ELLEN
BERG
Diary #8
Why Our Character Sketch Unit Worked
This past week ended my character sketch unit. Thursday and Friday all the boys and girls were adding their finishing touches, asking last minute questions, and handing in their stories for evaluation.
Though I felt pretty confident that students were understanding and applying what we had been learning about in class, I have discovered you do not really know until the papers are sitting in front of you. There have been times I have flipped through students' work in disbelief, crying, "Certainly somebody understood?"
Fortunately, this time the results were overwhelmingly positive. Most of my students learned what I taught. It's time to do the happy dance.There is, of course, a range of mastery among my students. I have students who go beyond the criteria with their descriptions of characters' physical features, facial expressions and gestures and have meaty, realistic dialogue. Everything is not only included in the piece, but it also flows seamlessly through the paper.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have students who did not integrate these ideas as smoothly, but it is obvious they were trying to apply those aspects of writing craft to their own writing. It is clear they understood the concepts, though they are limited in their writing background and other facets of craft. It is a success in my eyes.
In the past I have had successful lessons, and in the joy and celebration of the moment, I have failed to reflect upon what I did that made the lesson successful. In order to repeat our success and apply it to new situations, we must understand the path we traveled to get there the first time. It is a skill I am working on with my students, but one I too seldom practice with my own work.
What made this unit click
Why was this unit successful? A few of my initial thoughts follow. We were writers, learning about and practicing our craft. From the very beginning I emphasized that good writers had certain tools they used to create their writing. We read Chapter 3, "Building Characters," from Ralph Fletcher's Live Writing, to find out what another writer had to say about writing good characters. We looked at examples of the techniques in other books and stories, and we practiced each aspect in our writing notebook.Instruction was clear, direct and manageable. I wonder how many times I have asked students to write a story without really teaching them how. I have explained the parts of a story, talked about showing instead of telling and reminded them to have a beginning, middle and end. I have told my students a lot of very vague and global things, but the problem is that telling is not teaching.
This time I knew what I wanted my students to know, explained each concept and spent time practicing it, and gave them several models to view and think about. I have too often started with the activity and then figured out the objectives it met, but this time, since the teacher knew where she wanted to go and how she was going to get there, it was easy for the kids to travel with her.
The project was both deep and wide. As I have mentioned before, I always worry that if I go too in-depth with a concept I will shortchange the curriculum. However, this time I learned how to better layer concepts so I could cover a large amount of material. Since concepts were interrelated, I was able to refer back to earlier concepts to assist students' understandings of new concepts. All concepts were included in the summative project, so we were able to explore each concept thoroughly as we worked toward the end result. Reading and writing were integrated. We read like readers, and we read like writers. During writing lessons we returned to stories and chapters we had read to see how authors wrote their characters. Many times during this unit students would make their own connections between what they were reading and how they were writing. Students were given the freedom to choose. Although students had to write a character sketch, who their character was and the scene they wrote was entirely their own creation. Additionally, when students felt their writing and/or characters were going nowhere, I gave them permission to abandon them and try on a new character. They seemed surprised they could do that, but I told them that real writers did not stick with something that was not working. Real writers file that work away for a later day. They appeared to accept that response eagerly.We had real conversations about writing. I did not have formal writing conferences during this unit, but I dropped in on each student during writing time at least once a week to see how their work was going. Students felt comfortable asking me questions and identifying areas they were not happy with, and I learned how to ask them more probing questions to help them find the answers for themselves. When I was not succeeding with my explanations or questions, I called on students who seemed to understand or who had dealt with similar problems in their own writing to help the student out.
See these writing samples from Ellen's character sketch unit
I am in the process of planning my next unit, and I am hoping it will be as successful as this one was. I am going to try to use the same strategies in my inquiry unit, though I am hitting some roadblocks in my own thinking as I begin to gather information. At this point I have more questions than answers, but building on the successful practices of this last unit seems to be a good place to start. Wish me luck.
