Welcome to my blog! Since this is my first blog post (ever!) I’d like introduce myself. I’m Anne Hartline and I teach 6th grade Language Arts and Social Studies at McKinleyville Middle School. Though my undergraduate degree is in Environmental Sciences, my passion as a 24 year educator has become early adolescent literacy across all content areas. Reading and writing with kids is important, challenging, and fun!
So, it’s that time of year again – the end of the grading period looms in the near future and both you and the kids are burnt out from extended writing assignments that may or may not have met your goals for excellence. You want to keep up the writing momentum but you hesitate to launch into another long- range writing piece. If you are like me, you also wish your students had spent more time over the last months in quality discussions, and you’d like to find a way to keep them engaged, focused, and talking as we enter the crazy and stressful holiday season.
Well, I have a solution. Labeled “Write-Around” by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Elaine Daniels (in The Best-Kept Teaching Secret, Corwin Literacy, 2013), and similarly discussed by Doug Buehl as “Written Conversation” (Wisconsin Education Association Website, 2007), this is an assignment that sets the stage for pithy student discussions by initially having students converse silently in writing to one another. Besides, it’s fun! From beginning to end it should take about 45 minutes. Here’s how it works (paraphrased from Daniels and Daniels):
- Choose a piece of text (an interesting or controversial news article, a complex cartoon or image, a video, a provocative short story, anything that interests kids and could yield a variety of interpretations and levels of complexity.)
- Have your students read/review the article independently. If you have taught annotation (an invaluable practice that I HIGHLY recommend), have them annotate as well. Don’t discuss it.
- Arrange the kids in groups of three or four (do not allow groups of two or five.) The first time you try this, you may want the kids to be in groups in which they have successfully worked in the past.
- Pose a challenging, thought provoking question or topic students will respond to related to the text.
- Issue each student a blank piece of notebook paper
- Establish the ground rules:
- All talking must be in writing — no oral communication is allowed.
- Use your best writing so your friends can read it.
- Use all the time you are given.
- Again, no talking. Ever. This is a silent activity.
- Now, begin the activity. Tell the students to write to the other students in their group about the topic. If you think they’ll need some sample stems as starters, have those available, but don’t make using them a requirement.
- After about three minutes (you can time it or watch to see when half the group is done) instruct writers to finish their thoughts.
- Have all students pass his/her paper to the student on the left.
- Students then read what has been written and respond in writing. Students should feel free to agree, disagree, or point out a whole new line of reasoning.
- Again, after about three minutes (you can time it or watch to see when half the group is done) instruct writers to finish their thoughts.
- Again, students pass the papers and continue the silent pattern or reading and responding until writers receive their own paper back.
- Once all papers are back to the originator, instruct students to read everything that has been written on the paper. Have them find one sentence that someone has written (either theirs or someone else’s) that they think would be worthy of further discussion and highlight it.
- Now, open the discussion to out-loud talking in small groups. Each student shares the sentence he/she thought was most interesting and the group discusses it. Make sure all students have a chance to share the sentence they chose.
- At this point, students could write a final response or opinion piece, or a whole class discussion could follow.
Try this! I think you will find, as I have, that students love the almost note-passing nature of this activity. At the same time, it encourages writing fluency and focused discussion. Enjoy!
-Anne
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