasn't a writer.  Bomer (1995) states that "I try to help them understand that the problem is not inside them, in the way their brain is constructed or their native intelligence, but in the experiences they recall when they write about the pain or confusion they have felt in school." I have the privilege now to get a hold of students when they first begin to try and create this confidence and love for writing from a young age.
On the flip side, one specific project that we had to do in high school was to pick out a poem and analyze it. I hated poetry. I was stuck. But throwing ideas around, I was made aware of the idea to pick out a song instead of a straight forward poem. All of a sudden my imagination ran and I knew the song that I wanted to focus on and was able to complete the project with ease. With that little choice, it changed my entire outlook on the lesson.

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I enjoyed Bomer's examples of how to build a foundation for community. I'm aware and think it would work great for adolescents but....while I was reading, I was thinking about how I could incorporate some of these activities into my classroom and make students more aware of others and help them focus in on friends instead of their developmental egocentric view. This could help collaboration in reading and writers workshops.

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So this is a picture from the beginning of the year before students were able to spread out around the room. I picked this picture as you can see the discussions and engagement of the students in the books that they chose to read. This is generally what I was looking for on a daily basis from my students.

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While my classroom may not have always been the tidiest or the cutest around, one of my main goals after graduating college was to fill my classroom with books. I loved reading as a kid and wanted all of my students to love it, too! And I wanted them to know that there are so many books, there's bound to be some they like!

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I wouldn't say that the video challenged my thinking, but it made me think about my own childhood reading in a completely different light. Because I saw myself in all of the texts I read, as a child it never occurred to me that the other children weren't reading books that reflected themselves as well. This is becoming a more widely known issue with children's literature with the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it is important that all children can see themselves in what they read to make sense of life and problem-solve.

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With each passing year that I have taught, students and parents have become increasingly aware of the levels used by teachers for grouping students. I fear that this is becoming part of students' reading identity and they are viewing themselves as "high, middle, or low" readers. While this can often be the most effective and efficient way of teaching small groups, I wonder if we can find a better way, by mixing classes or using strategy groups so students can separate themselves from their "reading level."

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I have a personal experience of when a teacher helped me develop as a writer. She was one of my high school English teachers. My junior year I was struggling with writing. So, every written assignment I would begin the day it was assigned. I would write a little bit every day and email to my teacher every evening. By the next day in class, she had printed the new part I had written and given me detailed feedback on what I could do to make my writing better. I would not be the writer I am today without her. The following year, I had another fantastic English teacher who said that my mechanics and structure were great now, but I needed to work on my diction and word choice. After having both of them for English, my college writing experiences were a breeze. When I became a teacher I knew that I was going to be just as patient with my students as they were with me.