Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers
are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about
supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion.
Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.
This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing
on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing
Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals,
find out how here.
Writing Workshop
Final Journal
Week #35:
Top Ten Things I Learned This Year
Ever watch David Letterman? If you're up after 11:00 p.m., you probably
know all about his show. He's got a thing for top ten lists. They're a great
way to say a lot in a short amount of time. Starting with number 10 and
moving up, here's my list of the "Top Ten Things I Learned This Year
While Teaching Writing Workshop."
10. I can write poems.
During our unit of study about revision, I discovered that I still enjoy
writing poems.
The Hungriest Teacher in the World
One afternoon
The hungriest teacher in the world
Ate all her students.
She ate them one by one.
And when she was done,
She took a nap.
9. You can teach an old dog new tricks.
I learned a lot this year about:
- using my own writing as a model for everything I teach. (Journal
# 21)
- rethinking punctuation and editing. (Journal #12)
- what craft is and how to "read like a writer." (Journal
# 10)
- reinventing revision. (Journal # 33)
- leaning on the advice of professional writers.
- how to clear out the cache on the networked printers.
- observing as students hold their own peer conferences. (Journal
# 24)
- becoming a better listener.
- looking at student work in Writing Workshop over
a whole year.
8. Wear black when you videotape your teaching.
In order to have a more objective view of my teaching and what goes
on in the class during Writing Workshop, I spent a day videotaping. I started
the class off with a brief mini-lesson on revision and then moved around
the classroom as students were publishing their poems on the computers.
Amazingly, in 45 minutes of taping everything went smoothly. Kids moved
easily from activity to activity. When they asked me for help, I gently
reminded them, "Ask three, then me." They helped each other and
worked on revising with a partner. Students even gave technical assistance,
to other computer users, as needed. What a growth experience for me, and
for the kids! The only problem was that I lost the first several minutes
of taping because I forgot to take off the lens cap. Next time, I'll check
the camera sooner.
7. It's all about the writers, not the writing.
Kids love Writing Workshop. It's as if they were born to do it. And
I think they were. It's hands-on, engaging, stimulating work. They work
hard, no question about that. But while they're doing their writing work,
they're learning about how other writers go about their writing and they're
building a community of writers within the workshop. In The
Writing Workshop, Working Through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts),
Katie Wood Ray explains why it's important to teach writing in a workshop
setting.
"(T)eaching writing in a workshop setting is highly theoretical
teaching. That's why we do it--because it's theoretical. Every aspect of
the workshop is set up to support children learning to do what writers really
do. The teaching is challenging because what writers really do is engage
in a complex, multilayered, slippery process to produce texts. The writing
itself is very satisfying, even fun at times, but that's the truth of writing.
It's not some motivational game we set up to keep children's interest. If
that were all we wanted, we would do things that were far less challenging
for us as teachers." (From the "Introduction")
6. Football can help you write.
Checking through the kids' writing folders at the end of this year,
I realize that Maurice has written about football in every genre that we
studied. During our study of memoir, he wrote about a particular Pop Warner
football game. When we worked on feature articles, his piece was about Deion
Sanders, his favorite football player, and how he got to be so fast. His
persuasive essay, "Wear a Helmet When You Ride a Mini Bike," told
about one of his friends who couldn't play football because he'd fallen
off of a mini bike and hadn't been wearing a helmet. He wrote about a dream
football game with his friends during our study of realistic fiction. But
poetry was what he enjoyed the most. This is his latest football poem.
Football
I wish football could marry me.
I wish I could sleep with football.
I wish I could live with football.
I wish I could go to the Prom with football.
I wish I could talk to football.
I love football.
I want to go to the carnival with football.
5. Everyone likes to do research on the Internet, write first drafts
on the computer, and print it all out.
If we have a bottleneck in our Writing Workshop, it happens while we
are doing Internet research. Everyone seems to want to do everything at
the same time. It's what Katie Wood Ray describes as "Understanding
That Slightly Out-of-Hand Feeling" in The Writing Workshop, Working
Through the Hard Parts (And They Are All Hard Parts).
"Planning, organizing, and teaching in a writing workshop
is very challenging work. Teachers who have them (their own, not one from
a kit) have spent years developing the deeply theoretical underpinnings
necessary to understand the work they are trying to do with children. They
spend day after day in these workshops watching and planning and redirecting
and pulling back and pushing forward and just trying to keep up with all
the different work children are engaged in. Every year feels almost like
starting over as they fell compelled, once again, to take what they learned
from last year and rethink how they will do things this year with this new
group of students in mind. In fact, having a writing workshop is such complex,
hard work that the best writing teachers I know sometimes spend their whole
careers never feeling like they've quite got a handle on it--feeling like
it's just slightly out of their control. I think that may be how it's supposed
to feel." (p. 86)
As the year goes along it gets easier and easier to manage the research
and the printing. That's because the kids get more independent and more
able to problem-solve for themselves and for each other.
There's also the issue of whether to let kids write first drafts on the
computer. When I think about what to do with first drafts in Writing Workshop,
I think about advice from other writers. Some writers do all their drafting
with a paper and pencil; others do all their writing on the computer (that's
me.) So in Writing Workshop we try for a mixed approach. At the beginning
of the year, everyone writes first drafts with paper and pencil. The second
half of the year, kids have the option of drafting on the computer if they
choose. This works well for us.
4. Gardens don't necessarily grow.
In Journal 19, I included excerpts from my own writer's notebook I'd
shared with my students. One entry read:
I'm sitting at the staff meeting and can't believe what they're
saying. The reason the district came and sprayed weed killer over a third
of the grass on the soccer field is because they're going to put in a community
garden. And first, they need to kill the grass. Weed killer! And the kids
can't go on any part of the field for two weeks.
This school has only one pathetic, small tree on the whole playground and
they take 5/12 (one class went out and measured it) of the only grass field
in the entire neighborhood. A garden is a great idea, but why not a container
garden that could be used to beautify the asphalt areas. That's what we
need.
The garden is not there. It was supposed to be in full bloom by now.
No big announcement, just the slow regrowing of the grass, and the thud
and noise of soccer resonating once again. Maybe our adventures with Randy
Bomer's book, Teaching for a Better World, Reading and Writing for Social
Action, and our unit of study on persuasive writing did make a difference.
(Journals #19 and #20)
3. Writers are like ogres. They have layers.
Syllogisms were the first new thing I learned about when I went to college.
"A formal deductive argument made up of a major premise, a minor premise,
and a conclusion. An example is 'all birds have feathers, penguins are birds,
therefore penguins have feathers.'"
This year in Writing Workshop, it came to me that "Writers are like
ogres. Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers, so do writers." So
much of what we do in Writing Workshop is about layers. We add layers of
genre and craft, and we take away layers of misconception about revision,
editing, and punctuation. We all end up like "onions."
In the movie "Shrek," Donkey has a wonderful discussion with Shrek,
the ogre, about onions and ogres that makes everything clear. Although it
may come as a surprise to you, writers are like ogres (and onions). They
have layers.
Excerpt from "Shrek":
Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to ogres
than people think.
Donkey: Example?
Shrek: Example...ok, um...ogres (looks at onion in hand) are like
onions.
Donkey: (Sniffs onion in Shrek's hand)...they stink?
Shrek: Yes, NO!
Donkey: They make people cry.
Shrek: NO!
Donkey: Oh, you leave 'em out in the sun; they get all brown, start
sprouting little white hairs.
Shrek: NO! Layers! Onions have layers; ogres have layers. Onions
have layers...ya get it? We both have layers (Sighs and throws onion to
ground in frustration as he strides away.)
Donkey: OH! You both have layers...oh...Ya know, not everybody likes
onions...CAKES! (Donkey chases after Shrek.) Everybody loves cakes. Cakes
have layers!
Shrek: I DON'T CARE what everyone likes. Ogres are NOT like cakes.
Donkey: You know what else everybody loves? Parfait. Have you ever
met a person? You say, "Hey, let's go get some parfait." They
say, "Lookit here, I don't like no parfait." Parfaits are delicious.
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden. Ogres
are like onions. End of story. Bye-bye! (Whispers) See ya' later.
2. Good listservs make good neighbors.
It may not be a good place to scrounge up a cup of sugar, but the MiddleWeb
Reading and Writing Project listserv is filled with the best neighbors I
know. From the friendliest and most knowledgeable of Internet folks, I've
borrowed ideas for every one of the twelve units of study in this year's
Writing Workshop journals. My professional life is deeply enriched by daily
contact with this group. And what professionals they are!
"They know their stuff. They know who they are stuffing. And they know
how to stuff it." (A bad rendering of a great quote from a source I
can't remember!)
1. I am very lucky.
"You're lucky if you find something you love to do and
someone who'll pay you to do it." -- James Patterson
How much I've learned this year! It seems that, in our class, I'm always
the one who learns the most.
Download year-long writing portfolios by Manual
and Sophanna, demonstrating their
growth in Juli's Writing Workshop. Juli writes that "This 'year at
a glance' view of their writing allows the 'whole writer' to emerge. I find
it fascinating to look over a whole year of writing samples. Obviously,
they still have a long way to go. But they are participating fully in the
process and making progress toward more accurate spelling, grammar/usage,
word choice, and sentence fluency. As English Language Learners, their strengths
are probably their ideas and content. They have lots to say in their writing.
A strong voice is also evident in both their work." (Also see Journals
#4 and #28)
Read last week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
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