New Teacher Support & Development
Empowering and Motivating Every Student, Every Day!
KNOWING & THINKING & WRITING: A TRIO FOR LEARNING
"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." Flannery O'Connor (author)
"I don't know what I think until I write it down." Joan Didion (author)
"As learning tools, writing exercises are valuable because they help students think critically about course material while encouraging them to grasp, organize, and integrate prior knowledge with new concepts." Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Reflection Journals: "Independent readers not only read for meaning; they also need to reflect on and discuss their reading with others. . . . Students need to make notes and write down their thoughts and observations. . . . What did I learn from this text?" Fisher, D. and Frey, N. Rigorous Reading, 111, 114.
One of the learning tasks for new teachers is the collaborative/reflecting log that mentors and teachers write during their collaborative conversations. The log is both cognitive (the action) and metacognitive (the learning); the mentor documents the conversation while the teacher reflects on and scribes the learning. The suggested practice asks that the mentor and teacher discuss a bit; then, both stop and write; then, continue the same until the end of the hour. At the end of the year, the logs become a repository of the teacher's professional growth.
I know that the collaborative log is not a favorite task for teachers and mentors, yet the practice of intercalating content with reflective writing provides a model for frequent writing in the classroom. Just recently, I have heard teacher comments: I have to have my students do more writing; my students write reports, and that takes time; my students need practice with short responses. As a routine, frequent writing - structured and unstructured and of various lengths - provides the student, as it does the new teacher, time to stop, to think, to write, and to think and write some more.
"The amount and quality of writing students do in the classroom are two of the most important determinants of their academic success. . . . By having students write more, we cause them to push their ideas from vague notion (developing idea) to complete thought, and to practice developing complete thoughts is to practice perhaps the core task of thinking." Lemov, D. Teach Like a Champion 2.0, 281.
John Ekelund
Unlocking the Future Today!