Taking Risks…Teacher Writing Group
Everyone should have a Dr. Bloome in their professional lives. Dave is the director of the Columbus Area Writing Project and he meets with our teacher writing group every month. I tag team with Dave for the meetings. I do the writing prompt and read around and Dave helps us move our thinking forward by talking about writing instruction. Tonight’s meeting was another one that took us a bit out of our comfort zones, but will only improve our teaching.
Dave challenged us to take a risk in our teaching. He explained that risk taking is at the heart of learning. Not all learning is safe and predictable, but we don’t grow unless we take risks. So, our assignment is to take a risk in our teaching of writing. We answered the following questions as we planned: What is the “risk” you are proposing to take? Why is this a risk? What do you hope to learn or accomplish by taking this “risk?” What do you need and need to do to prepare yourself to take this risk?
The people at my table shared their plans: A kindergarten ELL teacher wants to give her students more control over their writing. She’d like them to be able to make a decision about their writing and name the craft or mentor text they are using. Our literacy coach wants to be more present as a writer when she is doing instruction and share her own writing. A K-5 resource room teacher wants her students to be able to try some new genres and document their writing journeys. Her frustration lies in trying to meet everyone’s needs across all the grade levels. I want to work alongside my students to become more independent in publishing their work digitally. I just received The Digital Workshop, so that may give me some ideas. I’d also like to try Voice Threads…so we’ll see. I have a month to try something out.
Dave asked us to try the risk, see how it goes, and write about what we’ve learned. The important part is not whether or not the “risk” is successful, but what we learn from it.
On a side note, when we met with the technology teacher today to plan future projects, she told me that several teachers talked about “taking risks.” Should be interesting.
