Tompkins, had given me alot of methods when it comes to writing techniques that I should incorporate when I begin teaching in my own classroom. The main one that I got to implement in my classroom with my five students was called collaborative reports. I am in my masters project class and my action research had to do with improving their vocabulary with some writing.
The main reason I chose this particular writing lesson was to get my students to create short reports. They needed to learn that there are times when a long report is not needed as long as they could get all the information into the shorter report. However, they also needed to use the information that they had found and be able to explain it in these short reports to their readers easily.
I asked the students to collaborate together to create a story about their trip to NASA. We had been talking about stories and what impact they have on their readers. We also discussed how many paragraphs make up a story and what parts make up those paragraphs. They needed to have the who, what, where, when, and why, they also needed to tell what would be in the body of their story. First, Second, and Last paragraphs that will explain the main points to their readers.
I wanted them to collaborate together in order to create a graphic organizer such as a T-chart to help with their report. I explained to them that Tcharts are used when a story is going to be created. The students were able to collaborate together to edit and revise their papers. During this time, I was able to meet with the students individually to see if they had any questions or needed help with their tchart in order to create their stories.
When the time came, I was able to allow my students to present their stories and tcharts to their classmates and teacher. They were even allowed to come to the smart board and present it that way if they wanted.
One thing that I learned from this activitiy is that I would incorpate the internet or other resources next time for the students to use to get more information about their topic. One thing that did help was that we were able to just focus on this topic because I implemented this lesson while TCAP was going on that week. I know now that I would need to teach this lesson to my students when there were little interuptions. They need all the help of the teacher that they can get.
Another thing that I need to remember is that students need a variety of teaching techniques in order to complete their assignment. Students tend to want their input and one way to do so is to let them choose their writing topic just as long as they ok it by the teacher first. This is one exercise I tend to use for my future students. I will keep my options and ideas open for my students writing!
Great Assignment! I like the collaborative part of it and the emphasis on creating a report that contains a lot of information and yet is still concise. A lot of my students struggle with overly verbose writing. One of the rules from Strunk and White's authoritative book on writing style states that writers need to omit needless words. Forcing students to write concisely hones this skill.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you learned some of the same stuff from your implementation that I did. I, too, need to have students do their research assignment when there are fewer distractions. The fourth quarter of the school year is absolutely crazy, and I need to have foresight enough to plan to make this quarter manageable for both student and teacher.
If you do choose to implement more internet research the next time you have students do this assignment, be sure to guide them through the blessings and trappings of the internet as a resource. Though there is a ton of good information out there, I have found that allowing students to use the internet usually leads to shoddy research and lazy writing. It also opens the door for academic dishonesty. I am by no means against it, they just need to be well prepped on the front end.