A Collection of Promising Practices to Provoke the Teaching of Writing
The group of 24 educators who participated in the 2018 Summer Writing Institute endeavoured to deepen the well of resources that they could draw from to move their practices of writing and teaching writing forward. The participants came from diverse teaching backgrounds, held different positions within schools, came from different places from around Manitoba and even a few came from different countries – but despite (or maybe because of) these differences they formed a community of writers. In this Summer Writing Institute community they explored writing and teaching through the lenses of community, inquiry, and connecting place-based literacies to issues of social justice, eco-justice, and human rights. As part of the process, they created package of materials and reflections on pedagogy that they hoped would support other teachers of writers.
Promising Practices Process
During the Summer Institute, each student in the class presented a 30-minute teaching writing demonstration to their community. Drawing upon the experiences and pedagogical process explained by Janet Swenson and Diana Mitchell (2006) of the Red Cedar Writing Project www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/8965/Enabling_Communities_and_Collaborative_Responses_to_Teaching_Demonstrations.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d, participants from the Summer Institute participated in the Collaborative Response to Teaching Demonstration (CRTD) process. Following the demonstrations, they would meet in groups of three or four to collaboratively write a reflective response letter to the presenter. They followed a template which guided us to provide feedback with the following five lenses as our focus: Affective responses, promising teaching practices, curriculum connections, extensions and adaptations, and questions arisen. In the affective response section, they wrote about how they felt as teachers and learners. Promising practices led them to reflect upon what works well for both learners and teachers. They explored connections to the new Manitoba ELA curriculum, as well as connections to other curricular documents. This helped them think together about how to transform a process-based curriculum into understandings of how their current teaching and assessment practices already fit or could be deepened and expanded. As they extended and adapted, they thought about how that lessons could fit different grades, levels, subjects, genres or how it could differentiated for diverse learners. They then asked questions that arose for their larger inquiries into teaching, learning and writing. What you will encounter now is a compilation of the 2018 Summer Writing Institute participants' own descriptions of their teaching demonstrations and reflections that were shaped by the letters they received from our community.
2018 Collection of Promising Practices to Provoke the Teaching of Writing
The PDF of the collection of lesson descriptions and reflections on these promising practices is provided below.
Promising Practices Process
During the Summer Institute, each student in the class presented a 30-minute teaching writing demonstration to their community. Drawing upon the experiences and pedagogical process explained by Janet Swenson and Diana Mitchell (2006) of the Red Cedar Writing Project www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/8965/Enabling_Communities_and_Collaborative_Responses_to_Teaching_Demonstrations.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d, participants from the Summer Institute participated in the Collaborative Response to Teaching Demonstration (CRTD) process. Following the demonstrations, they would meet in groups of three or four to collaboratively write a reflective response letter to the presenter. They followed a template which guided us to provide feedback with the following five lenses as our focus: Affective responses, promising teaching practices, curriculum connections, extensions and adaptations, and questions arisen. In the affective response section, they wrote about how they felt as teachers and learners. Promising practices led them to reflect upon what works well for both learners and teachers. They explored connections to the new Manitoba ELA curriculum, as well as connections to other curricular documents. This helped them think together about how to transform a process-based curriculum into understandings of how their current teaching and assessment practices already fit or could be deepened and expanded. As they extended and adapted, they thought about how that lessons could fit different grades, levels, subjects, genres or how it could differentiated for diverse learners. They then asked questions that arose for their larger inquiries into teaching, learning and writing. What you will encounter now is a compilation of the 2018 Summer Writing Institute participants' own descriptions of their teaching demonstrations and reflections that were shaped by the letters they received from our community.
2018 Collection of Promising Practices to Provoke the Teaching of Writing
The PDF of the collection of lesson descriptions and reflections on these promising practices is provided below.
promising_practices_title_page.pdf | |
File Size: | 24646 kb |
File Type: |