An interesting writing lesson

As a part of the Noyce group, Sutter has access to the Every Child a Reader/Writer curriculum. The Writerly Life study has recently been updated. Most of the lessons have remained unchanged but a new one has been added that had be smiling the minute I read it. I knew it was going to be memorable! It is an explicit teaching of how to approach writing conferences both as a teacher and student. Now, I have done several versions of a mini lesson that address this topic - modeling with a carefully selected student and charting the important parts of a conference. But I never thought of modeling and allowing each student to practice this skill. Yes, that's right. Everybody gets a partner and takes turns being the teacher and then the student in the writing conference. The goal of this lesson is to make the student conferences more productive. So when the teacher asks, "How's it going?" you get something more than, "Fine." There were so many times during the lesson that I just wanted to laugh out loud as I watched my students emulating me but they were all "teachable moments." I couldn't walk past any of them with out stopping and commenting on the fabulous job they were doing as teacher. I watched kids tell their "student" the correct spelling of they, how they could get feeling into their writing or paint a picture for the reader. Then there was the group having a discussion about what to do when you know what you're going to write about, you start writing and then suddenly you forget what you were going to write. I could hardly stand it. But I just said in my teacher voice, "That is a great question. Let's talk about that when we come back to the carpet to share." So, of course the end result of the lesson is what happens when you then have a conference with a student about their writing. So I had my regular conferences. The first student response to "How's it going?" was, "Well I'm having a little problem with this piece." (Success!) The next 2 were "Fine..." As I internally groaned, I asked the follow up, "Tell me about your writing." And my final student responded with her automatic "Fine" and then interrupted her own thinking with, "I mean, I want you to help me tell this story about when I had strept throat in pre-school." The end result was that I had my first conference with a primary student about telling a story from another perspective. She laughed out loud when I told her of my recent writing of a letter I wrote to Milo's parents from his perspective. Yet, another reason that teachers of writing must write!