Teachers College July Writing Workshop
This summer I attended the Teachers College Writing Workshop. It was wonderful to attend this week long workshop in person on the campus of Columbia University in NY. Having worked with the curriculum for many years (without having attended the workshops), it was great to delve deeper into some questions I had about teaching practices and to explore some new idea. It was inspiring to see the revisions that have been made to the publsihed curriculum (streamlined, more diverse, etc). I took away some tools that I am excited to potentially try out in the classroom for example using identity maps to generate small moments (personal narraratives) or even non-fiction books about topics of interest, including some opion writing (book of awesome). I discovered some new ways to help students generate story ideas and organizing their work by making covers with consistant langauge for the titles for example: "The Time When I..." or "All About..." I was also able to glean some deeper insight into using "Shared" and "Interactive" writing to review, model, and emphasize concepts and how these can be done to support grammar and phonics development. My biggest take away is to stop calling on hands during the mini-lessons! This will allow more time for reading, writing and phonics work (independent and small groups). I can't wait to share what I learned with my teaching team and anyone else who is interested!
It sounds like it was a worthwhile a great workshop and I would love to join for any lesson(s) to check it out. :)