Reflection 1

The purpose of my first lesson was to introduce the students to the writing project that we were going to be doing. The intention was to set the background for the project where the students would get excited about writing for a realistic audience and then get a chance to work together as a class to draft a first attempt. I could see from the number of questions that the students asked that they got really excited about the first part of the lesson. They asked questions like “Are we really getting a new student?” This showed me that they were interested about writing for this target audience. The discussion also went much longer than I intended it to because of the curiosity they had about the things they might write about. I could tell that there was still some underlying confusion when we started to brainstorm and write our class draft together. The piece they were writing was supposed to be for a new student so that they would understand what rules we had at Donley or they could tell about an exciting spot to visit in East Lansing. This came right after we had just given the students new spots in line for when we were moving around the school. The first idea I got when I started trying to draft the class copy was about lining up and it quickly devolved into a how to piece on how we decided to get our spots in line. This was unanticipated by me and I didn’t know how to guide them more in the direction that I was looking for in an authentic piece.

I also think another factor might have come into play with this lesson. We had just gotten done with our writing unit on small moments. There was some evidence that the students were trying to tell about a small moment. The first sign of this was that they told me about the most recent thing that had happened to them in the school. I also noticed that they were trying to give ideas from a first person perspective instead of telling a new student about why we line up they were telling the process of getting their own personal spot.

Beyond my objectives I learned that the students were aware of the writing lessons we had just accomplished and were having a hard time moving to something new. I also found that they were capable of using their own thoughts to start a piece, but they had more trouble when they had to extend a classmate’s idea. This was a new practice to them and one I didn’t explicitly teach that ended up being something important that I should have considered.

I realized after teaching this lesson that I had some major misconceptions that I needed to clear up before I taught the next lesson. Fortunately I planned on the second lesson building upon the first so the changes to the actual lesson didn’t need to be huge, but I did need to make sure I spent more time clarifying what I expected during our brainstorming session. I also realized that the students were going to need a very explicit way to record their ideas while brainstorming because when I left things wide open to them they tended to reach too far outside the box on what they would be able to write.

 When I consider my core practice of trying to write for an authentic audience I learned that I was able to get the students excited about writing for a particular audience. However, I also learned that in the future I might need to find an audience that is a little more concrete. The students were excited about writing for a new student, but they weren’t able to put themselves in that student’s shoes and think about the writing they did on this first day from that point of view. They were only able to think about what they wanted to tell about.