Love Writing

Image created at Tagxedo.com

Author's Note: 

When I spoke to Dr. Wickstrom about the idea of doing a multi genre project to outline my research, I was rather hard on the overuse of the word cloud. But after some reflection I realized it has some value and brings some great conversation to the table. For this cloud, I was very deliberate about designing it and the words I used.

The shape is a nod to pop culture, which every teacher knows is very important to our students. I wanted to convey to them my love for writing in a way that wasn't so in their face, but still subtly told them to be prepared, we will be doing a lot of it.

I took all of my annotations and pasted them into the text box to form the cloud. As you can see the keywords that stand out the most are student, writing, writer, and reading.I agree that these are the most important pieces to a successful writer's workshop because the research says so.

The largest word in the cloud is Student, and it should be. The student should be front of mind for all the decisions we make as educators. They are our most important stakeholder and will benefit or loose the most from our practices. There is no excuse for serving sub-par lessons to our studetns each day. Best practices supported by research take the student into account first. In the workshop model, the students begin to see themselves as writers which leads into the next largest key words.

It makes sense that writer, writing and reading are the same size. Kittle says readers are better writers because writing and reading are intimately connected. She makes her kids read 80 minutes outside of the reading they do in class. She also relies heavily on mentor texts to illustrate the key components of a genre and give good examples of well thought out word choice, proper mechanics, and organization of ideas. Having a text rich environment also scaffolds language learning for ELL's and provides access to academic language for higher level thinking. And in a writing workshop model, we are flexing our writing muscle by giving ample opportunity in a class period to write.

By looking at the key words I can see my focus come into view for this next year. To implement the writer's workshop I must have student buy in, have a text rich environment, and provide opportunity for our students to see themselves as thoughtful writers.