Conference+Review+-+Basgall


 * Workshop Review **

// Workshop One: Reading and Writing in a Decade of Standards // September 10th 2011, Narrative Writing The Value of Writing Fiction and the Core Standards with Rian Burke, Stone Alternative School – Ann Arbor

Rian Burke was very well prepared for the workshop and had very informative information with him for his presentation and lecture. I learned that the Common Core Standards are taking place of the Huskies but are very closely related in terms of content. That 92 Huskies were taken and consolidated in the common core standards, where there are divisions by grade. Where standard 1 and 2 is for 9-10th grade and standard 3 and 4 are for 11th-12th grade. As with 5 and 6 being for overall secondary institutions. The whole system is made of new material and by grade rather than having repetition of the same content for all 4 grades in high school. They expect to be assessing these standards by 2014. Burke looked at Standard 3 and 4 more closely by using examples of fiction to show that the overall meaning of standard 3 from the Common Core Standard on Narrative is focused on fiction for the first section. The section of the standard wants students to consider audience and that fiction stories are recommended when focusing on this section.

For fiction reading and writing, multiple reading examples and discussions are recommended for secondary education. Burke introduced us with Little Red Riding Hood, where he read through the story to refresh the student’s minds. Students would take notes and illustrate what they would like to include in their story. He related the story to a movie and to the Three Little Pigs. Showing that intertextual literacy is important and that the students should also fill out a plot diagram for the stories to ensure they understand that every story has an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Students would also have vocabulary to go over terms used within fiction writing that they should know.

We looked at standard 5 and it is intended to develop and strengthen writing for a particular audience, and Burke said we should focus on language use in our students writing. And we also looked at standard 6 a little bit where it would be appropriate to use Google docs for distribution of writing and also online group work for presentations. He also recommended using electronic portfolios or wikis for classroom use.

Burke introduced the idea of having quizzes online rather in class. The positives to this would be that students wouldn’t have to spend class time to do these quizzes but if they were just for refresher or showing what questions may look like for an exam would also be positive. Negatives would be students looking up answers, and not all students having computer access.

Overall the presentation was okay, nothing that I haven’t already learned within my education courses but the only new thing I learned was the common core standards. That these standards are new and that I should look closer to these than the Huskies provided from previous years. I wish he would have had a more interesting PowerPoint and that he summarized the stories for us as older adults than reading the stories. I would’ve liked more time focused on the common core standards and how I could implement those overall within my classroom.

// Workshop Two: Reading and Writing in a Decade of Standards // October 15th 2011, Writing about Social Justice Social Justice: The Holocaust and its Effects with Chelly Eifert – Keystone Academy, and Jennifer Walsh – Ann Arbor Schools

Chelly and Jennifer were very well prepared for their presentation. I don’t remember much in terms of learning about the Holocaust in grade school, so this presentation was extremely informative for me. I not only learned about the Holocaust itself, but how to implement it within my own future classroom. Even as an English teacher there were ways for me to develop writing assignments with a focus on the Holocaust by using The Diary of Anne Frank for my unit and using journal writings to help the students immerse themselves within the context and time period.

Chelly and Jennifer started their presentation by giving all of us poems and we, as a group, had to present that poem to the class. By doing this it gives some background of the Holocaust and opens discussion of what the meaning of the poems display.

The presenters focused on Nazi propaganda where images of material were given to children to show how Germany was evil. In several children’s books and within magazines/newspapers pictures of Jewish people were portrayed as the devil and evil people. Some of the children were raised on these pictures and had to believe that Jews killed Jesus. They made us think about this in a new light – If I lived in Germany, why wouldn’t I believe Jews were the devil? Just portrayed off the amount of propaganda shown and the way Jewish people were portrayed, it isn’t that hard to think that these people were exposed enough to believe this way to be true.

We also looked into ways in which we can relate this propaganda to modern times. It is important for students (especially in early middle school) to learn how to distinguish between fact and opinion, and that this propaganda along with modern propaganda shows that the media is not always reliable or trustworthy.

Jennifer showed us that it is easy to implement the Holocaust into a unit plan. She recommends that we start with essential questions, questions that the students have and what they know or don’t know. Then we go into research based assignments focusing on notes where students organize their thoughts on facts of the Holocaust. Journals provide a formative assessment for students to create their own journal that would have been used back in the time period (with a focus on The Diary of Anne Frank for an English class). These students will take on the role of a character or persona of someone from history during the Holocaust era.

Overall, the presentation was extremely informative and kept me interested throughout the entire presentation. I learned new things about the Holocaust and how important it is to implement within our lesson plans during high school/middle school years. I also found new ways to gain students interest in a tough subject area and how to make something that may sound dry and uninteresting into something students would enjoy and benefit from.