September Renewal

What is your plan of action in the fall? I am going to be outside of my comfort zone-- and that's good! I'll be student teaching at an area high school, so I can try all kinds of activities / strategies I've learned during the OWP Summer Institute on a new age group / skill level of learners. I may teach college, too. With the approval of my mentoring high school teacher, I want to have daily writing, small writing groups, reading groups, and I want to explore activities connecting print literacy to visual and technological literacy. I also intend to use general approaches such as I observed with writing territories, and also more specific lesson ideas such as with the "Monsters in the Closet" demonstration. If I teach college this fall, or the next time I do, I want to try new ways of approaching poetry composition, such as using ekphrasis as a prompt, responding to film, and using writing territories. I would also like to implement daily writing there.



What’s your plan for your own writing? I journal regularly already, but I don't review what I've written, or only rarely. I think I need to amp things up and have another tier of daily writing, where I'm polishing pieces, and I also want to develop a submission / publishing plan. I've built a nice rapport with my small writing group, and we're planning to correspond.



How will your classroom look differently daily? Weekly? Monthly? It will be new. It's reborn. At the college level, I have many new ideas to try alongside strategies I use already.



Discuss the process of creating your demo and what you discovered through that process. How will you incorporate your demo in the fall? What kinds of student writing samples can you collect? I discovered that technology has the good qualities of imparting transferrable work skills, and building social skills, as well as allowing for variety of response to text. Technology does have the drawback of not always being dependable, and not feasible financially for most districts. I will collect samples when I use technology in the classroom. I would adapt an ekphrastic poetry demonstration from the demonstration I did this summer, to be practical. If there are resources where I go, I would love to give students the stopmotion option this fall.



How has your writing project experience affected your plan? It has given me so much good information, and a human resource in my great fellows.



How will you use other demonstrations? My binder is dear to me-- I'll keep it closer than a brother. I will need page protectors before long. I'm a nerd, but that's not the sole reason; it's because I'll wear the pages out with flipping through them.



Please list several demos that you saw that you will integrate into your classroom. Memoir/writing territories, monsters in the closet, roadmaps, paper-blogging, film-response, film creation . . . I could go on. And on.



Based on our brief conversations and your new knowledge of OWP programs, what areas interest you? I am interested in technology in the classroom, poetry, the graphic-print connection, professional development, as well as helping my colleagues at the college-level.



Who would you nominate for certain areas? Tough one. I can see Chris, Michelle, Rachel, Katrina, Dana, Kim, and Faith in poetry . . . Joe and Melissa in creative nonfiction and fiction . . . Sarah, Genesis, and Josh in technology . . . Elise, Debbie, Stacey, Sharolette, and Kathy in Professional Development.