Today's Summer Institute session was powerful for many reasons. The Murray Cards exercise allowed me to generate some great writing ideas and I created a piece that is very meaningful to me. Working through all those stages with someone there with you for the ride was extremely powerful. I now know a lot more about my partner (Monica), but most importantly, I had an outside view of where my writing was going. I see this working in a classroom and serving many purposes.
But what I want to ponder now is how this impactful activity contributes to motivation. How does a "community building" type of activity, like the Murray Cards, correlate to how students react to unfamiliar texts or how they react to a standardized test? The general focus of today was about how teachers respond to student writing. I think one possibility is to position students as "teachers" themselves when they read a lofty text and have them "respond" in the same ways we responded to each other today. Asking the same questions of the text that they would ask a partner during Writing Workshop. Instead of giving up when they reach difficult words, they could respond to the writer of the text and ask them what they meant there. They could also infer what they believe the writer meant (which is one of the responding strategies we used today). It wouldn't necessarily reflect HOW they will be assessed on a standardized test, but maybe it would help them feel more comfortable on a test with lofty language to feel some sort of authority as they read. To feel that this text isn't a "gotcha" but that some person some where WROTE this text and maybe felt that they needed help with it too. Who knows....I'm definitely going to try it this school year with my upcoming batch of 10th graders! Wish me luck!
As you come back here to your questions no motivation I see how I the testing agenda works into this. I wonder if issues around motivation are connection to testing itself... rather than the other way around... like kids need motivation so they can do better on tests... or is it doing better (or worse) or tests is connected to issues with motivation...
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to think about the relationship between motivation and confidence - if students feel more capable of performing a task, perhaps there will be an increase in motivation. Kylene Beers has an interesting blog post on this that I saw at the end of the school year - she talks about the correlation between "skill" and "will". Her comments might speak to your inquiry as well!
ReplyDeletehttp://kylenebeers.com/blog/2014/05/04/what-the-research-says-about-enjoyment-of-reading-and-reading-achievement/
Thanks, Katie!
DeleteAdmittedly, my AP students, mostly, are all about the test, sadly--and this drive is driven partly by themselves, partly by their peers, and partly by their parents. Generally speaking, they all want to go to Duke and MIT and Harvard and Stanford, and in their minds, screw my thoughts and feelings about the writing of texts, but help me make this 5 on this exam--and if I learned anything about myself, in retrospect, that's cool. They're competing against their peers who are fighting for spots at the same school, against the academic legacies parents insist upon them, against the realistic academic limitations they have, and against the "journey is better that the destination" teacher like myself. Their motivation is there...but the types of carrot they use may be GMO or Common Core rather than organic.
ReplyDeleteI loved your thoughts here, and I enjoyed sharing the experiences of reading the Murray cards too. You really took your thoughts in some interesting directions, and I think your lines of discussion were so interesting. Well done!!
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